feel your feelings
Feelings are meant to be felt. Touch is a felt sense, experienced through feeling. Smell and taste are felt. Emotions have corresponding manifestations in the physical body through neurotransmitters such as dopamine, adrenaline, and endorphins. Feelings are responsible for physical changes in your heart rate, breathing patterns, pupil size, and skin color. Your feelings are real, and they are meant to be felt.
Reason and emotion have long been considered opposing forces. However, neuroscience research reveals that feelings and thoughts are always closely intertwined. Imaging technology shows that emotional stimuli trigger more neural activity than neutral ones. Emotions consequently receive preferential access to cognitive processing, behaviors, and awareness. All emotions serve a purpose. We have sophisticated nervous systems, and our emotions guide us to evaluate and adapt to environmental changes.
The capacity of our mental processing is limited. We cannot process all information entering our senses thoroughly, so our brains prioritize emotional information as an energy-saving mechanism. This prioritization happens at the cost of other information. When making decisions, emotions take precedent over reason because the brain treats emotional data as more urgent and relevant. This explains why we often feel first and rationalize later. Emotions impact our perception, memory, and this very prioritization process.
Our culture is dominated by avoiding and suppressing emotions. Our inability to feel our feelings seems elementary to the human condition. People have found a variety of ways to cope, numb, and avoid feeling. Addiction, dissociation, procrastination, and physical activities are some ways people eschew their emotional selves. The lifespan of a single emotion averages 90 seconds, with some emotions lasting longer than others.
Feelings can be painful, confusing, and scary, but you can build up your tolerance for your emotions. Allow your feelings to come and go without judging or trying to change them. Observe them, identify them, recognize them in yourself, in your memory, in your body as physical sensations, and accept your emotions.