Photo of woman sitting outside with eyes closed head titled upwards feeling her feelings. — What if the key to feeling better was learning how to *feel* your feelings instead of how to control them?

What does it mean to feel your feelings?

You might think, how could you not feel your feelings. Once upon a time, that’s what I thought. See, I thought I was feeling my feelings because I’d have thoughts like: “I’m sad,” “I’m annoyed,” or, “This is enjoyable.” What else could feeling your feelings involve?

It turns out that feeling your feelings actually involves physical sensations in your body. This was news to me! Suddenly all of those literary turns of phrase like, “His chest swelled with emotion,” “Her stomach knotted up,” and, “It hit him like a punch in the gut,” made a lot more sense. I talked to a few friends about this, and they too were surprised to learn that emotions come with physical sensations.

Feeling your feelings means that you can feel the physical sensations in your body that come with emotions, name the associated emotion with your mind, and allow the emotion to show up and then fall away naturally. This is called emotional regulation, and when people talk about feeling your feelings, most of the time they’re talking about this process.

What does it mean to regulate your emotions? How is emotional regulation different from controlling your emotions?

So, emotional regulation – or feeling your feelings – is the process of noticing your feelings and then working with them to allow them to move through your body. Regulating your emotions this way allows you to consciously respond to the world with the information that you got from your emotions and from your intellectual thoughts.

I commonly hear people talk about the importance of “controlling” your emotions, and I really don’t like that phrase. To me, “controlling” emotions sounds like suppressing them, essentially pushing them down and responding to the world without input from your emotions. But your emotions have really important information to give you! Pushing your emotions down also doesn’t make them go away, it just lets them fester and get more confusing and more complicated. Think about it, if you had a friend who was mad at you, would ignoring the fact that they’re mad at you make their anger go away? Probably not. The only thing that’s going to resolve your friend’s anger is working through whatever it is that led to the anger. Likewise, telling your own anger, sadness, fear, anxiety, or other emotion to take a hike because you “need to be rational” and “behave” isn’t going to make the emotion go away, it’s just going to go around the corner and sulk and then come back to bite you later.

Now, feeling your feelings, isn’t an excuse to throw your emotions around and make them other people’s responsibility, nor is it justification to do whatever you want because of how you feel. The good news is that actually learning how to feel your feelings through healthy emotional regulation is probably going to feel a whole lot better than treating other people like your personal emotional punching bag anyway.

How do you feel your feelings? How do you sit with your emotions?

Okay, so how do you actually go about feeling your feelings (i.e., regulating your emotions)? Here are four steps to feeling your feelings:

Infographic explaining "How To Feel Feelings" by noticing, naming, welcoming, and exploring the emotion. Graphic of woman with heart over her chest at top of image. Body text appears in four pink rectangles on white background. — Share on Pinterest

Step 1 to feel your feelings: Notice the physical sensations of the emotion & allow them.

Move your attention around your body. What do you feel in your stomach, chest, legs, back, face, neck, feet, and arms? When you notice a physical sensation, don’t try to tune it out or ignore it. Instead, pay attention to it. (The fancy word for this is interoception, being able to sense what’s going on inside your body, and you can get better at it with practice.) Ask yourself questions like this while you’re noticing the physical sensations:

Where in my body do I feel the physical sensations?
What do the physical sensations feel like?
What color is the physical sensation?
What shape is the physical sensation?
Does the physical sensation change as I pay attention to it?
Does the physical sensation change if I take a deep breath?
You can also create a list of words to help you describe the physical feeling of your emotion. Here’s a list of descriptive words to get you started describing your feeling.

Step 2 to feel your feelings: Look for a name for the emotion.

Now that you’ve explored the physical sensations of the feeling, what emotion do you think this is? Giving a name to an emotion helps keep our thinking brain calm and it helps us to observe and experience the emotion without becoming totally consumed by it. Sometimes, finding a name for the emotion can be hard. It might help to look at a list of emotions. It can also help to learn about the different emotions. A book called Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown PhD, MSW, really helped me to learn the words for describing my emotions. This book is basically an encyclopedia of emotions that describes 87 different emotions. Each emotion is organized into sections in a really intuitive way; each section has a title like “Places We Go When We’re Hurting” or “Places We Go When We Feel Wronged.” This organizational setup makes it really easy to find the emotion you’re looking for even if you don’t know exactly what the name for the emotion is. Sometimes I’m not able to find the right name for an emotion right away, but noticing the physical sensations and thinking about what name it might have still helps.

Step 3 to feel your feelings: Welcome the emotion with care and validation.

