Summary
Joe presents four tactical approaches for learning to feel your emotions. He begins by establishing that feelings are always present — there is never a waking moment without an emotional sensation — but we learn to cut them off when those emotions weren’t safe in childhood. Physical abuse victims may lose body awareness entirely, unable to distinguish a quarter from a key by touch. Since the emotional center of the brain drives all decision-making, this emotional numbness leads to unconscious choices driven by wanting to feel good, loved, or successful while avoiding failure, rejection, and shame.
The four methods are: (1) Learn to recognize emotions when they’re happening — through thought patterns (binary thinking signals fear), through others’ observations, or by periodically checking in with yourself. (2) Breathe deeply — muscles constrict to suppress feelings, and deep breathing loosens the jaw, chest, and belly where emotions are held. (3) Notice sensations in the body with curiosity and wonder, investigating them like a child examining a turtle, and letting them move. (4) Express emotions — the most important step. Joe shares his own story of being photographed while crying as a child, not crying for 14 years, then practicing fake crying in the woods for 2-3 months until real tears came. He also suggests the “actor technique” of pretending you’re performing an emotional scene to give your body permission to remember how to express.
Key Concepts
- There is never a waking moment without an emotional sensation
- We constrict muscles to suppress emotions — breathing reverses this
- The actor technique gives permission to express stuck emotions
- Binary thinking is a signal that fear is operating
Key Quotes
“There is no time when you’re awake when a feeling isn’t happening. You might not note it, you might not register it, but there is always an emotional sensation happening in your body at all times.”
“If you take a kid that was physically abused as an adult and you put a quarter in one hand and a key in the other hand — they often won’t be able to tell you which is which because they have learned how not to feel their body.”
“Almost every time that you’re overwhelmed, what’s actually happening is that you have an emotion that isn’t being felt.”
“I would go off into the woods and I would hike off trail far away from anybody and I would fake cry, and I did this for like two or three months until finally real tears came out.”
“By learning not to cry you’re basically learning how not to feel better.”
Transcript
I would go off into the woods and then I would hike off Trail far away from anybody and I would fake cry and I did this I think for like 2 or 3 months until finally real tears came out in this video we’re going to talk about how to feel your feelings my name is Joe Hudson I’m a former venture capitalist and now I coach some of the most notable names in Silicon valet before I go into the four tactical ways to feel your feelings I want to talk about feelings generally so first of all you’re always feeling a feeling there there is no time when you’re awake when a feeling isn’t happening you might not note it you might not register it but there is always an emotional sensation happening in your body at all times secondly we stop becoming aware of our emotions when those emotions have been scary to feel so if you take a kid that was physically abused as an adult and you put a quarter in one hand and a key in the other hand and you have them close it without telling them which is which they often won’t be able to tell you which is the quarter and which is the key because they have learned how not to feel their body because they were physically abused if your emotions weren’t safe if you were emotionally told it wasn’t okay to have an emotion or you were blamed or bribed or beat or made fun of for having emotions or just told to settle down settle down anything that told you it wasn’t safe to feel your feelings you’ve learned to cut them off so the problem with that is that the emotional center of our brain is what makes decisions so if we can’t be aware of our emotions we’re often making decisions in a very unconscious way the great way to think about that is how many times have you made a decision because you wanted to feel good or because you wanted to not feel like a loser or because you wanted to feel loved or you didn’t want to feel rejected or you wanted to feel like a success or you didn’t want to feel like a failure so here are the four tactical ways you can learn to feel your feelings the first one is learn how to recognize your emotions when they’re happening the second one is to breathe and learn how to breathe deeply the third one is to feel it in your body and the fourth one is to learn how to express your emotions without becoming overwhelmed by them okay let’s get into the first one so it’s learning to recognize your emotions so often times we have an emotion without recognizing it and I remember one of the ways that I learned this the first time was that I realized every time that my thinking was binary black or white good or bad buy the car or don’t buy the car I knew I was in fear and so I could recognize my fear not from my body but because of the way that my thoughts were going and that’s one way to learn how to recognize your emotional experience so anything you can do to learn how to recognize what you’re doing maybe it’s because your wife tells you oh you look upset or maybe you can recognize it by actions that you take or maybe you can just recognize it by every 2 3 hours stop and say what a what am I feeling right now and even if you can’t put a word to it like scared you can say oh I’m feeling like my tummy is excited or Zippy and I feel like my chest is constricted because the