If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
The quest to understand our emotions
Navigating our emotions can be challenging. We’re never given an “emotions guide” when we’re young, and sort of stumble our way through life figuring it out. And yet, how we relate to our emotions determines the quality of our lives.
Do we run away from any slight pain or discomfort? Can we easily process our grief and let our emotions run their course, or do we block this natural process from happening? Do we try and hold on to the good feelings that will eventually go away, causing frustration and a never-ending pursuit?
Mostly we pick up our habits and beliefs about emotions from parents, friends, teachers, and whoever else happens to be around. The patterns we have are conditioned by the past, but fortunately they are not set in stone. It is possible to change our emotional landscape!
For example, during the pandemic I developed a nasty inner critic. Running my startup, the voice told me I was a failure, and liked to use lots of swear words to fuel its own spiteful circular monologue.
With time, meditation, and a bit of therapy, the voice was replaced with a much kinder, encouraging voice. Instead of “you idiot” it now says, “great job. you did the best you could!” The result was less negative emotions and more positive ones.
I’ve found it helpful to breakdown the different ways we respond to emotions. I pull from the work of Dr. David Hawkins, who categorizes our emotional responses into 4 categories:
Suppress/repress
Distract
Verbally express
Let go
Just by bringing some awareness to these approaches, we can start to see our own habits. This then opens up the possibility of choice.
But before I go into that, it’s important to ask: what exactly is an emotion?
Feeling❤️ + story🎭 = emotion
Meditation has taught me that our concept of “emotions” are a construct. I learned this mostly through doing dozens of hours of body-scans on Vipassana retreats. This involves sitting still and bringing attention to the physical sensations of my experience in a non-judgmental way. A.k.a mindfulness of the body.
You can try this yourself. When you actually sit down and look for your emotions, you find that there are (at least) a couple of ingredients that go into it:
A physical sensation in the body. This is the feeling.
An interpretation of that physical sensation. This is the story.
Together, they make an emotion.
Said differently,
Feeling + story = emotion
When I feel tightness in my chest, and I simply experience the tightness, there is no story there (unless I make one!). It’s just a contracted feeling, some pressure, heat, pulsating, and discomfort. It is unpleasant.
But then my mind starts thinking and computing. “Why is my chest tight? Did something happen?” My pattern-finding brain then takes in the context of the situation. Oh, right, I have three meetings today and feel like I’m behind. I am overwhelmed and struggling to keep my head above water.
Connecting the unpleasant physical sensation to the context of the situation, and perhaps my past experience of associating tight deadlines and stress with tightness in chest, I can name and label my emotion or multiple emotions. “Overwhelmed. Rushed. Anxious.”
Emotions researcher Lisa Barrett has found the same thing through 20 years of rigorous research. She breaks down emotions into Core Affect, Interpretation, and Cultural/Individual Differences.
The point is that we all experience emotions both in our bodies and the stories we tell ourselves. In order to understand our emotional reactions, and to let go of emotions, decoupling these is often the key to inner freedom. I’ll explain shortly what I mean.
With that said, below is a breakdown of the 4 ways we typically respond to emotions!
1/ Suppression or Repression
Many emotions are not pleasant to experience. Sadness, fear, and anxiety are especially uncomfortable. For a long time my automatic response to fear was a voice that said “don’t be a pu**y.” This macho attitude tells us that we should push aside the feeling.
This plays out in ignoring the issue, saying its not important, overriding it, pushing it down when it comes up, and probably moving on to distract yourself. People-pleasing and being “too nice” is another common avoidance mechanism of uncomfortable emotions.
But what happens when we push away a feeling? It doesn’t actually go away, even though it might seem to for some time. It’s like pushing a large beachball underwater. The deeper you push it down, the harder it will smack you in the face when it comes back up.
There are well-documented health consequences to emotional suppression.
Suppressing emotions is associated with high rates of heart disease, as well as autoimmune disorders, ulcers, IBS, and gastrointestinal health complications. Studies show that holding in feelings has a correlation to high cortisol — the hormone released in response to stress — and that cortisol leads to lower immunity and toxic thinking patterns. Over time, untreated or unrecognized stress can lead to an increased risk of diabetes, problems with memory, aggression, anxiety, and depression. — MBGHealth
It takes a lot of energy to suppress or push down an emotion, which leads to those health issues. Try holding a book close to you, with your arm drawn in and bicep flexed. Not so hard. Now try extending your arm and hold the book far away from you. Your muscles will get tired very quickly.
Usually, when we have gotten used to suppressing an emotion, we find that another emotion is layered on top. When we suppress our sadness, then it might also bring with it anger or shame. This response is known as a “secondary emotion.” Here’s a great video about the difference between primary and secondary emotions.
If a parent got angry at you and you cried, and they then told you “don’t cry,” your primary emotion of sadness or fear (because your parents were angry and you needed their love) was suppressed. Nowadays, you might experience shame, guilt, insecurity or some sense of being “bad” whenever you have a primary emotion like sadness or fear.
Now, when our habit of suppression becomes habitual it can lead to repression, which means it just happens automatically without us knowing. The result are lots of secondary emotions, usually negative/painful, that seem to dominate our experience.
