Why you can’t Afford to Ignore your Feelings

By: Camden Baucke, MS, LLP

Emotions aren’t just noise in the back of your mind, they’re important messengers.

Thoughts are important, but I’m strictly talking about feelings. It’s the intuitive data that tells you what matters, what’s working, and what might need more attention in your life. In spite of how vital they are, many ignore emotions and interpret them as nuisances rather than signals worth listening to. These folks might think they have to “be rational” and live strictly by emotion-free logic.

But feelings are not opposed to thoughts, they’re woven together in a complex tapestry. The issue is that if you only accept thoughts, and not emotions, you’re limiting yourself. Whether we like it or not, emotion plays a role in every judgment we make, every relationship we navigate, and every step we take. If you ignore your emotions, you’re not just flying blind, you’re bound for resentment, outbursts, and more.

What Feelings do you Ignore?

Positive emotions are rarely suppressed. Hopeless expectations might dampen excitement or happiness, but those emotions are usually accepted with ease.

Negative emotions are typically the hardest to accept. Feelings like grief, shame, anger, fear, and jealousy are all commonly suppressed. Either inconvenient or embarrassing, you might be more reluctant to accept these emotions, much less share or express them. Depression and anxiety are the culmination of negative emotions, and there’s even stronger consequences for not processing them.

But why ignore negative emotions? Why purposefully neglect yourself?

The Belief you shouldn’t feel Bad

If a negative emotion isn’t “supposed” to be present, you can avoid it to pretend that it isn’t.

The rule that you’re not supposed to feel negative emotions resembles a belief. It’s an assertion that if you feel negative things you’re already deserving of consequences. You might believe feeling bad is a sign of weakness, that it portrays you in a negative light. Negative emotions might feel like failure, illuminating your rotten nature to anyone who would judge or abandon you for it. but this is just a belief, not truth.

The truth is that negative emotions play a vital role in protecting your body and mind.

If you’re anxious because of a wild dog chasing you, good! Your body is pumping more blood and nutrients to your muscles to help you fight or escape. If you’re feeling grief after losing a friend, that’s natural! If you love someone, the pain of their leaving is the cost of connecting with them. If your sibling punches you in the face, then you’ll feel angry, who wouldn’t! That anger spurs you to protect yourself or hold them accountable. Depending on context, negative emotions are incredibly important in helping you navigate hardship.

However, what happens when you can’t act on your feelings?

Feeling emotions is not the same as enacting a behavior out of them. Just because you get a message from your brain doesn’t mean you have to react to it. Feeling irritated is not retaliation, feeling sad is not surrender, and feeling anxious is not cowardice. Receiving a message is not the same as a behavior.

If you believe these are one and the same, it makes sense that you would ignore how you feel.

Blocking the Process of Feeling

The natural process of feeling emotions is a flow.

You experience life with your senses and perception. That information goes to your brain, which then forms thoughts and emotions. Thoughts are not always true. You can debate thoughts, but emotions stick around until they are processed and felt.

However, this process can be blocked by a belief that you shouldn’t feel what you feel.

If you don’t believe you should feel bad, because it would make you whiny, dramatic, weak, or whinging, then you neglect yourself. Even worse, you will likely feel alarmed that you feel bad. You may ignore these negative emotions and hide them in the back of your consciousness. The problem is that if you recognize your nervousness, you will feel more anxious, which will spiral you into further anxiety.

You can’t manage emotions if you deny that they exist. They will exist regardless of your beliefs, and they will accumulate. If you don’t acknowledge and accept them, they cannot be processed or felt, and will not dissipate. Instead, you will build up whole hosts of negative emotions until it degrades your quality of life.

The Consequences of Ignoring your Feelings

Ignoring your feelings comes at an accumulative cost.

It starts small, but it can build up into resentment towards yourself, your friends, family, your job, and more. It can build up to social avoidance, isolating yourself because you think you shouldn’t feel the mass of emotions accumulating in the back of your mind.

While feelings can be avoided, don’t think they’re not observable.

Anxiety avoidance can be seen in tightness of the jaw and shoulders and a reactive startle response. it’s seen in posture, vocal habits, and routine. You might believe you’re avoiding your anxiety, but it can slowly affect every aspect of your life, visible to the outside world.

There is a point at which your emotions can no longer be ignored, when there is no more room to bottle your emotions. The bottle can burst and so can you.

Your accumulation of irritations may burst in a spiteful rage, and avoided anxieties might burst in a panic attack. The burst might be less loud, but ignored grief can plummet you into depression. Negative emotions are not meant to be processed when you store them at max capacity.

In other words, it’s best to manage emotions when they happen.

How to Feel Your Feelings

Step #1 – Feeling is an Experience, not a Performance

• If you believe that acknowledging emotions is a failure of performance, then you will block yourself from ever starting the process of managing them.
• Feelings are signals from within your brain and body. It doesn’t matter what you think of them or what they mean about you, they are meant to be listened to and be experienced.

Step #2 – Accept Negative Emotions

• Negative emotions can be just as important as positive ones. If you ignore them, you neglect yourself.
• You don’t have to act on negative emotions, or validate inaccurate and negative thoughts, but you need to accept that you feel bad.
• If you accept that you feel negative emotions, you can then manage them.

Step #3 – Identify, Feel, and Express your Emotions

• Emotions have specific names, and voicing them accordingly helps you process exactly what you feel.
• You don’t have to voice them to the world, start with a journal, a close friend, partner, or parent.
• Sharing your emotions is the healthiest option, much more so than avoiding them or purely acting out of them.
• Negative emotions create pressure, and they often just need a pressure valve in the form of expression.
• When you express emotions, let them wash over you. You can control yourself, but don’t be afraid of viscerally experiencing what it is that’s hurting you.

Step #4 – Take Care of Yourself

• Do whatever it is you need to manage the left-over sensations from negative emotions.
• If you’re still feeling jittery, grab a blanket and a warm drink, and do some diaphragmatic breathing.
• If you’re still feeling down, go out and get something to eat or spend time with a friend playing a game.
• If you’re still physically tense, go exercise and work out the rest of your frustration.

Step #5 – Address the Sources of the Negative Emotions

• Find the thoughts or circumstances connected to your negative feelings. What made you feel bad?
• This is when you try to prevent experiencing more of those negative feelings in the future. Not because they’re bad, but because they’re painful to feel.

Step #6 – Go on with your Day

• Emotions, if accepted, felt, and processed, will dissipate and allow you to live the rest of your day.