How do I "feel" my feelings

Emotional regulation is a multistep process of acknowledging and dealing with emotions in a healthy way. Amid the state of our world, there are a lot of feelings you could be experiencing.

The following are steps you can consider for managing challenging emotions, or beginning a practice of emotional regulation, part of which is "feeling your feelings"

Please keep in mind these steps are condensed and could be missing context (as emotions and personal experience are so individual)

I do encourage anyone who would like to explore this topic further, to reach out to licensed therapist.

1. Identify the Feelings

Many/most of us have not developed a habit of investigating our emotions as we experience them. Some of us make a judgment or some assumptions about what’s going on or even dismiss how we feel, but emotions are complex, and we do ourselves a favor by taking a moment to name what we’re experiencing, identifying what’s going on in your body, actually feel the emotion with your senses.

What’s going on in your belly? What’s going on in your chest? Is there buzzing in your head? Does your throat feel tight?”

2. Explore the Feelings

Once we identify and name what we are feeling, we can investigate a little further, taking into account what brought on the emotion and how you would describe it.

It might be pretty straightforward (like you heard distressing news) but its not always that clear. Perhaps you notice that you feel some tension in your neck, or knots in your stomach whenever a certain name pops up on your notifications, or when someone mentions a particular topic.

Whatever you discover it's important that we explore with curiosity, not judgment (we’ll get to that next) and if it helps, write down your process, what you felt, thoughts you were having ect.

3. Don't Judge (or quickly dismiss) Your Feelings

Sometimes we tend to jump straight to our feelings about what we are feeling.

For example, We feel angry or disappointed, and then shame because we dismiss the other feelings as being “irrational.”

An example: feeling sad because your holiday plans get canceled at the last minute, but then you feel guilty because it’s such a “small” thing to worry about compared to what other people are going through.

What if instead we are to acknowledge and sit with our feeling without trying to explaining it away, dismiss it (gaslighting ourselves?) piling another emotion on top of it (shame, fear) or judging what this says about you as a person

When you don’t judge a feeling, you give yourself permission to really feel it

Sometime people refer to emotions such as anger, fear, grief, sadness as negative emotions, but there is actually no such thing as a negative emotion.

4. Ask some Questions about what the Feeling is Telling You

Emotions are an important part of our nervous system. Our senses continually gather data from our environment and relay that information back through a complex system that produce feelings, useful to protect ourselves from things which are harmful and to reinforce behaviour that is pleasurable or healthy. Tuning into our emotions may help us recognize what we need, and encourages us to act in accordance with our best interest.

Asking what an emotion is trying to tell us may be illuminating

It could be telling you something as small as I think it would be good for me to step away from social media this week or something deeper such as I need to discover why it seems like everything is irritating me lately

maybe all this feeling is telling you is that you need to eat because you’re hangry 😂

Acting on your observations of a feeling is different than acting on a feeling itself. I am sure you would agree that if we always acted on our feelings that could be very problematic, and perhaps you know someone who seems to struggle with understanding this concept? What I am suggesting is that we take some time to investigate our emotions to find further information to help us cope with them, make changes or set boundaries... not to directly act on them in the moment.

5. Discover Ways to Manage the Feeling Safely

There are many ways to respond to our emotions once we have identified (named) it and unpacked it a bit. Expression can take form in a variety of ways and may depend on your circumstances or where you are at in your emotional regulation journey. Some examples of ways to manage the feeling include things like talking to a friend, journaling, allowing yourself to cry, burn off some calories (run, punch a heavy bag) or clean your bathroom (I can't be the only one who cleans as a way to cope??) How about a bubble bath with relaxing music, or enjoying an episode of your favourite TV show?

Physical activity is one of the most powerful tools we have to help regulate emotion, it both stimulates and soothes the nervous system, and helps metabolize stimulating or harmful substances that our complex systems produce in response to stress (for example cortisol) as well as boosts production of beneficial substances such as our feel-good neurotransmitters (Dopamine, Serotonin)

The point here is to DO something that helps you feel like you are working through the emotion, rather than suppressing it, or avoiding feeling something unpleasant. That is one reason why emotion regulation practice is beneficial: It allows you to choose how to mindfully and safely express our emotions instead of taking them out on others or engaging in destructive behaviour.

6. Pick Your Battles

You have a real life. That means all the above steps are not going to be possible all of the time. Doing step one is the starting point (and it does get easier with practice) Identify what you are feeling, and perhaps that is as far as it goes for today?

we’re not always going to have time to deal with emotions as they come up. In these cases, it’s still important to go through the first step of naming and accepting a feeling (instead of swallowing it down without any thought and sending it into the other room to expand). But after that, sometimes you just have to tell yourself, Okay, I’m feeling XYZ and I’ll get to it later. With practice, gauging the intenstiy makes this process smoother, if it’s something small, like you’re kind of annoyed about something, perhaps you can take five minutes and go for a walk or vent about it to a friend. If its something big, but there isnt time to address it (you are at work, you are exhausted or you have a crisis to contend with) making a mental note (or a physical note in your phone perhaps) to come back to this at another time.

None of us has the mental energy to process and explore emotions at all times. It can be healthy and totally understandable to use distraction some of the time. Give yourself permission to take a break, or put off the work for a period of time when needed.

Sometimes we layer guilt on top of our behaviour and end up feeling worse, not because the distraction was "bad" for us but because we’re judging ourselves too much to enjoy it

Thank you for taking the time to read this entry, I know it was alot of info!

For those interested, I have linked a site where you can download a PDF of printable tools related to this topic

https://tools.positivepsychology.com/ei-exercises