The key to finding balance in your life

It is natural for us to find comfort in the illusion of control and the belief that there are only two contrasting, mutually exclusive realities - things are either right or wrong, good, or bad, happy or sad, big or small. We know however that the real world and life don’t work like this. We are human and the reality of being human is that most of our lived experience cannot be reduced to a two-sided story because it is largely played out in the gray zone.

Human. Defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “having the qualities, faults, and feelings that people have, as opposed to gods, animals, or machines.” 

So many of us are terrified of the thing that makes us most human: our ability to feel. Our ability to feel is the special gift that separates humans from other animals. We have the capacity to feel everything and then to pause, think, and process our emotions and feelings so we can respond to life rather than react to it. 

There are no good or bad emotions or feelings - they are all part of being human. 

Whilst some emotions and feelings might be uncomfortable, what if we viewed them as messengers that have no label attached to them? What if they exist in the grey zone of humanness as signals for change, informing us about needs that have not been met and values that are not being honoured? What if they are guides for how we should be living our lives? Or, what if they just need to be acknowledged and allowed to pass through?

If you want to unleash your greatness, you have to make peace with your humanness, which means you have to fully embrace your ability to feel and experience life. The good or bad and the grey.

What is the difference between emotions and feelings?

You often hear the terms emotions and feelings used interchangeably. While they are closely related, they are actually quite different, and here’s how.

Imagine you are in the supermarket. Your kids are being loud and misbehaving, and you are rushing up and down the aisles with a long grocery list. You round the corner and bump into an old friend you haven’t seen in a long time. You tear up, overwhelmed with excitement as you give your friend a hug, forgetting about your noisy children and the rush to finish shopping. This is emotion.

Emotions are neurological reactions to external stimuli that alter the physical state of the body. An event happens, and the brain uses memories of these sensations from the past to make sense of them now, triggering a physical and instinctive sensation in our body. 

While emotions originate as bodily reactions activated through neurotransmitters and hormones released by the brain, feelings come after emotions. 

Feelings are generated from our thoughts. They are stories we’ve created based on beliefs, personal experiences from the past, or fears of the future. Feelings are informed by our frame of reference, a fancy way of saying the “glasses” that we wear that help us make sense of the world. Our frame of reference is as unique as our fingerprints and is determined by our education, family, religion, culture, background, and positive and negative experiences we’ve had in life. No two people have the same frame of reference, but we often carry the misguided assumption that the people around us feel the same way we do in a certain situation. 

As an example, imagine you are at a party, and you notice the emotion of discomfort signaled by the fact that you have butterflies in your stomach and the palms of your hands are sweaty. Your mind might label that as feeling insecure because you don’t know many people at the party, but someone else who has the same emotional bodily sensations might label the experience as exciting because they get to meet new people. The same event prompts an identical emotional bodily reaction, but their frame of reference triggers very different feelings in these two people. 

It’s not just emotions and feelings that feed off each other; the body gets involved too. Just as an emotion can trigger a bodily sensation such as tension in the shoulders, our bodily sensations can inform our feelings and thoughts. A common example is when you feel the urge to urinate, which causes the thought that you must go to the bathroom and might trigger fear-based anxiety if you cannot find a toilet. As you can see, the process is not always linear and one-directional, it is complex and interconnected.

According to American psychologist Dr. Robert Plutchik in his research paper titled, A General Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion,” in Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience: Theories of Emotion, Vol, there are eight primary emotions that serve as the foundation for all others: joy, sadness, acceptance, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, and anticipation, whereas there are over 4,000 words in the dictionary to describe feelings! 

Try this: Set a timer for two minutes and write out the feelings you have in your vocabulary. There is no right or wrong answer, this isn’t a test. What did you learn from this exercise?

I have learned through my journey that if you don’t know how to label and express your emotions and feelings, it’s really difficult to find balance because feelings and emotions are often unpredictable and crash down on us when we least expect them, making us feel vulnerable and reactive. Learning how to embrace and work with emotions and feelings has gifted me the ability to feel in control and balanced; to go from reactive to responsive, helping me be fully alive to my humanity. 

Despite the power that comes from embracing our humanness, many of us are taught from a young age that feelings and emotions are not rational and that they should be squashed down, denied, and hidden. 

Can you remember the first time someone told you to stop crying? Or when you told your parents that you were full and they replied, “No you’re not, you only ate two bites, finish what is on your plate.” We’re told to love and embrace who we are and to be ourselves, but in the same breath we are also told to not be too sensitive because “it was a joke”. 

Unsurprisingly, many of us grow up being afraid of our emotions and feelings because they are constantly being shamed, dismissed, denied, and devalued. We don’t trust our feelings because we have been told by our parents and society that we shouldn’t feel the way we do. Social media and the glossy facade that we are exposed to do nothing to encourage reality, truth, discomfort, and difference. So, we push our feelings away because we have been told that what we are feeling is not right. 

Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish talk beautifully about the impact this has on children in their book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. They say that when you continuously deny a child's feelings, not only does this confuse and enrage the child, but it also teaches them not to trust their feelings and instead rely on other people for solutions.

The impact of not being taught from a young age how to label, accept, embrace, and healthily process our emotions, leads to many of us spending a lifetime terrified of our feelings and emotions. It’s no surprise that many of us find ourselves as adults without the skills to deal effectively with our feelings and emotions because this requires us to pause, to be mightily uncomfortable, and to sit with sensations and thoughts that we don’t want to sit with. 

Even if we did have the time and space to do this, the thought of facing up to things we’ve been running away from is not something most of us relish. Instead, we just want those feelings and emotions to go away. That might mean grabbing a bottle of wine and switching on Netflix, burying ourselves in work, or buying stuff we know we don’t need. Anything to distract and medicate ourselves from our emotions and feelings. 

Constantly running from and numbing our emotions and feelings eventually comes at a price to our health, both physical and mental, to our relationships, and to our overall enjoyment of life. 

Years of repressing emotions and feelings don’t make them go away; we carry them around with us, in our mind and body, and every now and then they come crashing down on us when we least expect it.

Imagine you are having a nice conversation with friends, and someone makes a joke about the way your hair looks that day. Suddenly you are crying and no one, you included, is quite sure why. So many times, in our lives and our relationships our reactions to things are not actually about what happened in that moment but are a result of unprocessed emotions and feelings that happened in our past. These unprocessed emotions and feelings don't necessarily have to be linked to a major traumatic event. It might be the smallest thing such as a negative emotion linked to Mr. Foster telling you off in your first-grade math class that is triggering your current response. 

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Finding balance is not an easy task because it requires you to dance with discomfort. To look your emotions and feelings in the eye, allow them to be present and process what they are trying to teach you. This is a skill that needs to be practiced consciously to process feelings and emotions in real-time rather than carrying them with you, holding you back from living a fulfilled life. Thankfully you've landed at the right place and we're here at intogreat to help you with just that.