If you realize you do this, it is very common, so there’s no need to feel further bad about it. It is not your fault for feeling what you feel. The suppression of emotions is a conditioned response. With awareness and a bit of work, you can start to de-condition these patterns.
2/ Distraction
Because telling emotions to “go away!” usually doesn’t work for very long, we move on to distraction. We pull out our phone, stuff our face with food, binge watch Netflix, play video games, drink a few beers, numb ourselves, and find something that takes us away from the uncomfortable emotion. My personal vice is eating jars of peanut butter and almond butter. Anything to get our minds and bodies to feel different.
Remember that we experience feelings in our body. When we react to someone/something, we are actually reacting to an unpleasant sensation in our body. Buddhism has known about this for thousands of years and more recently humanistic psychotherapy and embodied practice.
This might sound strange at first. But just think about it: If someone did something that would historically make you angry, but instead your body felt totally relaxed, open, and free of tension, would you really experience anger? No, you would interpret the emotion differently and probably brush off the situation.
The famous Finland study found that we all associate emotions with certain parts of our body. Anxiety and fear in the stomach, anger and frustration in the chest, sadness or overwhelm in the throat. We each have our own unique body-map, and no two people experience/interpret their emotions in the same way. It’s an interesting exercise to ask yourself where you feel your emotions.
Of course, distraction doesn’t have to be negative. In fact, it can be a good idea in certain circumstances. When we have an overwhelming emotion, it can be a great idea to just “cool off” and go for a walk. Maybe it’s okay to eat some soul food and do a LOR or Harry Potter marathon until you’ve gotten to a place where you feel more relaxed and stable. Then, from a calmer place, you can start to look at and process the emotion.
3/ Verbal Expression
There is a lot of emphasis on verbal expression of our feelings. Just say how you feel! Make your feelings known! Don’t hold back! This is true more so in the West, not in Japan where I live, where it’s very much the opposite. Culture has a big influence on your beliefs about emotions.
However, verbally expressing our emotions can have a downside. If you’re still in the grips of a more negative emotion — fear, disdain, anger, shame or some destructive feeling — expressing this to the wrong person might only make the situation worse. Just think about a time you got caught up and then regretted saying something. Maybe you felt better, but it could have damaged your relationship.
The other downside of expressing your emotions, at least verbally, is that it can just entangle you in further story-telling, sinking you deeper into a vicious circle. Complaining, bickering, and trying to solve problems with your mind hardly ever works when you are dealing with a strong emotion.
Yes, while reframing issues and thinking them through can have use, our feelings are experienced and stored in our bodies, and are crucial to releasing the emotion. Psychologist Eugene Gendlin found that 50% of his clients were able to make progress in therapy if they had strong body-awareness (the “felt sense”). Without this, it just turned into more thinking.
Talking to a friend or therapist who listens compassionately can be an important part of healing. I am not discounting that. In that case, verbal expression can be very useful — it just has to be to the right person! And remember that thoughts fuel feelings and feelings fuel thoughts. Without feeling into the emotion, it’s likely to keep us stuck in the thought-loop.
4/ Letting Go
The last option we have is perhaps the hardest. It’s to let it go. To let the emotion run its course without suppressing or distracting, and eventually watch it change into something else — acceptance, compassion, gratitude. Freedom is on the other side of difficult emotions…and the only way out is through.
The funny thing is, emotions don’t last very long if left alone. One brain researcher found that emotions have a 90-second life. When we experience a feeling, there is a chemical reaction that starts in our bodies (release of hormones like cortisol and oxytocin) that is completed after less than two minutes.
This is probably an over-simplification, as there can be many factors that prolong an emotion like your body, current state, personal situation, and the circumstances. But the point is that emotions are temporary. They will pass, if you let them!
The big secret that nobody tells you, that the Buddha discovered 2600 years ago and Western psychology just in the last century, is that fully feeling your emotion is the key to letting it go. The poet Rumi says our emotions are like “visitors,” which I find a really useful way to look at it.
The problem is when we are unable to, or unwilling to face an emotion because it is uncomfortable. We lock the visitors in instead of letting them run their course. We think that by avoiding it, pushing it away, or distracting ourselves, that we can escape them. Much of our world is based on escapism.
One reason people are not willing to feel their feelings is because they believe that vulnerability is weakness. So, they block out their feelings. This is especially true of men, as we are told to be “strong” and to “push through.” Women don’t have it any easier, as they are often shamed for being too emotional!
However, the truth is, to be vulnerable is to be courageous. Brené Brown puts it this way:
“To foreclose on our emotional life out of a fear that the costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living. Our rejection of vulnerability often stems from our associating it with dark emotions like fear, shame, grief, sadness, and disappointment—emotions that we don’t want to discuss, even when they profoundly affect the way we live, love, work, and even lead.
It starts to make sense that we dismiss vulnerability as weakness only when we realize that we’ve confused feeling with failing and emotions with liabilities. If we want to reclaim the essential emotional part of our lives and reignite our passion and purpose, we have to learn how to own and engage with our vulnerability and how to feel the emotions that come with it.”
