“Feel your feelings” has become a social media and therapy truism lately. It seems like we’re blasting this phrase at our parents, friends, and colleagues constantly, but in my experience as both a coach and a yoga teacher, I find this well-meaning command often gets very, very misunderstood.

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Sometimes that misunderstanding is benign, but in cases where folks have long standing habits of intellectualizing, ruminating, and avoidance, not knowing how to properly feel one’s feelings can often slow or even block personal growth and development. 

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The key point in the phrase is the word ‘feel’ 

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Truth be told, I never actually tell someone to “feel their feelings” in a coaching session. Instead, when I notice or suspect the presence of strong emotion, the question I will often ask is something like “what does that feel like in your body?” 

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Why? Because what we often miss is that emotions (or “energy in motion” as we like to call them in the biz) are somatic, body-based experiences that we often confuse as mental or cognitive experiences because they tend to come accompanied with a story about why the emotion is surfacing and what it could mean. 

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And because many of us are gifted with powerful imaginations and have a strong internal monologue, often the story we’re telling quickly overshadows the felt experience we’re having. This might seem trivial, but it has some hidden, potentially insidious implications for how we learn to process and meet these feelings.  

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Emotions only last in the body for about 90 seconds 

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What?! Yes, I promise you the science says this is in fact the case! The wave of an emotion as a felt experience in our body is actually quite brief. But you’re likely shaking your head in disbelief at this claim. I know all too well, having recovered from about 3 or 4 anxiety disorders at this point in my life, that sometimes, it appears like an emotion can persist for days, weeks, or longer. So what gives?

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When an emotion persists for longer than this 90 second period, it is a sure sign that we are (often inadvertently) using our thinking and storytelling mind to prolong, resist, resurrect, or “trap” the emotion in our bodies. Our unwillingness to completely feel an emotion exactly as it is, without a story, prolongs our suffering. 

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That’s a heady concept, so let’s bring it to life with an example. I’ll use myself here. There was a point in my life when I struggled with intrusive thoughts and rumination—what a psychiatrist might label “OCD” in the DSM-5. Here’s how that actually manifested for me. 

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1. I’m going about my day minding my own business when suddenly a terrifying thought rips through my brain. 
2. That thought is something like “What if everything you’re seeing isn’t ‘real’ and this is all a dream?” 
3. That thought brings intense sensations of anxiety into my body. My chest collapses, my stomach drops, and my breathing starts to get shallow. 
4. These sensations cause my mind to churn out rapid-fire thoughts that either argue with the previous thought (that’s stupid why would I think that?), try to reassure me that it isn’t true (of course it’s real, go feel that pole over there), and suppress or “unthink” the original thought (let’s stare at the sky and try not to think about this). 
5. Within a few seconds, the anxiety subsides, and the world is not scary again! Until an hour or so later, when the same thought appears again and repeats the entire cycle! 
6. This happens so often that eventually I become afraid of having that thought again because of the sensations it brings. Once this becomes cemented as a regular pattern, it becomes what a therapist or psychiatrist would term a “disorder.” 

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The importance of understanding paradoxical intent

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Now it’s worth noting that nobody controls their thoughts. 

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We can’t “turn off” thinking and we can’t choose our next thought, either. We can consciously direct our attention to other things within our awareness (other thoughts, sensations, etc.) but there is no real control over where our mind wanders. An easy way to picture this is with the example of a math problem. You can choose to solve a math problem, and you can also choose to stop solving it. You cannot choose when and if the math problem pops back into your brain, though. 

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So in my example above, I did not choose the initial thought and I also did not choose the initial fear that I got flooded with. I didn’t even choose the dialogue that appeared to try to ‘solve’ or ‘unthink’ the thought—that all happened automatically. 

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Because this is how our brains work in external reality where intent is not paradoxical. If my alarm clock is going off, I have a thought like “wow that’s annoying,” and then take action to turn it off, which solves the “problem” of the annoying noise. Intent follows action in a predictable, positive manner. 

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Unfortunately our inner worlds work on the principle of paradoxical intent, and that changes everything about how we engage with emotions and thoughts. Paradoxical intent states that the more you try to become free of something or “solve” it, the more the thing actually sticks around. Your attention actually gives the dreaded thing the space to grow and fester. 

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You can see this applied to my example above. My brain was conditioned to work off the principle of positive intent. There’s this thought that’s bothering me, so I’m going to “get rid of it” to make the problem (anxious sensations) go away. But because this is a thought/emotion and not something in external reality, all that extra thinking did was actually keep the sensation “stuck” a lot longer. And it did something even worse, too. 

