The Skill I 10 Out of 10 Recommend Developing

I'm sharing my favorite skills and tips for increasing a sense of calm and regulation! Regulation to me is generally feeling peaceful, present, calm, and creative as I go through life.

In 2019 I felt like I had a pretty good handle on life.

I’d created a kind internal world for myself, a helpful business, and integrated a bunch of coaching tools that meant life kept getting better.

And I had this nagging sense that I was missing something.

I was right!

Slowly and with a fair amount of difficulty, I’ve gotten the general landscape of what I didn’t know. Turns out it was a lot.

There’s an emotional system that we naturally possess that I’d been taught to override and ignore for most of my life.

Getting this system back in alignment and learning how to work with it has brought about some incredible changes in my life.

I went from a mental sense of well-being where my thoughts reigned supreme to an embodied state of well-being.

I wasn’t trying to look on the bright side or convince myself that I felt well. I actually felt well as I more compassionately worked through a range of experiences and emotional reactions.

My sleep, eating habits, and capacity for being present all improved.

There are still ups and downs in life, and I don’t feel well all the time. But I’m more skilled at knowing how to care for myself when I’m going through something difficult or having a tough time.

Here are a few of the highlights of what I now understand about feelings.

1. Feelings Are an Incredibly Helpful Part of Our Navigational System

Feelings are information. They instruct me on what’s most needed so that I can better care for myself.

When I’m feeling angry, it usually means I need to set a boundary. When I’m feeling sad, I usually need to sit with and acknowledge a loss. When I’m feeling scared, I usually need to take an action to either move through the fear or to help me feel safer. When I’m feeling happy, I usually need to enjoy the feeling without holding onto it. And when I’m feeling tired, I usually need to rest.

When I relied on a cognitive understanding of my state alone, I often missed these signals or actively worked against them, pushing away my feelings, which meant I got into less balanced psychological places.

2. There Needs to Be Safety to Feel Feelings

When we're in environments where it isn’t safe to feel our feelings or other people are actively trying to suppress what we feel, we put our feelings in a metaphorical storage unit to be dealt with when we do feel safe. It’s an amazingly handy survival mechanism!

And much like a real-life storage unit, there is a cost to keeping a bunch of our feelings in storage. It uses our resources. This depletion can feel normal because we get so used to it, but we aren’t meant to live this way all the time.

When we finally do reach a place in life where we’re feeling, it can be surprising to have all these feelings start to show up.

My meditation teacher describes it as going through life holding beach balls under water. And when we finally sit still or make room for our feelings in a safe space, our emotions pop up.

Your first instinct might be that something has gone wrong, but actually something is going right. You're feeling safe and that's why you're feeling your feelings.

We need to have both internal safety, where we are kind and compassionate with our feelings, and external safety, where the environment we’re in is supportive, for our feelings to work through.

As more historic feelings get acknowledged and work through our system lightens up and we have more bandwidth for the rest of life. It’s sort of like holding your breath without realizing you’re doing it and then getting the experience of breathing deeply.

3. Feelings Are Meant to Be Experienced and Processed in the Body (with Compassion!)

In their natural form, feelings are like summer rain showers. They are meant to blow in, be experienced, and then pass through.

There are sensations associated with feelings, sort of like how you have a sensation when you stub your toe. But if you welcome that sensation it passes, just like the pain of a stubbed toe passes. We can't think our way through feelings. We have to process them by allowing the experience to be in (and blow through) our body.

When feelings are processed as they’re occurring, they don’t build up as much. The system gives clearer signals about what’s going on because it’s reacting more to the present moment than to historical things.

4. Outsized Reactions Usually Point to Old, Unprocessed Feelings

When we experience things that we don’t have the capacity to deal with and they get metaphorically stored, it is like living with an unhealed bruise. When something pokes that bruise, you’d feel a bigger reaction to the touch than to an unbruised part of your body.

So, when you notice a big reaction to something that doesn’t warrant that much of a reaction, it probably means there are some feelings in your storage unit that need to be processed.

A therapist can help you to work through the feelings (aka trauma) that have been stored in your body.

Being able to distinguish between the past and the reality of the present is a huge and helpful piece of clarity because it means you’re able to respond more appropriately to what’s in front of you.

5. Coping Mechanisms Are Just Poor Substitutes for Kindness and Safety

When we’re in unsafe environments and don’t have the skills to process our emotions as they come up, we turn to all sorts of coping mechanisms to deal with the discomfort of our experience. Understandably! We’re doing the best we can with the tools at our disposal.

Coping mechanisms help us make it through that difficult time, but ultimately wind up causing us other problems, because they aren’t addressing the actual emotional experience that we’re having.

We can get habituated to our coping mechanisms, but as we gain more tools and skills I’ve found there is a positive, reinforcing loop of moving away from those earlier coping habits because dealing with emotions feels way better and comes without any negative repercussions.

6. Being Seen and Supported in Your Emotional Experience Is Amazing! (And Being Ignored or Invalidated Sucks)

When the people around you can hear and understand what you’re feeling, it feels really good.

More and more I put myself into what I call high connection environments, where supportively relating to one another’s emotional experience is normed. These environments are like supports to my mental health.

It’s strengthening to have people validate and empathize with what we’re going through without trying to fix anything.

The opposite is also true. Environments that only accept certain emotions or regularly dismiss your experience are harmful to mental health.

Relationships in which feelings aren’t handled with care are problematic because they are essentially saying that your needs don’t matter, since feelings are representations of our needs.

Your needs and feelings do matter!

7. You Have More Resources Than You Likely Realize

While other people can be super helpful to our emotionally processing, one really cool thing about being an adult is that we can provide a lot of emotional support internally.

Even when we receive external support, it’s actually our inner landscape and skill at being with our feelings that affects our life the most, since we’re with ourselves all the time.

If you’ve been waiting for that perfect understanding presence or for some extrernal event to resolve your emotional state, you’re missing out on some of the benefits of being an adult.

When we’re children we don’t have the skill to process our own emotions, and we genuinely do rely on other people to help us. These parts of ourselves can tell the hopeful story that someone else can rescue us from our pain. But being witness to our own experience (with compassion) once we’re adults is accessible, far more reliable than an external source, and ultimately what’s needed.

It just takes some iteration to update those young, hopeful parts of ourselves that we’re an adult now. And it also takes some practice at being a compassionate, accepting witness to whatever emotions are arising within us. (Re-sharing my favorite resource for learning how to do this below. Therapy is a great place to learn and be supported in developing these skills too.)


One of the most impactful things I read about feelings is that kids can’t name when emotional safety isn’t present. They just feel bad, but they don’t understand why. That was my experience.

Integrating more of my emotional system, aka feeling my feelings, has been a big boost to my mental health and overall well-being. It’s like it’s more comfortable and calm being in my own system.

I’m more aware and able to address when something is problematic when I’m tuned into my emotional reactions. I ten out of ten recommend getting better at this life skill!

Here's my Go-To Resource for Processing Emotions: Soften, Soothe, and Allow Self Compassion Meditation by Dr. Kristin Neff