“Feel your feelings.”-it's a phrase you hear in the world of self-help and therapy but it can be an especially difficult concept to grasp when the demanding and fast-paced world we live in often force us to put our emotions aside and prioritise thinking and doing. The tendency to ‘think our way through life’ means that it can be difficult to tune into and fully feel our feelings, making it easy to lose touch with our inner emotional landscape. However, understanding how to properly ‘feeling your feelings’ can be a powerful skill to make our selves more at easy and our lives more satisfying.
Why do we have emotions in the first place?
We can think of emotions as having 3 main functions. Firstly, they are a source of information about our experiences. For example, fear alerts us to potential threats and triggers the fight-or-flight response, preparing us to respond to danger. Anger tells us when we feel hurt and need distance to protect ourselves from further painful situations. Feelings of happiness motivate us to seek out rewarding experiences and build connections which feel good.
Secondly, emotions serve as an internal feedback mechanism about our needs. When our needs are unmet, this system alerts us to make necessary changes to meet those needs. Feeling chronic anxiety about a work situation calls for us to consider other options and possibilities to change our circumstance.
Lastly, emotions signal information to others. They play a crucial role in communication, allowing us to express our thoughts, needs, and intentions to others. Facial expressions, body language, and vocal intonations convey our emotional states, enabling others to understand and respond to us appropriately. Emotions also facilitate social bonding and strengthen relationships by conveying empathy, trust, and support.
In short, emotions are an incredible source of information. Experiencing a wave of emotion is our body’s way of sending a message to us; once the messaged has been delivered, the ‘messenger’ is free to leave and the particular emotion will naturally and easily move on. While it can be tempting to ignore or suppress feelings especially if they are unpleasant or painful, they don't just disappear. Until we ‘receive’ the message, emotions manifest in other ways such as physically in our bodies or through conflict in our relationships.
Why is it important to feel our feelings?
Feeling feelings is more than just acknowledging that you have emotions; it's about allowing yourself to experience and express them in a healthy and constructive way. It involves tuning into your inner world, recognising your emotions, and giving yourself permission to fully experience them without judgment or suppression.
When we allow ourselves to fully experience our emotions, we create an opportunity not only for the release of physical tension and stress that may be held within the body, we also allow for a connection to be built with ourselves and others. We can only communicate and connect to another if we can first connect to what needs to be communicated inside of us. The ability to attune both to ourselves and as well as others is the foundation of human connection and our emotional and mental wellbeing.
The Marble in the palm of your hand
I like the analogy of holding a marble in the palm of your hand to think about what it means to feel feelings.
Marbles come in different colours and sizes; some you will prefer, others you may like less. Feeling our feelings is a lot like holding a marble in the palm of your hand and examining it from all angles, turning your palm around so that you can view it from 360 degrees. Some emotions will be more comfortable and preferable while others will be uncomfortable to experience and therefore not preferred.
When we don’t like the way certain feelings feel, we tend to dismiss it, as if brushing the marble away from our hand. Other times, we find ourselves holding tightly on to a feeling as if we were closing a fist over that marble. When we are too quick to brush away our feelings, we lose out on the richness of information that it is trying to deliver to us. Similarly, when we hold on too tightly to feelings, it’s a lot like judging ourselves for the way we feel or chastising ourselves to ‘just get over it’. This creates a lot of pressure around it, leaving very little room for the feeling to ‘pass’.
When we allow ourselves to fully experience our emotions, we gain insight into our inner world, our needs, and our patterns of behaviour. This self-awareness can be a powerful tool for making any necessary changes in life, whether that is to change directions, make an active decision about something, or simply pause and rest.
4 Steps to Feel your Feelings
Emotions can be nebulous and intangible so a more deliberate and structured approach to tuning in and allowing ourselves to more fully experience what we feel inside can be helpful.
Step 1: Notice the sensations in your body
Emotions are felt in the body. Start by getting curious about the physical sensations in your body. Ease into and allow any sensation you notice to be there without trying to control, reduce, or change them. This is a lot like shining a torchlight on yourself, from your head all the way to your toes to closely observe what each part of your body is experiencing.
The question to ask yourself here is: What sensations do I notice in my body right now?
Step 2: Get Curious
Using the sensations you observe as information for what emotion you might be experiencing, next, get curious about the information being delivered to you.
The question to ask yourself here is: What might these sensations be telling me about how I am feeling?
For example: What does this sensation of tightness in my chest mean? What might this lump in my throat be signalling? What might this knot in my stomach be saying?
Step 3: Name the feeling
Put a name to the sensations you feel. The more we can identify and label sensations that we feel in our body, the more we strengthen the connection between the physical feeling and our understanding of it. Naming our inner experience helps us become more self-aware and able to pinpoint exactly what kind of anxiety, or anger, or sadness we are feeling. It can be helpful to start off with an Emotions Wheel which gives us a wider range of vocabulary with which to name our emotions. The Atlas Of Emotions is another incredible tool for naming and visually seeing the nuance in our emotional experience.
The question to ask yourself here might be: What best describes how I physically feel?
Step 4: Acknowledge and Permit the feeling
Once you can name the emotions you are experiencing, acknowledge and permit it to be there. This means acknowledging that what you are feeling is real and valid. It also means to trust that your feelings are a valuable source of information about your current inner experience (even though they are not facts about what is true of the external world). Acknowledging it means to experience it without forcing it to go away or changing the way we feel and simply allowing the feeling to arise in us, long enough to experience it and realise information from it. Later, there can then be a time and place to help ourselves regulate and shift to a different state.
Here, the question to ask yourself is: For this moment, how can I allow these feelings to be here, just for now?