Your conscious feelings might be totally real and still never cause you to do anything

Epiphenomenalism holds that mental states are produced by physical brain processes but have no causal power of their own, like steam rising off a moving train without driving it. T.H. Huxley argued in 1874 that consciousness is just such a byproduct, meaning you'd act identically, down to writing about your feelings, even if your feelings themselves did nothing at all.

— Thomas Henry Huxley, On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History — Fortnightly Review, 1874