Learn Feelings Fluency to Build Resilience
- Dr Em Wong
- 3 days ago
- 11 min read
Ageing wisely requires us to build resilience, which in turn depends on being able to read and trust our body’s signals, while also understanding how to best respond. Tuning in to the language of mind-body communication facilitates brain health, because it provides data for tracking responses to lifestyle choices. Our ability to perceive the body’s signals (and to translate them into words and numbers) gives us a secret superpower that I like to call feelings fluency.
Interoception (or body awareness) is also known as our secret sense, because it operates below the level of our consciousness. Building interoceptive capacity and feelings fluency strengthens our stress resilience and boosts brain health in countless ways. Whatever your innate capacity for interoception may be, it will most definitely improve through the simple practice of paying attention.
Connecting with our bodily needs
At the biological level, interoception refers to our sense of what is going on inside (aka: what we are feeling). The brain is known to field millions of sensory input signals every minute. Most will feed into the sophisticated machinery of the brain’s autonomic nervous system, which dynamically maintains optimal internal conditions for critical body functions through a process known as homeostasis. The brain and body’s innate intelligence acts invisibly and autonomously to keep parameters such as oxygen, glucose, fluid, electrolytes, pH, and body temperature in balance.
The body’s innate intelligence is also responsible for predicting threats. preparing defensive responses, and mobilizing the immune system to heal and protect. Allostasis refers to our ability to adapt homeostatic parameters in response to changes in the environment. For example, our autopilot settings for red blood cell count levels are raised to accommodate lower oxygen levels when we are in high altitudes.
Feelings generated by bodily needs that require attention, like fatigue or hunger, are known as affective signals. These signals trigger us to take action, like drinking when thirsty, scratching an itch, or going to the toilet. Affective signals start out as whispers that we often try to ignore because they aren't “convenient” (like when you have the urge to pee while driving on the freeway). But we know from experience that we’d better figure out where the next rest stop is, because those signals will definitely escalate in both urgency and intensity.
Sometimes we’re confused by what the body is trying to tell us. How many times have you felt the urge to have a cookie? You knew you couldn’t be hungry, because you just finished eating your lunch. Turns out that urge you have to eat a sugary snack likely comes from being dehydrated or stressed. Or it could be part of a habit loop signalling that your body’s used to getting a cookie after lunch.
Connecting with emotional needs
Our experience of emotions emerges from a cocktail of neurochemicals that are triggered in response to either external or internal stimuli, or a combination of both. For example, one of the most commonly cited fears is public speaking or glossophobia (anxiety may arise from the circumstance of being in the spotlight), but it’s also rooted in fear of judgment and embarrassment.
The neuroscience behind how emotions are generated continues to be debated. What’s clear is that the process starts beneath the level of conscious awareness. The brain is constantly receiving and integrating information from our senses and past experiences, and making predictions about how to respond rapidly. That’s how we’re able to instinctively jump out of the way of an oncoming bus - we’re only aware of the danger after the fact, when we feel our pulse and breathing quicken.
When I saw my son again after being separated for over a year, I surprised myself by spontaneously bursting into tears and sobbing uncontrollably. I was startled by the intensity of my own reaction in that moment. The jumble of feelings (joy, grief, longing, relief) hit me all at once. And it wasn’t until later that I became aware of how much I had missed not being able to see and hug him.
Feelings fluency is about reconnecting with the body’s physiological signals so that we are more aware of what’s going on. Emotions can seem scary because our experience feels immersive and confusing, coming on rapidly with no apparent warning. Learning to translate our feelings into words and numbers helps the brain figure out how to respond. With practice we can get better at detecting early warning alerts, giving us more bandwidth to choose how to respond.
Emotions are essentially neurochemical signals that create transient physiological responses in the body. These naturally last no more than 1-2 minutes. But our experience of feelings can last much longer, a phenomenon known as emotional inertia. Feelings that are persistent and intrusive are believed to perpetuate through activation of brain network activity. But we can learn to interrupt the cycle of emotional inertia by shifting our mindset or unhelpful thinking habits (like inner judgment or recurrent worry).
For example, when Nellie was getting ready to give her presentation at work, she could feel her heart racing and a knot in her stomach, which she experienced as anxiety and dread. She tried to bury those feelings, resisting the urge to run away or shrink and hide. Her inner critic kept telling her that the audience would be critical or bored by her. As a result, even though she was well-prepared, Nellie came across as nervous and uncertain. Even though she got some good feedback afterwards, her inner critic kept reminding her of a minor error in her slide deck.
