Feel What's On Your Mind
The mind is often seen as an opponent in mindfulness, but you can recruit it to be on your emotional support team.
This is the third installment of a four-part series on awareness of thoughts and feelings.
Detecting emotional feelings in the body
Combining all three of these challenges into a single exercise
We tend to overthink our feelings. When we talk about our emotions, we tell stories about who caused them or focus on strategies to get rid of the ones we don’t like and to hold onto the ones we do.
Mindfulness takes a different approach: investigating the phenomena underlying what we feel. Instead of trying to improve pleasant feelings or eliminate unpleasant ones, we temporarily suspend that impulse to recognize feelings with less internal interference.
This approach is counterintuitive and not widely understood by those who haven’t practiced it, but it offers a powerful alternative to worry and rumination. It turns the theory of pausing between stimulus and response into an accessible, real-life skill.
A common misconception is that we’ll quickly develop the precision to identify what we feel and find the right words to describe it. When we try to stop our minds from solving our feelings, they often pivot to curating them, sorting emotions into neat categories borrowed from pop psychology or social media.
Curiosity about feelings is where the relief comes from. Being willing not to know exactly what you’re feeling—and to make lots of guesses—is key.
Here's an approach to begin exploring your emotional feelings that can keep you guessing in liberating ways for years.1
Start by noticing your energy level. Feel it for a few seconds without evaluating it or trying to change it.
Next, notice the presence of pleasant and unpleasant feelings without evaluating them or trying to change them.
At any given moment, there are four possibilities for your mood: pleasant, unpleasant, mixed, or neutral.
When you find yourself worrying, overthinking, or catastrophizing, look for sensations in your body that connect to what’s on your mind. You can’t force yourself to stop thinking, but you can explore how your mental activity shows up as emotional feelings in the body. With practice, this becomes transformative.
The mind doesn’t need to be an enemy in developing emotional awareness. It can actually become a valuable ally. The key is to accept that your feelings may remain coarse and vague even as your ability to spot emotionality increases. This isn’t a reflection of a personal shortcoming but evidence of your messy human complexity. Allowing yourself to experience unpleasant feelings with less resistance, even those you can’t put into words, makes them less likely to escalate and feel personal.
The exercise below will help you develop this capacity to feel what’s on your mind without getting lost in stories about it. By distinguishing between physical and emotional sensations, you’ll build the skill to stay present with your feelings—even the difficult ones—with more clarity and less reactivity.
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Exercise
This practice helps you build the skill of distinguishing emotional from physical sensations, empowering you to navigate your feelings with greater ease and clarity.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Walking
Waiting
Worrying
