In my work on emotional intelligence, I often urge readers to practice the pause. "I first learned of this as the editor of John Cunningham's great book, Win the Day. Essentially, an emotion has tremendous energy for about ninety seconds. If we learn to pause before acting, we can engage the rest of our faculties. If we act sooner within the emotional state, that next action adds more emotional fuel to the fire, and so on and so on, and the conflagration can consume us. John and others usually discuss this in terms of love-and-light-brigade-discounted but very valid emotions like anger (different from resentment — if one does not practice the pause anger can become self-consuming resentment). I see that it equally applies to generally considered positive emotions like love and excitement (distinguish those from infatuation)."

That quote is an excerpt from my essay https://marcus17043.medium.com/are-you-well-advised-to-follow-your-heart-dea0cbeb214b, subtitled "Yes but not until you can discern the difference between feelings (follow) and emotions (process)." That essay confused many people because they could not get passed that feelings and emotions are often used synonymously. Thus, I followed it up with this poem and essay, https://marcus17043.medium.com/of-feelings-and-knowledge-580fed0d092a, subtitled "Another poetic attempt at universal epistemology with an acrostic sonnet, how bout them apples of Adam and Eve!!!"

The first stanza of the sonnet is:

"Feelings our hearts both transmit and receive

English language writers and readers fail

Emotions and thoughts our systems deceive

Lies of conditioning wish not prevail"

The poem and essay build off of White Feather's work, which I quoted and only partially quite here:

"Emotions are all connected to thought and are a mental corruption of pure feeling. ... All emotion is conditioned corrupted mental reactions to true, pure feeling…"