You’re feeling the physical feelings that come with the emotion, and hopefully you’ve found a name to go with the emotion, too. Next, welcome the emotion. When doing this, I like to remind myself that the emotion has valuable information to bring me. Sometimes the information is about something happening right now and sometimes it’s more about a past experience, but it’s valuable information either way. Even if I don’t know what the emotion is about, I still assume that the emotion has valuable information to share with me. I also like to remind myself that the emotion makes sense; the emotion is not irrational or nonsensical. The emotion may or may not be about the present moment, but it would not arise without a reason. These thoughts help me to welcome and validate the emotion. Next, I respond to myself with care and loving words. These words vary depending on the emotion, but common phrases might be, “I’m here, you’re safe,” “This is hard, and it won’t last forever,” or, “I can let this feeling happen and let this feeling pass through me and go away when it’s ready.” If you didn’t have parents/caregivers who talked to you in a kind way when you were emotional as a child, this might be hard. This was hard for me, too. You can read about how I worked on my self talk and get some prompts to evaluate and work on improving your own self talk here.

Step 4 to feel your feelings: Explore the emotion & get curious.

Once I’ve welcomed the emotion and responded with care and validation, it’s safe to explore the emotion and reflect on what’s going on inside me. I used to skip the first three steps and go right to an anxious line of thought about my emotions like, “What is this? This sucks. Why am I feeling this way? How do I make it go away?” By starting with welcoming the emotion and caring for myself, I made it safe for my body and mind to actually give me information about the emotions that I was looking for. Exploring and getting curious about your emotion could involve asking yourself questions like:

Do the physical sensations change or move at all when I pay attention to them? Does it change to another emotion?
What brought up this emotion? Is it about something happening right now? A past experience? A mix of both?
What part of me feels this way? (It could be a physical location in your body, a certain facet of your personality, or even a younger version of you. For example, you might answer, my heart feels this way, or the part of me that wants to succeed feels this way, or 12-year-old me feels this way.)

In this process, listen to what naturally comes up, even if it doesn’t make sense to you. During this process, I often jump back and forth between these four steps. For example, maybe I get to the fourth step and the emotion changes and I need to go back and welcome the new emotion and respond with care before I start exploring the emotion again.

Sometimes an emotion is really big or difficult to handle and you might spend a long time on just one of these steps, or you might not be able to get past the first step. You might also need to move in and out of noticing the physical sensations of the emotion if the emotion is big or difficult; this is called pendulating. It’s okay to take a break from a big emotion and pay attention to something else for a while. It’s also okay if there are times when you’re not able to do all of these steps.

The point of going through the steps of feeling your feelings is to help your brain feel safe noticing the way your body experiences emotions and to make your body feel safe interacting with your brain during an emotion. Forcing your brain or body beyond its limits won’t help, so pay attention to what feels like a safe amount of attention and processing for you. Learning how to feel your feelings is like building a muscle at the gym. You work up to it slowly and over time you’ll be able to feel your feelings and regulate your emotions more and more.

An emotional regulation example

Here’s an example of emotional regulation applying these steps to the emotion of anxiety. All of this conversation is going on inside my head as I’m feeling my feelings:

I’m noticing that my chest feels kind of tight, my heart feels a little fast, I’m holding my jaw muscle kind of tight. I notice that I want to let my mind race around all over the place trying to get rid of this feeling. It’s uncomfortable and I can still let these physical sensations happen.

I think this is anxiety. I notice that there is a quick hard feeling in my stomach; I imagine that it’s a black oval. I let it jump upwards towards my chest. Fear. I feel afraid now. It’s okay to feel fear. It’s okay to feel anxiety. I’m safe. I can help myself through this. Okay, now the physical sensations feel less intense.

I notice that my anxiety showed up and then fear showed up. I guess anxiety was trying to protect me from feeling fear, maybe because anxiety is an emotion that helps me to take action and fear makes me feel frozen and unable to act.

Okay, I started to notice the anxiety when I thought about going to a big social event with people I don’t know. That makes sense. Meeting a lot of new people can be scary because it’s normal to want to make a good impression and feel accepted. Human connection is something I value, so it makes sense that this feels important. It also makes sense that I would worry about being accepted by new people because I didn’t really feel accepted in my family growing up. My body remembers that experience and tries to protect me. Sure, not everyone will like me and not every social situation will go perfectly, but that’s okay. I’d still be safe if something didn’t go well or someone didn’t like me. It’s not like when I was a kid, I’m safe now and most of the time things go well when I interact with new people.

When you just can’t regulate emotions

Sometimes feeling your feelings is really hard and really scary and you just can’t regulate emotions even when you want to. You’re not alone if that’s how you’re feeling. It can help to take a step back and build up some related skills to help you regulate emotions.

