Embracing Emotions: How Feeling Your Feelings Improves Your Quality of Life
- Bonny
- Dec 8, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Many people question why it’s important to feel their feelings. While it can be uncomfortable, especially with difficult emotions, allowing yourself to experience your feelings can improve your quality of life. It can increase your self-awareness, support emotional healing, help you build stronger relationships, and lower stress. When we push our emotions away, they often return later with even more intensity, like a boomerang.
Improve self-awareness
By noticing and feeling your emotions, you gain a clearer understanding of your inner world. This helps you recognize your needs, wants, and personal boundaries.
Foster emotional healing
Feeling your feelings can help you heal emotionally. When you pay attention to emotions you’ve pushed aside, you give yourself a chance to understand them. Approaching your feelings with gentle curiosity rather than judgment can create a healing experience, allowing you to reconnect with parts of yourself that have been hurt or overlooked.
Strengthen relationships
Understanding your own emotions lays the foundation for understanding others. This can help you communicate more effectively, express yourself more honestly, react less impulsively, and build more genuine and meaningful relationships with others and with yourself.
Reduce stress
Avoiding or suppressing your emotions can lead to burnout. While ignoring feelings might help temporarily, it increases stress when it becomes a pattern. The opposite is also true: staying connected to your emotions and taking mindful action can help reduce stress. For example, when you notice that you’re feeling sad, worried, scared, or lonely, and you reach out to a trusted friend, your stress level may decrease.
Below are some commonly asked questions from my clients about feelings:
"How can I feel my feelings?"
If you did not grow up in a home environment where emotions and feelings were openly talked about, it makes sense that you might have a harder time connecting with them. Start by noticing what you feel, name it, notice body sensations (e.g. tightness in the chest, tension in the jaw, quickened heart rate, or restless hands) associated with it, and with as little judgment as possible, let it be there. Finally, bring gentle curiosity to your feelings and ask yourself, "What is this feeling about?", "What is it telling me?", "Does it need anything?" You don't need to act on every feeling, but rather, try to understand it.
Important notes to remember:
Feelings are temporary and do subside.
People can feel more than one feeling at a time.
Feelings are like messages that tell us more about ourselves.
Feeling your feelings does not make you weak.
"Will feeling my feelings lead to rumination?"
If you are concerned that feeling your feelings, particularly the unpleasant ones, may lead to rumination, you're not alone. I have often heard clients share this same concern with me. However, what differentiates feeling feelings from rumination is the intention to move through the feeling with self-gentleness and not get stuck in a negative, self-critical loop. Rumination is repetitive, passive, and negative; whereas feeling your feelings with gentleness towards yourself is intentional and kind. Therefore, to avoid rumination when you feel your feelings, be kind to yourself and be kind with whatever thoughts and additional feelings that might come up in the process.
"What's the point of feeling my feelings? It won't fix anything."
Understandably, you may be cautious and somewhat doubtful about the idea of paying attention to your feelings. It is not a quick fix or a solution to your problems. However, the process of feeling your feelings involves slowing down and paying attention to your internal world with gentle curiosity, which brings about greater insight into yourself and helps with emotional regulation. By naming your feelings, you engage the rational part of your brain (prefrontal cortex) while calming intense emotions and turning overwhelming feelings into more manageable ones. So, although feeling your feelings may not immediately resolve your problems, it is a valuable skill that can help you through the difficult times.
I'm not connected to my feelings. Is there something wrong with me?
No, nothing is wrong with you if you find it difficult to connect with your feelings. Instead, it offers insight into how your childhood environment shaped you. Perhaps emotional expression, especially the negative ones, was not modelled or normalized. If you were shamed or criticized for expressing your feelings, it makes sense that disconnection feels safer. However, it does not have to stay this way. With time, patience, and intention, change is possible.
I offer therapy for adults online across BC, Canada, with in-person availability for those who prefer to meet face-to-face on Commercial Drive, Vancouver. If you would like to learn more about your emotions or how counselling can help in other areas of your life, please feel free to reach out.