05. Feelings

Feelings refer to the experiential, receptive aspect of affect (e.g. feeling hurt, happy, confused, upset, etc.). The capacity to feel is a key difference between the animate (people, animals) and the inanimate (computers, AI). This is what it means to be alive. A common view is that we have little control over our feelings and are at their mercy, but this doesn’t have to be the case. The steps outlined below can help you manage your feelings.

 

Awareness of feelings

Awareness of feelings matters for several reasons: if you ignore them, you may miss what they are trying to tell you, which can be important. Furthermore, they don’t disappear when ignored – their influence simply becomes unconscious. Finally, you can’t do much about them or their effects if you’re unaware of them. To be more in charge, you first need to know what you feel and why.

What did I feel?
We don’t need to do anything special to become aware of our feelings – just pause for a moment and pay attention. However, in the heat of the moment, we tend to prioritise reacting, and then our reactions become automatic. For example, feeling hurt or disappointed is often behind our angry reaction. To contain anger, it is necessary to recognise and acknowledge these underlying feelings – if not immediately, then at least later. This may not be easy, though, especially if our feelings have been ignored for a long time. The exercise below can help.

Revealing hidden feelings:
Relax fully and recall the situation in which you reacted in a way you didn’t want. Ignore how you feel now, as it may differ from how you felt then. To catch what you felt, replay the event in slow motion from some time before your reaction. If still unsure, write freely about the event until the feeling surfaces.

Why did I feel what I felt?
If you want to find out why you felt in a certain way, check these common triggers:

Expectations: recall when you first started having the feeling. If it was before the situation unfolded, negative expectations (e.g. “Nobody will like me”) may have triggered a confirmation bias response. If it came after, the trigger may have been your unfulfilled positive expectations (e.g. “Everybody will love me.”). 

Situation: if a feeling appeared at some point, change the elements of the situation in imagination until the feeling disappears. You can alter the environment (temperature, noise, light), your state (being hungry or tired), the people involved (make some appear or others disappear), or what they – or you – did or said. When the feeling vanishes, the last element you changed is likely the trigger.

Associations: your feeling may be coloured by past experiences. Even something forgotten can trigger an association, which may be irrelevant in the present situation. Rather than assuming that a feeling you can’t explain is a hunch that must be true, consider the possibility that it is simply an association.

Accept and face your feelings

Burying and avoiding feelings is common, but it comes with ‘side effects’. To keep them buried, we may start evading situations, people, or anything that could remind us of them. This can also affect our thinking, behaviour, and reactions. Some emotional reactions exist only to cover up our feelings (e.g. lashing out to hide feeling hurt or vulnerable). This is how buried feelings gain control over our lives. The only way to stop it is to face them.

Face your feelings:
Feelings may be unpleasant, but there is no reason to be afraid of them. Relax and let them surface. When they do, you may experience a shift in your body, a sense of release, or an urge to cry. It may be intense, but it shouldn’t last long. Stay relaxed and go with the flow. If you refrain from thoughts that fuel the feelings further and treat yourself with self-compassion, they will subside. feelings may be unpleasant, but there is no reason to be afraid of them. Relax and let them surface. When they do, you may experience a shift in your body, a sense of release, or an urge to cry. It may be intense, but it shouldn’t last long. Stay relaxed and go with the flow. If you refrain from thoughts that fuel the feelings further and treat yourself with self-compassion, they will subside. 

Change your feelings

There are three ways you can influence or change how you feel:

Change your thoughts
The purpose of feelings is to let us know how events affect us, but they can be shaped by our assumptions, interpretations, and judgements more than by the actual events. For example, you may feel hurt or amused by something your friend said, depending on whether you think he was serious or joking. So, before allowing a feeling to take hold, examine the assumptions, interpretations, and judgements you’re making (e.g. “He wanted to hurt me” is an assumption). Changing them is the quickest way to change how you feel. Adjusting your expectations can also be powerful (see Everyday Reasoning for more details).

Accept what happened 
What if your feelings are valid? Perhaps your friend did want to hurt you. The good news is that the brain is wired to handle disturbing feelings (we don’t even remember most of the things we felt bad about). However, it is also wired to look for solutions, which sometimes impedes the former. So, you can help your brain by checking whether there is still something to be done and, if not, accepting what can’t be changed. If your brain keeps returning to the situation, affirm that there is no point in revisiting it because nothing more can be done, and allow the spontaneous healing process to take its course.

Change your attitude:
This is a powerful way to bring peace of mind and closure. These two tactics can help you do this:

• Recall the event from an observer instead of a participant position. This creates mental distance that reduces the impact of the feeling without suppressing it. You may still not be happy about what happened, but it will feel more remote.
• Adopt a more constructive attitude by reframing the situation. For example, “I learned from this experience”, “I will focus on more important things” or “This is an opportunity for change”.

A note on complex feelings
It is possible to have multiple feelings about the same event (e.g. feeling upset as well as guilty). If so, it is essential to address each feeling separately.

 

Cultivating positive feelings

Being able to manage unhelpful feelings is great, but we can go further and actively nurture positive ones. Initially, bringing them into your life may take some effort, but just as you can make a habit of negative feelings, you can cultivate habits of positive ones too. This brings many benefits, including undoing the effects of negative feelings. Here’s how you can make this happen:

• Choose a feeling you’d like to nurture. Possibilities include joy, empathy, gratitude, contentment, interest, hope, pride, inspiration, awe, love, happiness, enthusiasm, compassion, care. Even sadness (induced by a movie, book, or music, for example) can be positive as it can connect us with others or with our own depth, and help us embrace life in its complexity.
• There is always potential to experience the feeling you chose. Look for something – no matter how small – that is likely to ignite it (e.g. listening to certain music, having a bath, enjoying your plants). You may need to create space for this by reducing things such as scrolling on your phone or channel-surfing. These activities are appealing because they provide effortless stimulation, but they don’t generate positive feelings.
• It is not only the quantity of experiences that matters, but also their quality. The more you savour these moments, the deeper they go and the more likely they are to become part of you.
• What you feel depends not only on external input but on what you select from that input, too. For example, focusing on what others have and you don’t nurtures envy; focusing on what you have (instead of taking it for granted) nurtures gratitude. The same applies to internal input, such as memories.
• Matching actions and behaviour (e.g. acts of kindness), as well as thinking (e.g. “It was enriching to talk to someone with different views”), can also nurture desired feelings.
• You can also use visualisation: when you experience a desired feeling, create an image of it: give it a shape, colour, and location in your body. If you link the feeling and its image well, you can evoke the feeling by simply recalling its image.