Listen to your feelings! Also, stop listening to your feelings!
By: Aaron Mitchum
Let’s clear up the question of whether to listen to your feelings or not. The answer is…it depends.
Your feelings (and I’m talking about basic emotions here: fear, anger, lust, care, joy, enthusiasm and sadness) are inherited tools for surviving in life. Like the temperature of our bodies, our emotions need to be in a certain range for sustainability (when they are in this range we feel a sense of calm). Too little or too much of any emotion brings that emotion into our awareness, we start to feel it, and that feeling puts pressure on us to do something to relieve its tension. This is good in the sense that we feel impulses to grieve and connect when suffering loss, to steer clear of danger when fear sets in and so on. However, because of the way feelings, the basic needs they provoke, and how it went in attempting to get those needs met are recorded during the first 15 to 24 months of life, plus how those records are then harnessed to set expectations and create predictions and reactions for the rest of our lives around such feelings and needs it can get tricky when we feel those feelings and needs in the present (when the situation is no longer the same as the past). When that happens we stop being present and automatically (aka without thinking) launch into a reaction that doesn’t match the reality of the moment (reactions could be: starting a fight, shifting into a pleasing others mode, getting super rational, a pit in the stomach, heart racing, feeling stupid, low self esteem, feeling helpless, feeling arrogant, feeling a flood off emotions, feeling no emotions, pointing our gaze a certain way, holding our body a certain way, facial expressions, tone of voice, stress level, walking gate, impulse to leave, impulse to keep talking, impulse to avoid some person or place, etc.) instead it matches the reality of the past and the way we learned to cope based on where our developmental level was.
Predictions and automated reactions aren’t bad, they help us save precious energy. With predictions we don’t have to re-interpret every moment which allows us to put our attention elsewhere and focus on expanding our life. However, when our predictions of what is happening and what is adaptive are no longer accurate it's time for them to be updated. When those automatic feelings and reactions are no longer adaptive (for example you learned to avoid others when feeling sad as a child because there weren’t good supports for you as a sad child but as an adult that creates more loneliness than necessary or you learn that asserting yourself is thought to be selfish which gets you rejected so you don’t allow yourself to know what you want and go after it as an adult, etc.) it’s time to learn to non-judgmentally not act on your feelings in automatic moments and focus on the present for new information (this is really difficult on a range and can depend on the age you were when the memories involved were created and the intensity of emotions involved with the original situations - e.g. experiences of violence or abuse are very challenging because they involve intense survival reactions). The reason it’s important to ignore un-needed survival signals and use thinking to slow down automatic reactions and feelings from the past is to regain consciousness and being present. If you don’t, you potentially will re-create and replay your past: same story, different cast. Slowing down and reconsidering reactions allows for the potential of new experiences to occur.
Why are new experiences important? Experiences are what cause new learning and new predictions to get built over time. Additionally, you might consider mindfulness meditation and working with a professional to target long term memories and honor and process the emotions and meanings of the past that keep troubling you. This can really help the ability for slowing down and trying new things. Regardless of where you take this journey though, the first steps are awareness and slowing down to be more present.
P.S. It is especially tricky to recognize our “maladaptive” reactions when they are prized and supported by our society or culture (like perfectionism and obsessional working). So we may not realize that we are reacting and operating in ways that are not best for us because they are creating results of positive feedback. This causes us to wrap our identities and self esteem up with our performance and the feedback we get. We forget who we are outside of what we do.