Infographic with tools for support when you can't regulate emotions. White background with pink stripes. Graphic of woman with heart over chest top of image. Black text. — Share on Pinterest

When you can't regulate emotions, try somatic therapy.

A somatic therapist can help you learn to notice the physical sensations in your body and teach you tools for regulating your emotions. I'd tried CBT therapy before, but somatic therapy was what finally really helped me learn to feel my feelings.

When you can’t regulate your emotions, try internal family systems (IFS) therapy or techniques.

IFS is a type of therapy that helps you recognize and work with different “parts” of you. IFS uses three big categories for these parts of you: 1) managers who run your daily life and try to keep you safe, 2) exiles who are hurt and try to hide from you, and 3) firefighters who jump in quickly to try to protect your exiles and stop emotional pain. I think knowing these categories is helpful, but I don’t personally use them a lot. The value of IFS, for me, was simply in understanding that I could acknowledge different parts of me and let them be just as they are instead of feeling all confused about the tension between my various thought processes and feelings. For example, instead of getting distressed because I don’t know what to do about a situation and I feel conflicted, I would say to myself, “Part of me wants to take action and part of me is scared to take action.” Then, later, this might expand to something like, “The part of me that wants to take action is afraid that if I don’t act now the situation will spiral beyond my control; this part of me is 9 years old and she knows she can’t rely on her parents for help.” Or, it might expand into something like this, “The part of me that wants to take action is on my right shoulder and she’s wearing a black suit and wagging her finger. The part of me that is scared to take action is a little girl sitting down in my stomach pulling her knees towards herself.” This might all sound kind of wild, but I found that there was something pretty intuitive and helpful about it once I got over the weird factor. If you want to read more about IFS, check out No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.

When you can't regulate emotions, learn how to pendulate.

When you pendulate, you move in and out of a difficult emotional state. For example, you might experience anxiety and notice a tight gripping sensation in your chest; before this gets too overwhelming, you might take a deep breath and focus your attention on how the ground feels under your feet and then go back to noticing the tight feeling in your chest. Figuring out what types of things help you move in and out of an emotion can really help. Watch a therapist demonstrate pendulation here. You can try out your own ideas for how to pendulate in and out of your own emotions and learn what works best for you.

When you can't regulate emotions, try taking a walk outside.

This sounds kind of trite, but there’s a reason the latin phrase, solvitur ambulando (“it is solved by walking”) exists. Scientific research also shows that walking outside actually does help us get back to a state of calm and feel better.

When you can't regulate emotions, try gentle movement.

Like walking, moving around gently helps your nervous system come back to a state of calm. You could try yoga, Pilates, or just moving around in a way that feels right and intuitive to you at the moment. In addition to helping you get back to a state of calm, moving around helps you work through emotions and release them from your body. I began doing Pilates around the same time I started really intentionally working on feeling my feelings and Pilates helped me immensely in the process.

When you can't regulate emotions, try meditation.

Meditation is a great way to get comfortable stepping in to the “observer” state where you notice your thoughts and feelings without attaching to them (i.e., without “going along” with them). Practicing meditation over and over again helps strengthen a part of your brain (the medial prefrontal cortex) that helps you regulate your emotions [1]. I really like the Calm App for mediation (especially the “Daily Trip” series). If you’re looking for a free option for mediation, I recommend First This.

When you can't regulate emotions, learn about breathwork.

Breathwork is intentionally breathing in certain way to help your nervous system come back to a state of calm. Breathwork is part of yoga and Pilates, but there are a lot of techniques for breathwork that you can try out. For example, one common type of breathwork is called box breathing. In box breathing you inhale from your nose for four seconds, hold your breath for four seconds, exhale through your mouth for four seconds, and then repeat. You can learn more about breathwork in the book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by Ja mes Nestor.

When you can't regulate emotions, assess how safe you feel.

When you feel safe, you’re able to think more clearly and your nervous system has an easier time staying calm. Assessing safety can be a little tricky. When I started my journey to feel my feelings, I would have said, “Yes, I’m safe because I have shelter, enough to eat, and no one is abusing me.” It took me awhile, but eventually I realized that what made me feel unsafe was the critical and uncomforting way that I talked to myself. (If that might be the case with you, too, check out these self talk prompts to help you reflect on your self talk and work on positive self talk.) To figure out if you feel safe, try to reflect on what safety feels like, what it means to be safe, and how you know whether or not you’re safe. Listen to what your body and mind have to say in response. Sometimes it also helps to have a safe physical space to go when emotional regulation is hard (for me, it’s my bed).