Navigating our internal world - Feelings and Emotions

This is part of a series of articles on emotions.

How understanding your emotions can better support living your life.? How knowing the difference between emotions and feelings can be helpful.

Enabling you to move from being ‘in the grip’ of your emotions and on autopilot with habitual responses. ?To gaining more insight, so you can pause and create new choices and create new opportunities.

Later in this series of articles I look in depth at the emotions of grief; anger; guilt & shame; and joy.

I look at what happens when we are not able to express those emotions. ?The long lasting effects of not being able to express them and how to safely and constructively express them.

The series is written for coaches so you can work effectively with your clients. Its written for coaching clients to support the shifts that you want to make. And, for all of us. So that we know what can support us to make better sense of how we respond to our worlds, giving us more options in life.

Feelings and emotions – are they the same?

We experience so many feelings and emotions in our lives.? At times they are overwhelming and at times we become numb.

Despite the interchangeability of the words ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’, I am making a distinction between them here.

Emotions are our physiological response to our environment. They are instinctual, bodily responses to what is happening in the outside world. As mammals we are programmed to respond in certain ways so that we can survive. They are there for a reason – to tell us about something in our environment and how to respond. Fear, anger, joy, sadness (grief), disgust and shame are generally considered to be universal basic emotions [note 1].

Feelings are our mental associations and reactions to those emotions. We experience an emotion, and the frontal lobe of our brains makes sense of it in the context of our personal beliefs and memories. As humans, through language, we are then able to describe our response as a feeling. This helps us to make sense of what happens to us internally (physiologically in our bodies) and externally. There are many different types of feelings [note 2]. ?Culturally there is a lot more difference about what how and which feelings are expressed, valued and regulated.

Essentially, we have a physiological response (an emotion) and then make sense of it and describe it as a feeling.

So theres a difference between emotions and feelings - why does this matter?

It matters because emotions are part of our inherent programming designed to keep us safe. Our physiology ensures that we will inevitably experience these emotions so that we can respond appropriately to our environment.

Our ability to notice and allow in these emotions supports resilience in these three ways.

1.????? Being able to notice what is happening to our bodies enables us to truly experience our emotion in the moment.

2.????? The skill of being able to notice our interpretation of our response brings a greater resilience.

‘It helps us to be aware of our mental processes without being swept away by them, enables us to get ourselves off the autopilot of ingrained behaviours and habitual responses, and moves us beyond the reactive emotional loops we all have a tendency to get trapped in.’ (Siegal Mindsight p. xi)

3.????? Being able to describe our feelings enables us to process and better make sense of our experience. We all experience a sense of being stuck at times in our lives. When we can notice and name the feeling and experiences then we can move to a place of more options. Describing our feelings is influenced by our culture, our heritage so it is important to find our own words.

Conclusion

Emotions are physiological reactions that happen in the present.

Feelings are how we describe those emotions and help us to make sense of the world based on our past. The more nuance we have in describing our feelings then the more informed we can be.

Coaching can help us to notice what is happening in our body as well as our brain. Help us to experience emotions in the here and now, building our capacity to better regulate the body and our response to the world [note 3].

Look out for this article (22) A series on emotions... What happens when our emotions get stuck? | LinkedIn where I write about the impact of stuck emotions and how to regain energy and movement in your life.

Notes

Note 1 However it is a contested issue in emotion research with many different theories and approaches.

Note 2 For example Brene Brown describes 87 different feelings in Atlas of the Heart Penguin Random House 2021

Note 3 Dan Siegal writes about the physiology behind this process in his book Mindsight Oneworld Publications 2010