Your Feelings Aren't As Important As You Think They Are.

I'm probably going to get heat for this from the counselling circles, but I don't care. I will tell you why you should not put too much stock into your feelings: it's because feelings are actually deceptive.

Yes, we all "feel". We feel physical things like cold and heat, we can feel sick, and we we can feel emotional things like happiness or stress. Some amputees can even feel phantom limbs. For someone to say that they "feel" a certain way is a valid point. For that person, at that precise moment in time, and in that precise context, they are "feeling" a certain way. But is this feeling even accurate?

The concept of feelings are complicated, which is why most people have difficulty expressing them, or even further explaining them so that others can understand them. For example, how is it that we can send lunar rovers to Mars, but we can't universally define the feeling of "love". Also, love is associated with very strong and intense feelings, but why does it change over time, or dissipate altogether? The interesting thing about feelings is that they are hard to define. Each person will feel something different than someone else, giving a true operational definition and measurement to feelings a difficult task. Also, feelings are somewhat time dependent. For example, you may have noticed that you feel differently about things over time - getting a G.I. Joe toy for your 10th birthday feels different than if you got one in middle age.

Feelings are actually chemical signals. But, the issue is a decoding problem. Note: I am not a neuroscientist or an expert in this field, but I'm compiling some recent evidence in the science of feelings. Think of the phantom limb - say, a foot that is no longer attached to a body, but the owner of that body can feel that limb as if it was still attached. The nerves (neurons) that carry signals (hormones and other chemical messengers) tell the brain (the body's control centre) that the foot is still there. But the brain knows it's not there, so how does this happen? It's an illusion. The brain is getting messages from the "foot" along the message highway of nerves, and it is interpreting those messages and decoding them as meaning the foot is sending them. The brain can sometimes decode messages incorrectly, or come up with an outcome that seems likely based on past experience. For example, the same feeling (i.e. signal in the brain) is associated with hunger and fight or flight, but your brain interprets it as one or the other - if you were hungry and about to eat, you wouldn't bolt from the table in absolute panic as if a lion was chasing you, but you would eat a meal. It seems like a more relevant conclusion to that feeling according to the context, and your brain decodes it that way. But how does this apply to feelings of emotion: the same coding and decoding system applies. Feelings (emotions) are just neurotransmitters arriving to the brain, which are then decoded. For example, love is predominantly the neurotransmitter oxytocin. When you flood the brain with oxytocin it can create the feeling of love, connection, and closeness. Likewise, anxiety and depression are noted by lower levels of both dopamine and serotonin in the brain - add more of these and the person feels more relaxed and happy. Feelings are brain chemicals. But, our brain does not always decode them properly. Your brain interprets the chemical message in the specific context. But, there is always a margin of error.

When you try to figure out what you are feeling, it is a guess at best. This is why feelings should not matter so much in our day to day lives - they can be inaccurate and misleading. And at the end of the day, great, so you have labelled a "feeling" based upon a perhaps, or perhaps not, properly decoded chemical signal in your brain. What does that do for you, or what does that mean for your life? Certain feelings are biologically important - like hunger or thirst, or exhaustion (you don't want to die of starvation, dehydration, or heat stroke). But emotional feelings may be less relevant overall. Ok, so you identified that you have stress, now what do you do about it? That seems the more relevant topic - is what to do about feelings that we perceive. From a research perspective, science is only beginning to understand the study of feelings. For generations of therapies that involved talking about feelings, it seems silly that so much emphasis has been placed on analyzing or discussing how we feel, when so little is understood about emotions, and emotions are highly unique to each person and are situation and time specific.

If you feel hungry, the action is to eat. If you feel tired, the action is to rest. The action part - the what do we do with how we're feeling - is more relevant than the "what" of what we are feeling. I don't think counsellors should ask you right off the hop how are you feeling, or how does that make you feel - to me, the answer is rather arbitrary for two reasons: first, you know if something makes you feel good or bad, and if it makes you feel bad, you know that something has to change. If things were good, the person probably wouldn't be seeking the help of a counsellor. Secondly, understanding how something makes you feel does not change the outcome of you feeling that way, or what caused you to feel that way. It's like pondering all day over why you are feeling hungry, but not actually eating to resolve the issue.

The other issue with feelings, other than them being completely subjective, is that they are not permanent. For example, feelings can fluctuate throughout a day. You can cycle from content, to happy, to worried, to angry, to sad, all in the same day, and maybe all within the same hour. They are highly fluid and situational. They even change over time. If you've ever been through a break up, I'm sure it felt devastating at first, and you experienced a wide range of emotions. But, they didn't last long did they? You don't feel the same way about your break up five years later, as you did five days after it occurred.

So given that feelings are hard to describe, are highly context dependent, are fluid and typically change over time, and may or may not be decoded properly by the brain, why are they clinically relevant? I personally believe that they are not. I think it would be okay to check in with a persons mental state by asking about their emotions, but beyond that, feelings should not be explored further. The main things to consider about feelings that make them relevant are what caused them, and what your'e going to do about them.

There's a saying that I love, and I think it's even on t-shirts: "fuck your feelings, no one cares". This is true to a large extent. But, the main reason I love this saying is that it prompts action, and it highlights that at the end of the day no one cares as much about your feelings as you do - each person is walking around with their own life, issues, and feelings going on. In fact, people are quite self-centred, but that is a different topic. The action part is once you realize that 1) no one cares as much as you as to how you're feeling, and 2) once you realize that you cannot control what other people do, but only your own actions, it forces you to think of how you are going to handle negative feelings you're experiencing. Are you going to take action, simply do nothing about it, or ruminate in the thoughts behind the feelings all day making yourself feel worse? If you're feeling down, what are you going to do to get yourself back up? Because, no one can change your own feelings but you - just like no one can make you feel a certain way but you. I'm not saying that sometimes chemical intervention is not necessary, as some people do require medication due to a neurotransmitter or hormone imbalance, but even with medications, talk therapy is always advised. And with talk therapy the outcome is always the same - what are you going to do differently to bring about a change. You can't change what happened, and you can't change other people, so the onus is on you to make a change in something in order to bring about different feelings. The negative feeling you experience should prompt action in order to bring about a positive feeling - feelings are useful in the context that they prompt change, but you should not dwell in the actual feeling too long.