Her co-worker Ellie was feeling palpitations, butterflies in her stomach, and dampness in her armpits. But Ellie had become familiar with these sensations and experienced them as signals alerting her to the nervous energy in her body. She’d learned that they could be a little uncomfortable, but it helped her to think of them as being her body’s way of preparing her to handle and learn from a challenging situation. Because Ellie felt empowered and confident, she was able to channel that burst of energy into excitement to project her enthusiasm into her speech.
Tools for building feelings fluency
In order to understand how feelings fluency can be helpful for brain health, let’s consider Shari’s story. Shari made a New Year’s resolution to commit to brain health by exercising more, so she signed up for a local gym membership. She went regularly for a couple of months, missed two weeks when work got busy, and soon quit exercising altogether.
Shari felt disappointed and frustrated, blaming herself for always failing to follow through on self-care. Even with the best of intentions, she just couldn’t seem to stick with her new health habits consistently.
Like many of us, Shari was in the habit of believing something was wrong with her when things didn’t work out. She was also in the habit of putting other people’s needs ahead of her own. She was proud of being someone who always kept her promises to everyone (her boss, co-workers, kids, sister, parents, neighbors, and so on). But when it came to keeping promises to herself, it was easier to brush them off, telling herself that they didn’t matter.
Shari’s neighbor Maria had joined the gym in January too, and when Shari ran into Maria at a school function in June, she saw that Maria was looking great. Maria mentioned that she hadn’t seen Shari at the gym, asking if she was still a member. Shari was embarrassed to admit that she had quit going and was feeling guilty that she was still locked into paying for the membership.
Maria mentioned that she’d come across some brain health coaching tools that were helping her to maintain her new habits and shared them with Shari to check out. Shari knew Maria had also been motivated to exercise because there was a history of dementia in the family, so she was motivated to learn what she could from Maria’s success.
Shari noticed some similarities between the tools shared by Maria and those used by her son David’s elementary school to teach kids about emotional literacy. The school program was designed to help kids build skills to recognize and meet their own emotional needs, while also learning when to ask for help. The kids in David’s class were being taught how to be smarter about feelings and dealing with stressful situations.
Shari had been impressed with the results of David’s program and saw that the self-coaching tools from Maria were an adult DIY version. Key objectives were learning to handle emotions, hone interoceptive skills, and create more balanced self-talk.
Check the Score
We think of numbers as representing objective data, like our blood pressure or temperature. But it turns out that they can also be used to describe the subjective experience of what we’re feeling.
Consider the pain scale, one of the simplest and most widely used tools in medicine. If you’ve ever been in an emergency room or hospital before, you’re likely familiar with the question, “Could you rate your pain on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is no pain at all, and 10 is the worst pain you’ve ever experienced?”
People often struggle to give an answer at first, so it can help to offer them multiple choice: “Is it a 2, 5 or 8 out of 10?” The point is not to come up with an objective measure, since pain is inherently individual and subjective. Instead, the pain scale represents a simple tool to help the patient communicate how they’re feeling. It serves as a useful point of reference for progress. Each time the patient comes up with an answer, they’re getting their mind and body to calibrate and compare, so they can decide if things are getting better or worse.
The concept of the pain scale can be applied to almost any other feeling. For example, I like to use it as a measure of energy level, where 0 is “I can’t get out of bed,” and 10 is “I feel amazing and could tackle anything!” This measure tends to be very helpful for people who are working on sleep. When they track energy levels throughout the day, they may learn that they are especially tired after meals, or wide awake at night. Such metrics can be invaluable for tracking progress in experiential learning, like when cutting back on caffeine or alcohol.
The pain scale can even be used to assess our satisfaction level with brain health habits, or our desire and motivation to change those habits (see Fig 3). For example, Shari could ask herself how satisfied she felt with her exercise habit on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is extremely satisfied and 0 is extremely dissatisfied. Her satisfaction score represents a key data point that summarizes her overall feelings about the situation. Shari had never even thought about asking herself this kind of question before. She had no idea that she would score a 2-3 out of 10 satisfaction with exercise.
