Ep 53: The Difference Between an Emotion and a Feeling
Last week, I shared what to do when you're in the middle of a difficult emotional experience. This week, I want to go deeper into something that often gets misunderstood: the difference between emotions and feelings.
Most of us use those words interchangeably, but they're not actually the same thing.
In this episode, I break down how emotions are automatic physiological responses that happen in the body before we have time to think, while feelings are the stories and interpretations we create around those emotional experiences. I share examples from my own life, including my years as an attorney, and how childhood experiences still show up in my dating life today.
We'll explore why understanding this distinction can be so powerful on your healing journey, how trauma influences the way we interpret emotional data, and why learning to separate the emotion from the story can create more freedom, self-awareness, and choice in your life.
If you've ever wondered why certain situations trigger such strong reactions or why you sometimes feel stuck in patterns that don't seem logical, this episode is for you.
Chapters
(00:00) - Understanding Emotions and Feelings
(09:55) - The Role of Emotions in Healing
(16:14) - Practical Applications and Resources
Takeaways
✨ Emotions and feelings are not the same thing.
Emotions are automatic physiological responses that occur in the body before conscious thought. Feelings are the interpretations and meanings we assign to those emotional experiences.
✨ You cannot stop yourself from having emotions.
Emotions are part of being human. They serve as information and help us navigate the world by signaling what feels safe, unsafe, desirable, or threatening.
✨ The body reacts before the mind understands.
Fear, joy, sadness, anger, and excitement often arise in the body before we've had a chance to consciously process what's happening.
✨ Feelings are shaped by your history.
Your past experiences, beliefs, culture, nervous system patterns, and personal stories all influence how you interpret emotional experiences.
✨ Healing requires separating the emotion from the story.
A physiological response may be based on past experiences that are no longer relevant to your current reality. Learning to distinguish between the two creates space for new choices and healthier responses.
✨ Triggers are part of being human.
You cannot move through life without being triggered. What matters is not whether the trigger happens, but how you interpret and respond to the information it provides.
✨ Emotions can be stored in the body.
Practices such as breathwork, bodywork, energy work, and tapping can help release stored emotional responses and create greater emotional freedom.
✨ You may not control your emotions, but you can develop agency around your feelings.
With awareness and practice, you can choose how you interpret emotional experiences and how you respond to them.
Resources Mentioned
📚 Psychology Today
The Important Difference Between Emotions and Feelings (February 2022)
Referenced for its distinction between emotions as "raw data" and feelings as the stories we create around them.
📚 BetterHelp
Are Emotions and Feelings The Same Thing?
Referenced for research discussing how emotions occur unconsciously in response to stimuli and feelings arise once the brain interprets those changes.
📚 Karla McLaren
Is It a Feeling or Is It an Emotion? Revisited
Somatic educator and researcher whose work defines emotions as physiological experiences that provide information and feelings as conscious awareness of those experiences.
Connect with me over on Threads @AshaWilkersonEsq and let me know how this episode landed in your body.
Come home to yourself.
-
Asha (00:00.906)
All right. So last week I talked to y'all about understanding what to do when you're in a situation where you're feeling triggered or really unbalanced or upset. I talked about the Threads post that I read where the person was saying some days it just feels really hard. And how people's responses were well intended, but also kind of placating and didn't really do anything to help other than just words of.
The sun'll come out in the morning. I mean, it wasn't as maybe elementary as that, but kind of the same idea. And I read to you the advice that I gave the woman, which was to ask herself what she needed in the moment, and to give herself that as if she was parenting a child. And one of the things that I talked about was the difference between emotions versus feelings. And I said that I would come back and talk about emotions versus feelings. And guess what?
I'm inspired to talk about emotions versus feelings. I record these podcasts when I get the intuitive hit or when I feel inspired. I don't have a schedule. And so far it's been working. It's been working much better than trying to keep a schedule because then I respond to something that I'm inspired by in the world, and it comes out much better. Anyway, I don't know if y'all needed to know that, but here I am. So I want to talk to you about feelings versus emotions and emotions versus feelings.
Because in the world we talk about them and we use emotions and feelings interchangeably. And oftentimes I think people weaponize emotions or feelings and we are sort of taught that we're not supposed to have them. But in my opinion, and in a lot of scientists' opinion also, emotions are physiological responses.
That happen in the body, and they are a part of us being human. Like you can't be a human and not have an emotion. The feeling is something that you can control or decide what to do with the emotion that you receive, but the emotion is a physiological meaning a physical response in the body that you cannot control. So to think that as a human, as an evolved human, as a smart human, as a respected human, as an educated human.
Asha (02:23.394)
That you should not have emotions is wrong. It's just false. It's just a misunderstanding of what your body is capable of. Emotions really serve to keep you safe. They tell you what is wrong and what is not wrong in your life in a situation. They tell you what you like and what you don't like. They tell you when it's time to move or if it's safe enough to stay. So emotions are really, really helpful.
uses of information. They are sources of information. In the energetic sense, emotions are energy responses in the body. So we've talked about energy of course on this podcast before, but as a human you have multiple energetic fields. You have electrical fields in your body that relate to your heart. You have your nerve system is on an electrical field. And
Thoughts and emotions are also a form of energy. And when energy makes contact with another energy body, there's some kind of response, and you can call that an emotion. It's that physical response in the body, a physic physiological response. So here's what I have learned, not just in energy work, but also in the little bit of research that I've done, because I, in order to really
trust the energy learning that I was doing and to really be able to talk about it in a way that I felt comfortable. I also did some research into the science behind it. And I was delighted to find that the more that I learned about energy, the more that I saw that science backed it up. And the more that I learned a little bit about science and the brain, then I could see the parallels and crossovers in energy work.
