This is the first part of a two-part series exploring emotional body sensations.
What “Ugh” Feels Like
When Some Small Part of You Feels Okay
Whether we mean to or not, we often treat emotional regulation as a way to avoid or resolve unpleasant feelings. But learning to regulate our emotions begins with the willingness to feel them while staying connected to what’s happening.
The bad news is that this slippery skill requires a lot of practice, isn’t particularly popular, and no one can do it for us. The good news is that even a little practice can help us catch more moments to respond before reacting takes over.
While working as an ABC News correspondent, Dan Harris famously had a panic attack during a live broadcast of Good Morning America while filling in at the news desk. The incident was so distressing that it prompted him to seek professional help. That path eventually included therapy, a regular mindfulness practice, and a second career devoted to talking and writing about mindfulness.
Comedian Joe List recently described a similar confrontation with intense emotional distress on an episode of Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out. Minutes before recording a stand-up set for Conan, his heart started racing. He felt dizzy and began shaking. His mind filled with predictions about being unable to go onstage and humiliating himself in front of Conan and the audience.
He decided to go onstage anyway. Then something interesting happened. He flubbed a line and had to depart from his rehearsed material:
“I flubbed a line and then I did an off-the-cuff thing, which puts you in the moment because you’re no longer reciting something.”
The improvised remark got a laugh. By the end of the set, he felt much better. The distress hadn’t disappeared on command. He had continued performing while it was present, and responding to what was actually happening interrupted his absorption in what he feared might happen.
These dramatic examples make the process easier to see. When emotional intensity becomes impossible to ignore, we may be forced to confront sensations we would ordinarily resist, explain, or urgently try to escape. But crisis is a terrible prerequisite for practice.
The point is not to wait until you’re about to walk onto a television stage. At lower intensities, we have more room to recognize the early signals: a tightening in the chest, heat rising in the face, a sinking feeling in the stomach, or a buzz of agitation that hasn’t yet taken over. These quieter moments give us opportunities to become familiar with unpleasant sensations before the stakes are high.
The same process happens when the kids aren’t ready, a coworker gets under your skin, or someone says something that leaves you feeling exposed or defensive. Attention training may not prevent discomfort from intensifying, but it can help us recognize—and sometimes reduce—the additional suffering created by resisting, catastrophizing, and urgently trying to escape what is already happening.
Mindfulness isn’t an exemption from difficulty. It’s a way to build skills for participating more fully in real life—including its pleasant moments, its unpleasant ones, and the complicated moments that contain both.
After several years of exploring emotional bodily sensations in my mindfulness practice, I discovered an almost endless number of opportunities to sneak this kind of investigation into daily life without anyone noticing.
One vivid example occurred while I was working as an instructional librarian at a business school. A prickly coworker struck up a conversation with me, which I naively interpreted as an attempt to connect over a shared interest. I quickly discovered that she was actually mocking something I was personally invested in. I could feel defensiveness, anger, and embarrassment erupting inside me.
Rather than escalating the interaction, I decided to draw on as much social composure as I could while observing the emotional reactions unfolding inside me. The energy I didn’t invest in defending myself became available for a highly educational, visceral lesson in emotional regulation. I smiled politely and nodded without feeding the interaction while secretly observing an internal fireworks show playing out in my face, chest, and stomach.
To be clear, defending myself was one valid response to her sneak attack. My mindfulness practice allowed me to recognize that it wasn’t the only one.
Even this retelling contains both parts of emotional experience. Descriptions like “prickly coworker” and “sneak attack” belong to the story I tell about what happened. The fireworks in my face, chest, and stomach describe what I could feel happening in my body. The story and the sensations were related and could influence each other, but they were distinguishable.
The point isn’t to strip an emotional experience of its meaning, talk ourselves out of a justified reaction, or avoid taking necessary action. It’s to recognize that the story about what we feel and the sensations we can detect are different components of the same experience. Noticing that distinction can give us more room to choose what happens next.
In today’s exercise, we’ll begin practicing at whatever intensity is already available. We’ll take a reading of our current energy and mood, notice any commentary playing out in the mind, and explore how the emotional part of the experience registers in the body. There’s no need to generate an unpleasant feeling. We’ll work with whatever is already there.
Next week, we’ll use these same skills to investigate a surprisingly different challenge: noticing subtle pleasant and peaceful sensations before attention rushes past them.
Exercise
This body-based attention exercise invites you to notice how mood registers physically—and to distinguish those sensations from the mental commentary surrounding them.
You don’t need to wait for an intense emotional reaction. Lower-level discomfort can provide especially useful conditions for learning.
When to use this attention exercise:
When an unpleasant feeling is mild or just beginning to register
When you feel anxious, irritated, embarrassed, or agitated
When you’re under real or imagined pressure
When you feel bored, ambivalent, or unmotivated
When nothing dramatic is happening, and you want to become more familiar with your subtler emotional signals
