How to Handle the Discomfort of Big Feelings

There are certain feelings that are easier to tolerate than others. Feelings like joy, love, happiness, and contentment feel good and you want them to last forever. Feelings like anger, frustration, resentment, fear, and anxiety suck and you want them to go away as quickly as possible.

Fortunately or unfortunately, all feelings are temporary and you can’t pick and choose which ones you feel. You feel all of them, or you feel none of them.

I have written about numbing feelings multiple times, including in my book, Intentional Eating: Finding Peace and Balance in Your Relationship with Food. What I am writing about today is how to feel your feelings.

As someone who spent her lifetime avoiding her feelings, this wasn’t easy at first. But with practice, I learned that it’s actually easier and takes less effort to feel them than to suppress them. I wrote about what it means to feel your feelings in this post:

How do you feel your feelings?

If you are like I am, feeling might not be your default. You may find emotions bursting out of you at inopportune times, or in greater volume and intensity than the situation calls for. If you find yourself in these situations, you might be ignoring your emotions until you have no choice but to feel.

Step 1: Pause to notice

If you’ve ever used “busy” as a numbing strategy (intentionally or unintentionally), slowing down and stopping could be challenging for you. It definitely was for me. When you pause, you allow yourself to be with what is (whatever you are feeling) and to stop avoiding it.

This is key, because if you don’t pause to feel, you’ll keep moving, eating, shopping, drinking, drugging, etc. in an attempt to not feel. This strategy works until it doesn’t. Ask any addict in recovery. I still catch myself numbing with food or games on my phone. The difference however, is that because I am aware of this behavior, I can make different choices sooner, preventing the escalation.

When you pause, you might find stillness and just breathe, letting everything else settle down. You may notice a physical sensation in your chest, throat, head, stomach, or maybe somewhere else. The physical sensation may be the only thing that you identify, and that’s okay. With practice you will learn what different sensations mean when you feel them in your body.

You might not be used to feeling anger, grief, or fear. You might have spent a lifetime suppressing these feelings in various ways. Pausing gives you the opportunity to just feel. No need to figure it out, analyze it, or change it in anyway. In fact trying to figure it out will shoot you back into your head and out of your body. The body is what needs to feel the emotion in order to move through it. The brain will help you bypass the emotion rather than feel it (I might be speaking from experience…).

Pause and breathe.

Step 2: Awareness

Pausing brings awareness. If you don’t know what’s going on, you can’t do anything about it. With awareness, you have the opportunity for change. It is in that awareness that you find control over yourself and your behavior. With awareness comes choice.

If you are a victim to your behavior, you have no choice. The behavior is driving the car (aka You). If you notice your behavior by pausing, it creates a little space between You and the behavior. In that space, You can retake the wheel, thus regaining control over yourself.

To help you feel the feelings that drive the behavior, you might place your hands over the sensation to bring some attention to it. Feel the tightness, emptiness, heaviness, lightness, whatever is there, and allow it to be. Imagine giving it space to exist. Continue to breathe normally and notice what is there without trying to figure anything out. Simply witness the sensation as it occurs.

Images might come to your mind, like memories, or you might start to associate your sensation with an emotion. In the end it doesn’t matter whether you understand your feelings or not, what matters is that you don’t try to suppress them or ignore them.

Step 3: Action

There are many things you can do once you start to feel. You might simply sit and breathe, allowing the emotion to roll through your body and release. Allow yourself to feel the discomfort without fixing or changing it. You might imagine creating even more space, or sending the sensation love. I sometimes imagine holding that tender part in loving hands. You are not changing the emotion, but you can change your relationship to that emotion.

Holding your tender parts in loving hands

Emotions can be scary and painful, but they don’t have to be. Meditation teaches you to sit with the discomfort and notice it with an objective eye. We create all sorts of stories about emotions, like “if I start crying I’ll never stop,” or “I can’t take this!” Building up your tolerance to emotional discomfort is one of meditation’s benefits. The more you can feel, the easier it will be to let the emotions release without bypassing or suppressing them.

Journaling is something you can do after you feel. First feel, then journal, otherwise you might end up bypassing the feeling part. It’s easy to switch to the mind when your body is uncomfortable, it can be a protective default. Stay with feeling first, then once the sensation dissipates, take out your journal to write.

You might start with the prompt, “I feel this _______ (heavy, tight, etc) sensation in my_____(chest, throat, etc). It reminds me of ______.” Or “it makes me feel _________.” Maybe you just start writing and see where the words take you. If you are artistic, you might want to draw, paint, or sculpt instead. Any type of expression is valuable, as long as it works for you.

**Please note: This does not apply to trauma, this is how to handle every day human emotions like stress, anger, anxiety, frustration, fear, worry, grief, sadness, etc. If you’ve experienced trauma please find support from a trained therapist. You should not attempt to handle it on your own.**

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Sangha Sundays is a group that meets online once a month to discuss life challenges through the lens of yoga. We discuss meditation, feeling your feelings, trust, boundaries, perfectionism, and other topics that hold us back from living fully open-hearted lives. This community is confidential, and your opportunity to explore your yoga practice off the mat in a safe, supportive space. Click the button below for more information or to sign up!