What do you do when a painful feeling arises? If you’re like most people, you have a go-to strategy to numb it, distract yourself from it, or push it away. We binge-watch a show, scroll endlessly through social media, or throw ourselves into work. Our culture teaches us that discomfort is a problem to be solved. But what if the problem isn’t the pain, but our desperate attempt to avoid it? If you want to find true emotional freedom, you must first learn how to feel your emotions—all of them.
This is the core, transformative message from author and activist Glennon Doyle. Drawing from her own powerful journey from addiction to recovery, she realized that her struggle wasn’t the addiction itself, but the underlying avoidance of feeling.
We often miss the secret to a fully lived life: feeling everything, including the pain, is what makes us truly human. Experiencing discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful existence. This guide will explore Doyle’s philosophy and provide three practical ways to stop avoiding feelings and start living more bravely.
The Great Escape: Why We Avoid Our Painful Feelings
From a young age, we are often taught to categorize our emotions as “good” or “bad.” Happiness, joy, and excitement are good. Sadness, anger, and fear are bad. Naturally, we spend our lives chasing the good feelings and running from the bad ones.
This creates what Doyle calls a “culture of cushioning.” We are constantly seeking ways to numb the hard edges of life. The problem is, you cannot selectively numb emotions. When you build a wall to keep out the sadness, you also block out the joy. The energy we spend trying to stop avoiding feelings is exhausting, and it keeps us from engaging with our own lives in a real and authentic way. The true suffering isn’t in the feeling itself, but in the frantic, lifelong effort to escape it.
3 Powerful Practices to Learn How to Feel Your Emotions
Learning to sit with your emotions is a skill, and like any skill, it requires practice. Here are three simple but profound exercises to get you started.
1. The “Sit With It” Practice
This is a simple mindfulness exercise to build your capacity for discomfort. The next time you feel a difficult emotion rising, instead of immediately reaching for a distraction, try this:
- Pause: Stop what you are doing and find a quiet place to sit for just two minutes.
- Name It: Acknowledge the feeling without judgment. Simply say to yourself, “This is grief,” or “I am feeling anxiety right now.” This is a powerful technique to [calm your amygdala] and reduce its reactivity.
- Locate It: Where do you feel this emotion in your body? Is it a tightness in your chest? A pit in your stomach? A heat in your face? Get curious about the physical sensations.
- Breathe: Take a few slow, deep breaths. Imagine you are sending the breath to the part of your body where you feel the emotion, creating space around it.
You are not trying to fix the feeling or make it go away. You are simply practicing the art of staying present with it.
2. Use Journaling as a Safe Outlet
Sometimes our feelings are too big and messy to process in our heads. [Journaling for mental clarity] provides a safe, private container to pour them out without having to censor or understand them immediately.
- The Practice: When you’re feeling overwhelmed, open a notebook and just start writing. Don’t worry about grammar or making sense. Write about what hurts, what you’re afraid of, or what you’re angry about.
- The Goal: The purpose is not to find a solution, but to give the emotion a voice. Often, the simple act of expressing the feeling on the page is enough to lessen its intensity.
3. Lower the Stakes (Start with Small Discomforts)
To embrace discomfort, you can start by practicing with low-stakes feelings.
- Boredom: The next time you’re waiting in line, resist the urge to pull out your phone. Just stand there and feel the boredom. Notice the impulse to escape and just let it be.
- Irritation: When a minor annoyance happens, instead of immediately complaining or reacting, just notice the feeling of irritation in your body for a few moments before you respond.
By practicing with these small discomforts, you build the “emotional muscle” you need to handle bigger, more painful feelings when they arise.
Conclusion: The Freedom to Be Human
As Glennon Doyle teaches, and as you can explore in her work or interviews on platforms like NPR, life is brutiful—both brutal and beautiful at the same time. The secret is to have the courage to stay for all of it.
Learning how to feel your emotions is the key to unlocking true emotional freedom. It is the path to a life that is not pain-free, but is rich, deep, and authentic. Pain is inevitable, but by learning to sit with it, you discover that you can survive it. And on the other side of that pain, you’ll find the strength, wisdom, and joy that can only come from a life fully lived.
