A Blog of Flashbacks Inner Behavior — Thoughts, Feelings, and Urges
January 2025
We have lots of behaviors that occur inside us, inside our brains. We think. We feel. We have urges. We have sensations through what we see, smell, hear, taste, and touch. My professional work focuses mainly on thoughts, feelings, and urges. We need to acknowledge that all activity in the human body occurs thanks to the brain we have. It’s our control center and without it, nothing happens. We don’t walk, talk, swallow…nothing.
What is a thought? A thought has words in it. It is a verbal behavior. It occurs inside a person. No one knows what the thought is unless the person says or writes it. I can’t see or hear your thoughts. You can’t see or hear mine. If you think, ‘Oh that’s pretty” or ‘Those are beautiful, red begonias and geraniums,” those are thoughts.
We all have thoughts about people—I like that person; I want to talk more. That person doesn’t interest me; I’ll find someone else to talk to. Whether about begonias or people, those examples are thoughts. I like my job in IT. I really don’t like working in this geriatric ward, or it could be pediatric. These are all thoughts. Is it really time to get up? What am I going to fix for dinner? We have thousands of thoughts a day. I don’t know how many—20,000? 80,000?
What is a feeling? It is also a verbal behavior. We can put it into words—I love C. What a beautiful begonia! I must go smell it, or at least bury my nose into it. Sometimes a person has a physical sensation that goes with it—chills, goosebumps, butterflies in the stomach, almost tears. Often, or perhaps usually, we do not feel the physiological sensation that goes with the feeling. Just like no one else knows what you’re thinking, no one else can feel your feeling. Some other feelings include fear, anger, or feeling sad. Too often, people tend to focus on these feelings, the ones that make us feel uncomfortable or very uncomfortable.
What is an urge? The first time it occurs, it is a physiological reaction to do something. Maybe I want to run away, have a cigarette, have a drink, hurt someone, save a person or animal from a fire or drowning. That initial ‘I must do something right now!’ I call an urge. A person doesn’t think it. A person doesn’t feel it. It is a call for immediate action. That’s the first time it happens. After that, these urges become mixed with our thoughts and feelings, and we act from a combination of all three. A firefighter, a soldier, or a parent may have all three of these inner behaviors going on at the same time in one situation.
What are we to do with these inner behaviors that no one except the person having them knows about? In my work as a school psychologist, a university professor, a behavior analyst I have learned a lot in this area. It all started for me when I was five, extremely ill, in a coma for a week, a near death experience (NDE) and my epilepsy began. Once my health began to improve, all the weird experiences of different kinds of seizures led me to look at what was going on inside me. I would be well into adulthood before I knew I had had an NDE or that I had a lifetime of epilepsy. Meanwhile, I muddled around in the muck of my brain and behavior.
One of the ideas I came up with was that I needed to improve what I thought about myself. I counted my positive and negative thoughts about myself and my positive and negative feelings about myself. I wanted to have a better me, so I wrote down my positives for one minute every day for two weeks. My aim was 40 positive thoughts or feelings every day. Two weeks was a short amount of time, but my husband’s birthday was two weeks later. A better, happier, more positive me would be my birthday present to him even if I never told him my plan..
It worked. From there, others began to use the 1-min timing to improve their own inner behaviors. Now eight others have conducted research studies with similar results and two more studies are in process.
One of my constant reminders of how important it is to count and monitor inner behavior comes from Virginia Woolf. “For surely it is time the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of a rat.” She published this statement in A Room of One’s Own in 1929.
It’s now 96 years later! We have the means to keep track of these human behaviors, including the effect of discouragement on a person’s behaviors. I’ll admit it’s not easy to figure out what to count and then to count the behaviors during the day each day. Even I sometimes forget to count. However, we can change our inner behaviors.
It’s easy to count, analyze, and change a person’s learning behavior—reads words correctly or incorrectly for beginning readers or those who need improvement. It’s easy to count correct and incorrect add, subtract, multiply, or divide math problems. When we teach children, the aims are high—200 to 250 words read correctly, 80 to 120 digits written in math problems. A person needs to have the basic skills down well to comprehend and go beyond the basic level. For the academic skills, we have tens of thousands and more charted data in the field of learning through precise standard behavior measurement.
The range for positive thoughts and feelings is currently broader because we don’t have as much information and data about what is their best range. While we have a lot we need more data for changing thoughts, feelings, and urges. However, we do know that we can measure and change them. We know we can aim for at least 25 to 50 positive self-thoughts or feelings a day.

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