The good news for those of us who intellectualize our feelings

Getting out of your head and being mindful

You can’t think your way out of depression. You can’t think yourself out of negative self talk. You can’t think your way out of being heartbroken. No amount of logic and reasoning will save you from your deep insecurities. Developing stories about why you are the way you are, will not help you be a different way.

I tried all those methods on a loop for most of my teen years and adult life. I went to therapy, I tried to confront my low self worth and logic my way out (e.g. why do I hold myself to an impossible standard if I don’t hold others to that standard?) and it helped a little bit. It got me to a place where I at least believed, intellectually, that I deserved to be happy and deserved to feel positively about myself.

Have you ever known something to be true, intellectually, cognitively, and yet…you can’t quite feel it? You have that truth in your mind, but it feels disconnected. Like fiction. There have been times in my life where I’ve felt really down on myself and a friend has given me a pep talk, trying to build me up. I never felt like they were lying; I knew the things they were saying were true, but it didn’t change the way I felt about myself. To me, it feels sort of like the knowledge that the planet Jupiter is made of gas. Intellectually, I get it, but I have no experiential knowledge of what a gas giant planet really is, or is like.

If you’re someone who intellectualizes your feelings like I did, I have amazing news for you. The alternative is so much better. It feels better, it’s easier, it’s more flexible and it’s freeing.

The slightly bad news is that it’s not easier at first and it may not feel better at first. If you want to dip your toe in, my suggestion is to start dropping the narratives about yourself. Do you catch yourself saying things like “I’m just not the kind of person who can ____” or “I’m feeling anxious because ____happened to me as a kid and that’s just how I am”? What would happen if you let go of those stories? Instead of thinking you’re not the kind of person to try some new thing, maybe you can reframe that to be: I haven’t done this before, but I’m curious what it would be like. Essentially, what if you could stop being committed to the narratives of your identity and start being curious about what you’re experiencing now?

Here’s the thing, maybe the stories you have about yourself and your feelings are true, and maybe they’re not. It sort of doesn’t matter. I’ll give you an example. I have a hard time keeping a tidy kitchen. There are dishes in the sink a lot, I don’t wipe down my counters every single night, my fridge could use a clean out, etc. I could tell myself its because I have an aversion to touching food remnants in the sink, or maybe because I don’t have a dishwasher, or it’s because I didn’t build the habit as a teenager, or maybe I have some kind of shame around being messy, maybe it’s because my brain just can’t do it. All those things are probably true to some degree, but that knowledge does not help me do the dishes.

Like anything worth doing, letting go of narratives and experiencing your emotions takes practice. The opposite of intellectualizing is experiencing and experiencing can be scary and it definitely takes practice. Doing just a little bit of mindfulness meditation each day can be some of that practice. It helps us practice bringing the mind down from swirling thoughts, into the experience of the body in the present moment. It allows us to practice catching our mind when it’s caught up in thinking and bringing it back to here and now, when things are calm and safe, because we’re just sitting quietly in meditation.

The first time I can remember experiencing my emotions instead of being caught up in thinking about the emotions, I literally stopped dead in my tracks. I was fully having a breakdown, tears down my face etc. I was walking from my bathroom to the bedroom and I realized that I was stuck in my head, thoughts spiraling. I put my hand on my chest where my breathing was pretty shallow because I was so upset and I dropped my attention out of my mind and into my body. I asked myself what sensations I was feeling - and I didn’t name the feelings, I didn’t think about them, I didn’t cognitively analyze them, I just FELT them. I just experienced them. I experienced what they were like, how they changed, how they dissolved. I was so shocked and how easily the feelings dissipated, how well this “mindfulness” worked, that I fully stopped spiraling immediately. What a relief to simply experience my emotions instead of trying to figure out why I was feeling them and how I could stop and berating myself for feeling the way I was feeling.

This is a practice. It takes intentional repetition, and time. What would it be like to not have to intellectualize and analyze your feelings all the time? What would it be like to just give your heartfelt attention to the sensations in your body as you experience emotion?