The problem is that when we don’t let go of our difficult emotions, we don’t leave room for the more positive ones. Holding on to anger or resentment dulls us to feelings of joy, love and acceptance. This makes life less enjoyable and impacts how we show up to others and the world.
So, how do you actually let go?
Willingness to Let Go
First there needs to be a willingness to let an emotion go, no matter how much we don’t like it. When we are dealing with anger, shame, sadness, fear, confusion, know that these are not objectively good or bad.
However, there is a well-documented process of letting emotions go and what’s “behind” or beneath them developed by Dr. Hawkins. The more we let go, the more we move through this ladder, and experience progressively more positive emotions.
When I let go of my insecurity about not being a fluent Japanese speaker, despite years of study, I went from guilt/shame, to grief, to acceptance, and then to gratitude and joy for knowing what I know. This feeling went from heaviness to lightness, stuck to unstuck, mopey and sensitive to carefree and laughing.
You’ve probably experienced letting go of sadness through the process of grief. Perhaps losing someone or something important (a job, loved one, your health), and then eventually seeing the beauty in it or appreciating the mystery of life. That’s what I mean.
Mindfulness of Body
Famous Buddhist disciple Ananda said once his best friend Sariputta and his teacher the Buddha were dead, his only friend was mindfulness of body. The four foundations of mindfulness, written about in the oldest Buddhist texts, are all based on the body.
Awareness of the body is very important!
To let go we need to stop feeding the storyline, to sit with the emotion, and to keep coming back to the feeling in our body. The thing is, most of us are chronically disconnected from our bodies, so it will take time to regain this awareness. You can do this through meditation, yoga, tai chi, or whatever else puts you in touch with your body.
When trauma is involved, getting in touch with the body can be triggering, so you might need to take a different approach like using Somatic Experiencing therapy or other body-based therapies until you are in a more comfortable place to sit with your body.
How to Let Go
A simple way to start letting go of an emotion is to reframe the story line that is connected to your body. When you’re nervous before a speech, you might feel “butterflies in your stomach.” For many people, this is similar to the feeling of being excited. So, it’s very useful to mentally reframe your nervousness to excitement — same sensation, but different story. This can break the mental loop of worrying and transform the emotion.
From my experience any sort of body-based exercises like these are the best way for releasing emotions that are trapped. A few that can help diffuse emotions:
Yoga
Meditation
Dancing in your living room
Hiking/spending time in nature
Breathwork
Scream into a pillow
Catharsis, a feeling of releasing tension, often follows doing body-based exercises. These all can start to release trapped emotions. This can be liberating. However, to fully let go of the emotion, you need to fully feel it without running away from it.
Letting go involves being aware of a feeling, letting it come up, staying with it, and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it. — Dr. David Hawkins
The way Dr. Hawkins describes it above can also be said this way: “be mindful of your body and emotions.” Mindfulness is simply paying attention in a non-judgmental way. Of course, half the time we are judging ourselves or others, and most of the time we are lost, not paying attention to our present experience.
So it requires a bit of practice and dedication before it becomes natural. At first it looks like watching the breath, stabilizing our attention and building up a level of concentration so our minds aren’t jumping around. And then focusing on the body-sensation, not trying to push it away and without getting sucked in. The more we can just Be with it, as much as we don’t want to, the more the Letting Go process can unfold.
It’s a process
Letting go can be a bigger, longer process that requires more than one cathartic release. It requires confronting the emotion and all its part, going to its source, and letting that go too. You need to do this multiple times and it could take seconds (if you are lucky)…or days, weeks or years to fully let go, depending on how deep it is and how much time you dedicate.
Meditation that emphasizes the body and self-compassion have been particularly useful to do this. Body-scan meditations, done over and over with an attitude of openness and non-judgment, allow you to feel sensations in your body, and in turn your feelings. This allows you to decouple the story you have told yourself and the actual feeling in your body. Doing so, with kindness towards yourself, allows you to accept the feelings and therefore let it go. Let go, let be, allow, accept — whatever words work for you.
Another body-focused meditation that has worked well for me is called RAIN, which invites you to feel into the body, let go of the story, and nurture more acceptance. Similarly, loving-kindness meditation has been transformation for me using a practice called TWIM. You can find many loving kindness meditations on Insight Timer or YouTube. It automatically brings in the compassion element, combined with a feeling of warmness in your body, usually starting with your chest area.
When emotions are too strong
The key to these meditations is consistent practice, especially when things are tough. But when we are feeling overwhelmed and are past our “window of tolerance” it might be hard to sit with this with any meaningful degree of time or awareness.
In which case we might need a walk in the park, hop in an ice bath, and some Wim Hoff breathwork until we calm down and find some balance. Whatever we can do to get “out of head and into our bodies.” And then we can start working with the emotion — that is where the real work starts.
Not easy but worth it
The truth is that these exercises require you to sit with the pain. As one teacher says, that is the price of freedom. It is highly uncomfortable at first, but once you get the knack of it, an amazing thing happens: You start to welcome the challenging situations in your life as opportunities for transformation and waking up.