Using Our Words
While numbers give us a quantifiable measure of how we’re feeling, words are even more powerful in conveying the shape and intensity of feelings. Young children these days are taught to communicate big feelings by using their words. Rather than giving into the impulse to yell or act out on their feelings, David and his classmates were taught that such behaviors were disruptive and tended to make things worse. Instead, they were offered other ways for understanding and expressing their feelings. They learned that putting their feelings into words helped themselves and others to understand their needs.
Shari had grown up in a generation that was taught completely different habits for responding to feelings. For better or worse, Shari had learned to control her feelings by suppressing or avoiding them. We suppress feelings by compartmentalizing (pushing them aside and locking them away), so that they don’t distract us from the work at hand. We avoid feelings through distraction, diverting our attention to things like food, beverages, gaming, and mobile devices.
Suppression and avoidance can be helpful in the short term, allowing us to side-step painful or uncomfortable feelings. We think we need to get on with whatever needs to be done urgently. But research has consistently shown that those feelings persist, and that the cognitive effort required to continue suppressing or avoiding is measurable in physiological terms. Emotional suppression has been shown to negatively impact blood pressure, heart disease, stress, and inflammatory biomarkers. Stress can also show up in myriad other ways in the body, from heartburn to headaches to eczema.
Like many of us, Shari usually avoided talking about feelings. She believed that feelings were weak and that talking about them was just “bitching and moaning” that burdened other people. But she could see that when David made a choice to use his words instead of yelling when he was angry, it wasn’t weak at all. She began to see that we have to be strong and brave to talk about feelings, because we need to be willing to be vulnerable and trust others.
David’s dad was definitely skeptical about “all this touchy feely stuff,” but Shari could see what a difference it was making for David. Understanding his own feelings and feeling safe to express them made him so much less anxious and more open. She wanted to learn more about the tools herself, so she could understand how to support David better.
Shari decided that she would try out the Feel&Reveal tools for identifying feelings (see Fig 5). As she thought about her exercise and gym situation, Shari circled the sensations “tight,” “dark,” “stuck,” and “heavy.” She then drew in Xs in her upper back and neck area, to indicate where she could feel these sensations. For the Name&Claim tool, she circled “sad,” “frustrated” and “guilty.”
Shari found it interesting that the discomfort from the tight and heavy feelings were already getting less intense, even in the 1-2 minutes that it took her to complete these exercises. When we process these sensations by translating them into words, we’re acknowledging and validating our own emotional needs, which gives our bodies a way to release the energy that emotions create.
David’s class had learned that writing is not the only safe way to express or process emotional energy. We can also choose to talk to someone, get a hug, take a walk, spend time with nature, move our bodies, or engage in “blowing out the birthday candles” breathing. These approaches can be helpful for reducing the intensity of our feelings until we are ready to work on identifying solutions.
Writing down our words is so helpful because it slows things down and turns the invisible experience of feelings into visible words. By pausing to figure out how to describe what I’m feeling, where I’m feeling it, and how exactly it feels, I’m shifting myself out from the muddy discomfort of physiological sensations. I get the sense that the words are helping me to pull myself out on dry land where I can see all the feelings, emotions, sensations, and thoughts laid out more clearly. And in a sense, words do shift us into the prefrontal cortex (PFC) where we can make better decisions about what to do.
Feelings fluency requires us to build new habits of responding to our body’s emotional signals. We can get in the habit of tuning into the whispers of interoceptive signals early on, rather than waiting until they’ve swept us off balance. We can also recognize when our stress response habits are unhelpful, like when Nellie’s inner critic was layering on additional stress for her.
Breaking our old automatic habit loops creates new neural connections that represent a more empowered approach to tackling challenging situations. Rather than allowing ourselves to feel the flood of overwhelming feelings, we have the ability to create a sanctuary inside our mind. And when we can focus the mind on being curious about what is happening and finding words to describe it, we build stress resilience and grow our capacity to handle stress.
Dr Em coaching tips
Download the habit worksheet (here).
Which of your brain health habits would yield the biggest impact, if you were to start working on it right now? What is your level of satisfaction with that habit? Does your response surprise you?
How do you feel about that habit and your situation? Write down any thoughts that come to mind. Notice any judgment and keep writing anyway.
Do the Feel&Reveal and Name&Claim parts of the worksheet. (Set a 2-minute timer for yourself). What do you notice about those bodily sensations at the end of the 2 minutes?
Comments