Why you should feel your feelings

Feelings are meant to be felt. Some feelings such as hunger, pain, fatigue and cold have physical origins. Others, like excitement, sadness, fear and joy have emotional origins. Both types of feelings regardless of their source, manifest physically to make us aware of what’s going on inside of us. It is the body’s signalling mechanism and also how we sense the world at our deepest level.

Despite the very important purpose our feelings serve, many of us walk around avoiding them. We have all avoided unpleasant physical feelings - eating regular meals to avoid hunger or being careful around hot stoves to avoid pain, for instances. But what about emotional feelings? Does it surprise you that we often avoid those too? It is more common than you might think.

Do you ever feel empty or numb?

Chronically bored?

Feel like you’re ‘just going through the motions’ of daily life?

What about feeling heavy or weighed down?

Likely, you are avoiding strong negative emotions.

Our mind-body has a built-in defence system for dealing with distressing emotions. This defence system simply prevents emotions from surfacing and being felt. It’s like emotional anesthesia - a mild numbing of our inner awareness so that we don’t feel as much. While its intention may be to protect us from harm, the effect of this natural mechanism is that instead of feeling the true emotion, we end up with a vague sense of unease and lack of motivation. We are numbed from our full human experience - both the positive and negative aspects.

Sometimes, rather than preventing an emotion from surfacing altogether, our mind-body avoids it by replacing it with a different strong emotional reaction. For example, have you ever felt extremely angry after perceiving rejection? It’s very possible that the anger is a more “acceptable” emotion for you to feel than the underlying sadness that was triggered. Even when we act “too emotional” (e.g. anger outbursts, feeling impulsively suicidal, inconsolable crying, self harming), that feeling of urgency to act out the perceived emotion is a way to distract from the true underlying feeling.

Below are 4 misconceptions about emotions that keep us from feeling fully. (For ways on how to overcome this, stay tuned for part 2: ‘How you should feel your feelings’.)

1) The emotion is too intense to tolerate.

We often mix up emotions with energy. The amount of internal energy behind an emotion might be confused with the intensity of the emotion experienced. However, energy can come from a different emotion than the one perceived, or even from multiple emotions at once. So it is unhelpful to link the intensity of our feelings to the severity or the seriousness of the situation that caused them. Instead, we can acknowledge that there is a lot of energy being generated and consider different causes for the intensity with patience and curiosity. One reason might be that we have been repressing our feelings for a long time and they finally come rushing out. Or maybe the emotion being triggered is complex and many different feelings are clustered and released together at once. It may even be the case that we feel safe enough in the presence of someone else that we release the energy behind all of our painful emotions. There are an endless number of ways that the energy we experience in the present fuels our mind-body. Separating out the actual emotion from the amount of energy we feel can be very helpful for tolerating painful states.

2) How I feel is a true reflection of what is going on in my life.

Emotions are mental thoughts + physical sensations. Or maybe the equation is more like emotions = mental thoughts x physical sensations. What this means is that emotions are our thoughts manifested in and around the body as physical sensations. It is likely a bi-directional relationship so emotions may also be a mental interpretation of a physical sensation. Just as thoughts are not necessarily true, neither are emotions. Our brain creates thoughts based on our own experiences, not based on reality. When we have good reality testing and perception, our thoughts can be accurate but ultimately, thoughts and perceptions are subjective.

Imagine you are in the presence of a tiger. The sudden gasp of air, the goosebumps rising, the wooziness in the belly, the sweaty palms, the heart racing - these are all physical components of an emotion. But which emotion? A tourist lost in the forest may feel terror at stumbling upon the tiger and think he is going to die. But a wildlife photographer may feel exhilarated at the same sight and perceive herself as lucky. Same trigger, same physical state, different perceptions. So how we experience our bodily sensations largely depends on the meaning our minds attach to it.

3) Emotions reveal intuitive knowledge.

We often hear phrases like ‘trust your instinct’ or ‘listen to your gut feeling’. This is good advice, as long as we remember: emotions = mental thoughts x physical sensations. Learning to tune into our physical sensations without any mental analysis can be a huge source of wisdom. It allows us to perceive the world with our bodies on a level that we do not yet have the sophisticated language to describe. The problem arises when we attempt to interpret our feelings using our minds only. We end up convincing ourselves of our thoughts rather than our feelings and as previously stated, those thoughts are not necessarily true.

4) Being emotional is a sign of weakness.

The belief that showing emotions is a sign of weakness is very common in modern society. There are likely many factors that shape this misconception but one major contributor, in my opinion, is the shame of living within our bodies and an overstated importance on the mind. Many of us disown our bodies unconsciously, and sometimes even consciously. In the process, we pass down the false belief to our children that emotions should be conquered with the mind. The ways in which our shame can manifest is described by the 3 Ds - Devalue, Dissociate, Depress.

DEVALUE: We put our bodies down with insults. We call it ugly and fat. Or we diminish its value to a burdensome corpse whose only purpose is to house the seat of our consciousness: the mind.

DISSOCIATE: We numb ourselves and feel very little or nothing at all. Akin to having mild anesthesia all over the body, we walk around half-zombies. We feel bored or empty all the time except when a trigger hits a nerve that wasn’t anesthetized well enough. We float out of our bodies or live out our lives in a dream-like world. We cut and bleed ourselves for refuge from this uncomfortable purgatory.

DEPRESS: Sometimes when we accumulate an extreme amount of painful energy, our bodies can react by going into a shock-like state, then shutting down. If dissociation is comparable to anesthesia, depression would be like an induced-coma. Our bodies go into hibernate mode to conserve all our energy for basic survival needs. In psychiatry, we call this state ‘Major Depressive Disorder’. The shame and/or guilt takes over until it becomes the predominant emotion.

Through our senses, we experience the world. We see, hear, taste, smell, touch - but these are not the only senses. We also feel viscerally, which means perceiving sensations coming from within the body. Emotions act as the sense that connects the mind and body. Reclaiming our bodies, along with all the feelings within them, allows us to sense the world at full human capacity. Being attuned to our emotions and expressing them constructively is not a sign of weakness. On the contrary, emotions equip us with an extremely powerful tool to guide us through the challenges and triumphs of life.

Want to know how to feel your emotions? Check back soon for the next blog post, in which we will explore ways to face our emotions and express them productively.