Emotion and Sensation Identification
Feelings! What’s going on with them? Why do we have them? How can learning about them make them more manageable and even enrich us?
Emotions exist to give us important information about our relationship to the world and motivate a response. Our “feeling brain” is an evolutionarily older circuit than our “thinking brain”, and it can take concerted effort to help the two work together in a cohesive manner. Sometimes we may feel something before we have conscious awareness of it, and find ourselves responding to the emotion in a way that doesn’t align with our “thinking brain.” This can feel disorienting if we don’t have an idea as to why it’s happening, and can lead us to challenging moments with others and within ourselves.
So, how do we learn to work with our emotions?
One of the first and most important actions we can take is to try to identify what we are feeling. Emotions often come with a physical sensation, your nervous system runs through your whole body, after all! [Below, you can see a Feeling and Sensation Wheel that may help you find some words.] When we notice a tension in our stomach, or a shaking in the hands, we can tune in and get curious about what we might be experiencing. Perhaps it’s a sign of fear, or maybe something is activating a sense of anger. There’s no “right” way to feel about something, so it’s up to us to do our best to understand what we’re experiencing.
As we can link our emotions and sensations, we can develop a greater understanding of what we are experiencing moment by moment. Getting more familiar also lets us develop nuanced language for what we are feeling, perhaps moving from sad to disappointed. Researcher Dan Siegel has a great line, “Name it to Tame it”: being able to name what it is we’re feeling helps us to get a hold of it. Putting words to our emotions also helps to engage our “thinking brain” and slow us down to find out what is going on and how we’d like to respond.
The last little bit of wisdom I can try to impart here is: we cannot selectively numb what we feel. When we numb out the “bad” feelings, we also numb out our ability to experience the “good” feelings. Life is a much richer experience when we are able to feel things fully, and move through emotion as it comes along.