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It taught my brain that this thought was a “threat,” and our brains thrive on keeping their eyes on threats because that’s how they keep us alive. All my effort to not have this negative thought to free myself of anxiety actually confirmed to my brain that this thought was indeed something it needed to monitor. So what did my brain do? It kept sending me the exact thought that I didn’t want just to make sure I remained vigilant about this “threat.

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Our efforts to ‘not feel’ creates destructive conditioning

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I used anxiety as my example, but you can sub in any emotion or thought you currently struggle with: depression, jealousy, anger, hatred, and everything else all follow the same principle. The more we use effort to free ourselves of our internal emotional experiences, the more we prolong and entrap them and transform them from passing experiences into full-blown disorders. 

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This “effort” also applies to things we may do in external reality too, and is the basis of addictions and substance use disorders. If I take a shot every time I feel socially anxious, I condition my brain to think social anxiety is a threat and that I need the alcohol to make the ‘threat’ go away. When one shot no longer works, I reach for two. Then one day, three. 

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We are all the products of our behavioral and mental conditioning, and not understanding the paradoxical intent of our inner world causes many of us to develop conditioning that, unfortunately, creates a lot of unnecessary suffering. 

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But I wouldn’t be writing this article or be in the business of coaching if there wasn’t a path out of this. And, if you’ve been following along, the path out is actually simple, but not easy. It’s so simple that you’ll doubt that it actually works. 

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The path to freedom is being fully willing to feel ANY emotion without a story attached to it. 

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Revising the previous example

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Here’s a shortened version of how I actually recovered from my “OCD.” This was not a one-time fix because conditioning is not created in a single experience, but from many repeated experiences. I had to do a version of this again and again until my brain had “installed” more productive conditioning. 

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7. I’m going about my day minding my own business when suddenly a terrifying thought rips through my brain. 
8. That thought is something like “What if everything you’re seeing isn’t ‘real’ and this is all a dream?” 
9. That thought brings intense sensations of anxiety into my body. My chest collapses, my stomach drops, and my breathing starts to get shallow. But I’ve had this experience before, and I know how to meet it now. 
10. These sensations cause my mind to churn out rapid-fire thoughts that either argue with the previous thought (that’s stupid why would I think that?), try to reassure me that it isn’t true (of course it’s real go feel that pole over there), and suppress or “unthink” the original thought (let’s stare at the sky and try not to think about this). I let all of that happen while gently moving my attention towards the actual sensations in my body and not getting lost in the dialogue. Without the fuel of my attention, the dialogue starts to subside.
11. Depriving myself of this dialogue actually spikes my anxiety higher. The sensations get more intense because my normal coping mechanism of thinking isn’t there anymore. My brain thinks there’s a threat and it’s screaming at me to do something, but I’m just sitting there paying attention to how intense everything feels. 
12. After about 90 seconds of this attention, the feelings suddenly start to disappear. My body literally ran out of the cortisol and adrenaline it needed to keep my anxious sensations going, and now my brain is confused. We’re still alive? 
13. This one experience starts to recondition my brain. It thought there was a threat, but I didn’t respond to it and survived. So, clearly, that thing (the thought) was not an actual threat. It was just a false alarm. 

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Spiritually, the path to healing our inner wounds is the willingness to fully feel the emotion without letting our mental stories cloud our attention. Neurologically and scientifically, this works because of the principles of behavioral conditioning and paradoxical intent. Doing nothing but just observing and feeling, and repeating this again and again, reconditions our brains to not see our emotions or thinking as threats.

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This is what it really means to feel your feelings. As you can see, this pithy phrase is nuanced and complicated which is where experienced coaches and therapists come in to help facilitate emotional processing and behavioral reconditioning. And even within this process, there are some important caveats that I want to call out. 

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The first is that I want to make it extremely clear that ‘feeling your feelings’ does not mean you will never feel anxiety, sadness, anger, etc again. These experiences are part of being human and are unavoidable. You can see this even in my revised example—there was still an experience of anxiety, it was just severely protracted. This work is about having a much better relationship with our emotional pain; not about removing it entirely. 

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The second caveat here is around “willingness to feel.” For those of us with nervous systems that are severely over or under sensitized, being with our emotions without coping mechanisms might feel incredibly unsafe and, in some cases, might do more harm than good. There are no hard benchmarks for over or under sensitization, but the former might be indicated by recurrent panic attacks or anxiety that prevents daily functioning. The latter might be indicated by severe depression or dissociation that makes daily functioning impossible. 

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If you think you fall into either category, or you’re in doubt about if you do, I recommend that you see a qualified therapist (and perhaps a psychiatrist) before engaging in this work. That is not because this process won’t “work” for you or because you’re “broken”— you are not broken and it absolutely will work. I just think you’ll get better results faster with a qualified professional helping you along the way.

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Photo credit Valeria Miller via Unsplash.com