Detect Emotional Feelings in Your Body

This is the third part of a four-part series about being aware of thinking and feeling.

To change how you relate to your thoughts, you have to be willing to feel the feelings behind them.

Life becomes more hospitable when you develop this underappreciated skill. As with physical fitness, observing how my body expresses emotions in real-time is a capacity that requires consistent exercise, and I plan to keep at it for the rest of my life.

Working on this for a couple of decades has transformed my internal life in ways I never could have imagined. Emotional situations feel different from how they felt in the past. This isn’t to say that they are always comfortable or that I’m never rattled. Sometimes emotions seem even stronger than before. The difference lies in my body’s improved ability to process uncomfortable feelings with less knee-jerk escalation.

This may sound abstract, but it’s the opposite. I have numerous examples illustrating this tangible difference, though the stories they create aren't the kind that go viral. They will likely resonate with you only if you consider that avoiding the gravitational pull of drama can lead to a more satisfying way to live.

When I forget where I park my car while running errands, I try to let the fear and embarrassment percolate in the background as I scan the parking lot. My body seems more able and willing to calibrate itself now because I’ve had so many opportunities to practice. The details vary, but at this point, it’s not unusual for the unpleasant feelings to be mild or even absent.

A few years ago, as my toddler grandson and I were heading to visit his newborn sister in the hospital, I accidentally let four dogs loose. (Who let the dogs out? Me, but not on purpose.) I managed to scour the neighborhood without being overwhelmed by worst-case scenarios. It’s not a story about willpower. It’s about the accumulated time I’ve spent focusing on my surroundings, while acknowledging the powerful feelings in my body that urge me to fast-forward in my mind, but trying to let the uncertainty play out instead. It was the discomfort of a full bladder that eventually prompted us to head back home. Upon returning, we discovered that the last dog we couldn't find had never escaped with the others in the first place. Now, I have a sweet story about walking around with my grandson on my shoulders, calling out her name.

More recently, I was invited to play the piano for a sing-along at a nursing home. I realized too late that there would be no one to lead the singing, and I found it nearly impossible to sight-read the music while trying to engage an audience that expected a performance I was not able to deliver. Fortunately, my collected mindfulness practice time helped me stay composed enough to find humor in the absurdity of the situation. I stumbled through the hour, hitting many wrong notes, but never feeling distressed. My heart didn’t race. I didn’t sweat. I felt humbled but not mortified. I stayed objective enough to recognize that sometimes people volunteer for things they aren’t fully equipped for, and this was one of those times.

I didn’t try to be mindful in any of these instances¹. I became viscerally aware of my body responding differently than it would have without consistently exercising my attention.

With practice, you can improve your ability to recognize and detect the raw emotional feelings that influence your thoughts and moods.² However, there are standard obstacles that can hinder the development of this skill. Even within popular mindfulness instruction, practical tips for cultivating real-time emotional awareness can be hard to find.

Only relating to emotions as story problems to solve. When we discuss our feelings, we typically tell stories that imply how we felt. We often focus on who's to blame for our challenging feelings and apologize for the ones that don't seem logical or defensible. We can also get tripped up by therapy terms and concepts.

When we become connoisseurs of emotional body sensations, we don’t need to solve unpleasant feelings. We can practice detecting them and feeling them with less resistance sometimes. This doesn’t mean we ignore the behavior patterns that contribute to our negative emotions. Instead, we appreciate the complementary nature of working at both levels.

Lisa Damour sheds some needed light on this theme:

“Being mentally healthy is not about feeling good, calm, relaxed, or happy. Instead, mental health is about two things: having feelings that fit the situation, and managing those emotions well.”³

Mistaking emotional intensity for emotional intelligence. Some of us turn our big feelings into an identity. When we’re sad, we sob. When we’re angry, everyone can see and hear the evidence. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean we have learned how to manage our emotions effectively. We may have simply become skilled at expressing them outwardly. While it's important not to suppress our feelings, we also don't want our actions to be solely driven by emotional intensity.⁴

One of the dangers of having easy access to emotions is that we may convince ourselves we can feel what others are feeling. We can be quite certain of this, even when we are mistaken. Such misunderstandings can hinder our ability to support others and maintain strong connections with them.

I have a knack for getting stuck in these challenges. Luckily, someone wise once advised me that my perceptions of what others are feeling are just guesses. By monitoring and managing my own emotional discomfort and backing off my certainty about the emotional experiences of others, I can more effectively support the emotional agency that others need to develop for themselves.

Expecting quick results from your mindful habits. Mindful awareness skills are empowering, but they aren't a quick fix. Cultivating them takes time. Instead of waiting for unpleasant feelings to become overwhelming before you take action, practice recognizing a variety of emotional sensations and their intensity levels, even when you’re feeling relatively peaceful.

You can't breathe away anger, fear, sadness, embarrassment, or anxiety, but you can learn to recognize the sensations that convey them and sometimes resist them a little less. Breathing through these emotions can be helpful when their eradication is no longer the goal.

The power of being willing to literally feel whatever you feel will reveal itself in ways you can’t predict and sooner than you think.

Not allowing for individual differences. We all think in both words and images, and we can cultivate a greater awareness of the evidence of emotionality. However, be cautious of anyone who provides a neat explanation of where specific feelings are experienced in the body. It's much more beneficial to explore and discover for yourself where you feel your feelings.

Some of the people I’ve worked with over the years struggle to spot emotional sensations in their bodies. They aren’t doing anything wrong, nor are they spiritually blocked or not trying hard enough. They simply need to learn different ways to identify feelings like anger, fear, sadness, embarrassment, disgust, and hopelessness. It’s usually lurking in their mental images and internal chatter, and there are effective ways to adapt emotional regulation exercises to fit the individual emotional processing styles.

If you’re unable to sense any emotions in your body right now, enjoy the peaceful neutrality. If any feelings arise from the mix of bodily sensations in the days, weeks, months, or even years to come, you can use the exercise below to help you observe them.

Exercise

This exercise sharpens your ability to distinguish emotionally neutral sensations from those that convey pleasant or unpleasant emotions.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• before a difficult conversation

• during a scary or funny movie

• while watching or reading the news