thing about emotions is that they all happen in the body so if you can just start labeling how you feel in your body you’re going to start being able to identify your emotions which leads us to the second way which is breathing when we breathe and particularly when we breathe deeply what we’re doing is relaxing our muscles and the thing about emotions is that they affect our muscles and the more constricted we are the less we’re feeling or the less we’re trying to feel so here’s a cool experiment I want you to stop feeling completely stop all feeling from your body and what you’ve noticed by now if you’ve really done it if you’ve really tried to stop feeling you’ll notice that your muscles are constricting right cuz our emotions are in our muscles they in our body and breathing opens those muscles up which allows the feelings to become more noticeable some particular muscles that we hold to not feel are the jaw muscles so we ar Chomp down on an emotion the chest which often makes us cave in our tummy is another one that will hold tight to not feel a feeling so if we can breathe and loosen those things up just right now you can loosen up your belly loosen up your jaw and you’ll notice the sensations in your body become more alive you can feel them more it’s just as easy as that so deep breathing helps you feel more now all of this accumulates to the third tactical way which is to notice the sensations in your body now there’s lots of ways to do it the one that we really like is called emotional inquiry and you can find it at the link below and what you’ll start noticing is that emotions have a particular sensation in the body there’s some great science on this even done with heat Maps where they’re showing the heat in bodies and how many people have similar heat Maps if they’re feeling the same way the more you can do that with a curiosity a sense of wonder like a little kid who’s like picking up a turtle the more you’re going to be able to feel it it’s not just putting your attention in your body here it’s about investigating and like finding out and digging around and then letting those Sensations move that’s something that really helps you learn how to feel your feelings and finally I think the most important thing about learning how to feel your feelings is to express them and this is going to feel really weird cuz there’s a lot of people out there who’ve been taught their whole life that being emotional is crap it’s not good it makes you weak or whatever the stories are and they’re all Bs right so having your emotions and being able to feel them not being controlled by them but being able to feel them and express them creates a tremendous amount of clarity and in fact almost every time that you’re overwhelmed what’s actually happening is that you have an emotion that isn’t being felt it’s not just that things are busy it’s because you go like and you’re holding and you’re tightening down not feeling an emotional experience instead of breathing in and actually allowing that emotion to move you could do it the way that I did which is somewhat ridiculous but let me tell you the story when I was a kid I was made fun of For Crying In fact sometimes my parents would take pictures of me and then one day when I was like 24 years old I was flipp through a photo album and boom there was a picture of me crying and I thought oh that’s probably why I haven’t cried in like 14 years so I took that photograph out I looked at it I put it on my desk to remind me that I needed to cry somehow I knew that that was really important and I still didn’t cry so then I thought oh I’m going to practice crying and so I would go off into the woods and then I would hike off Trail far away from anybody and I would fake cry and I did this I think for like two or 3 months until finally real tears came out and when I was finished I felt so much relief I felt so good and you can ask anybody that you know who cries easily how good they feel after tears it’s an amazing Discovery to feel that actually crying makes you feel better and by learning not to cry you’re basically learning how not to feel better another way to do it which I think is a great way to do it is to pretend you’re an actor whose job it is is to have a very convincing emotional scene an anger scene or a sadness scene or a scared scene and you are not the person you’re just the actor doing it so it’s very convincing but it’s not really you so it’s not personal and that’s a great way to allow your body to remember how to have that expression and once your body remembers it and it feels the relief and it finds out that sadness doesn’t last forever that anger doesn’t destroy everything and I’m never saying get angry at somebody else I’m just saying get angry in the privacy of a room where nobody’s getting hurt or that fear doesn’t make you incapable and makes you more capable when you really feel it when you find those things out when your body feels those things then the emotions become more and more fluid with all that said I want to let you know how critical emotions are so we do a lot of courses some are 8 weeks some are 5 weeks in almost all of them there is some emotional expression that happens and I watch watch lives change every day because of that I get to see people open up and feel relief that they haven’t for years and stop beating themselves up as much all because they’ve allowed an emotion to move so that they can get back to homeostasis so they can get back to calm so if you got into this part in the video I guarantee there’s something in you that knows that emotions need to move and I highly recommend it if you like the video please hit subscribe if you want us to make certain content let us know in the notes below and if you want to watch the next video it’s a good one