So I think it's really kind of two schools of thought, sort of speak, to come to the same understanding of what happens in the body. And they're not actually competing. Like we're taught when we're children, you either believe science or you believe religion. And religion's a little different. Religion is full of energy work though. But as I've learned and done my own research, the science and the energy understanding back each other up. Also, physics is all about energy. So
Asha (04:48.6)
That's really what we're talking about here. Physics as it appears in the body. Okay, emotions. Emotions are a physiological response. They are a physical response in the body and they're automatic. They happen in a rapid fire way, and they come or they're generated from your nervous system. It's your body's reaction to a certain stimulus. And they're also precognitive. So that means that they happen before you have a chance to think.
It's that automatic response of fear or anger or joy or disgust or sadness. And they come to the body first and you do not choose them. So when you walk into a room and you see someone staring at you across the way and you get that body feeling, that is an emotion. It's an it's a physiological response. Or when you open an email from your boss at 11 p.m. at night that you weren't expecting.
And your heart drops a little bit, that's a physiological response. Or when you see an email that says, Congratulations, after you've been applying to different schools, and your heart rate ticks up and you feel this twinge of excitement, that's an emotion, that's a physiological response, it's a body response that happened before you even had time to fully process the situation. Feelings are different. Feelings are
How your body, how your mind interprets what the body has experienced. Your mind gives meaning to the physiological sensation. Your mind gives meaning to the body response. Feelings, although I think we can subconsciously choose feelings, they are actually a conscious subjective experience of an emotion.
That's filtered through your history, your beliefs, your culture, your nervous system patterns. And they're also more personal, they're more layered, and they're more influenced by the context. So if I have an experience, let's okay, let's say this. I was an attorney. I'm still technically a licensed California attorney, right? But I was practicing when I first got out of law school, and we had all these billable hours.
Asha (07:15.678)
And there was always this fear in the law office that you were doing something wrong. I don't think any law firm tells you, Congratulations, you're doing a great job. There's always like get better, or there's a really high standard that's expected. So that's that's just the standard that's expected. And so if I were to get an email from my boss at 11 p.m. at night, I would have the assumption that something is wrong or that there's an emergency because it
happened a couple of times where maybe there was a file that was missing or you know some email came through really late from opposing counsel we had to do something. So when I would get an email, my heart rate would my it would feel like my heart would drop into my stomach and I would be nervous. The heart dropping into my stomach is the emotion. The feeling behind it is something's wrong. my God. And I would develop this kind of
Anxiety anytime I would see an email late at night, or when I would hear the ding of the email, it's like, God, what's happening now? That's the feeling. That's how my brain has interpreted the response in my body. So the the email chime is the stimulus, and based on that stimulus, I have a physiological response in my body, the heart dropping, and then the feeling behind it.
Based on the context, based on my experience of receiving emails at night and something is wrong, that's the feeling. my God, something must be wrong. There must be a problem. It's the story that I go into that I tell myself. Even now, my friend who's one of the yoga instructors at the studio, I'd called her the other day before class to ask a random question or just to chat or something like that.
And she picked up. She said, my God, what's wrong? I said, No, nothing's wrong. She said, my God. Anytime I get a phone call from a studio before I'm supposed to teach class or when I'm supposed to teach that day, she said, I feel like I'm always worried that I missed class or that I forgot something. And so that worry that I missed class or I forgot something is the feeling that she has when the phone rings on the day that she's supposed to teach because she's
Asha (09:35.938)
Worried that she's missed something. The emotion behind it when she sees the phone ringing is whatever happens in her body, the physiological response in the body. Now, I think these things are really, really helpful to understand because as I said last week, your emotions give you information. But it's important to understand the difference between the emotion and the feeling. The emotion is raw, it's uncut, it's information that tells you.
That maybe something's wrong, something's okay, and then you get to decide what to do with it. But here's the thing: when you are in your healing process, it's really important to distinguish between the two because you will have a physiological response based on your nervous system that may no longer be appropriate or tied to the current situation that you're in. And so it's really important to understand the feeling.
Or to choose the feeling, to choose the story, to choose how to interpret that emotion as you're on your healing journey. Another example is let's say dating. I I am not well practiced at dating. I have trauma in my background from my dad, from dating.
And my response is to try not to get too attached, right? So is this a story I want to tell? I don't know what to say.
Asha (11:15.65)
I'm gonna give an example of of dating. Not this is not necessarily a proud example, but it's it's something that it's something that's true for me. Okay. So I'm a person who really feels communication patterns. And whatever has been established initially, I really feel it when that compute when that communication pattern has changed. when I was a kid.
My dad would get upset and he would stop talking or he would not call and I'd have to be the one to call and and you know apologize and make nice and and to re-establish the relationship. So I have some trauma from that that I am aware of. But even in modern day dating, as I'm doing it now, when I don't hear from the person that I'm dating, or when there's a change in the communication pattern.
And I haven't been informed as to why. My physiological response is that my stomach drops, I feel a little bit anxious, and I'm bracing for almost for the relationship to be over. