Mental Health

How to embrace your feelings

We explore why it’s important to allow yourself to feel the full range of your emotions, including grief and sadness

Following the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, we are all feeling a collective sense of loss and sadness. But in times of grief, it’s ever more important to embrace your feelings and be kind toward ourselves and each other.

Each of us has responded in our own way to the sad news of the Queen’s death, but her constant presence as our nation’s matriarch over the last 70 years is something that we all share.

It’s normal and valid to feel emotional about her passing, even though she wasn’t known to most of us personally; it is a significant moment in which we are reminded that we are all human.

Whether this sad news has led to the resurfacing of grief and loss within your own family, or a feeling of flatness and uncertainty in relation to explaining the news to your family, heavy emotions can cause us to feel imbalanced, off kilter and even ashamed.

It can often feel like our body is attempting to hold in or reject an emotion that is threatening to spill over at any moment. But what if, rather than taping it down, we released it?

Increasingly, research shows that leaning into our emotions can be good for our health and that keeping them under lock and key can actually worsen the negative ones, such as anger, upset and pain.

Realising the power of emotions can stop us shying away from them and allow us a more peaceful, happier existence.

Open up the floodgates

Phrases such as ‘get a grip’ or ‘stop feeling sorry for yourself’ are familiar to most of us, whether someone has spoken them to us or we’ve told ourselves them. But this type of language cultivates a fear around certain emotions such as grief, anger and sadness.

“Grief hurts and anger can be scary – we’re wired to avoid any kind of pain, so of course we prefer not to feel difficult emotions,” says Tina Gilbertson, psychotherapist and the author of Constructive Wallowing: How to Beat Bad Feelings By Letting Yourself Have Them.

“However, that often means lying to ourselves and suppressing our true feelings. Research has found that trying to squelch or ignore them has a negative impact on our bodies, especially the cardiovascular system. It can also lead to a sense of emptiness or even depression.”

According to a study from the journal Emotion, those of us who have a high range of emotional diversity (people who experience an abundance of both positive and negative emotions) are proven to have less inflammation in our bodies than people who report a smaller range of emotional diversity.

Researchers within the study suggested that people may be able to maximise these benefits more closely by understanding what makes them feel a certain way. “It’s hard to suppress emotions selectively, so when you’re trying not to feel sad, it’s tough to feel really happy,” says Tina.

Constructive kindness

Many assume that being open to experiencing sadness is indulging a negative feeling, but as Tina says, reframing the definition of ‘wallowing’ can be deeply cathartic. “True wallowing is not only an act of self-care, but deeply compassionate,” says Tina.

“When you allow yourself to feel bad, you’re saying to yourself ‘I see you in your pain. I accept you and I’m with you’. Compare that with the kinds of things we commonly say to ourselves such as, ‘what’s wrong with you?’ or ‘get over it already’.

Compassion helps us feel better, while criticism adds a layer of suffering to the pain we’re already in. Rather than telling yourself to get over something, use kinder, softer words to articulate your emotion and pain such as ‘I am human’ – simple words of comfort can make all the difference sometimes.

Lean into difficult feelings

“It takes courage to move toward emotional pain instead of away from it,” explains Tina. “Embracing painful feelings won’t make them worse, and once you really get that, it’s easier to commit.

All you have to do is remind yourself it’s okay to experience all feelings. If you find you’re trying to talk yourself out of an emotion, stop and tell yourself: it’s okay to feel what I feel.

Then, go ahead and let yourself experience the feeling. Name it if you can. There’s just one caveat: remember that emotions are separate from behaviour; just because you let yourself feel something, doesn’t mean you have to act on it. All feelings are safe, but behaviour can lead us down a different path.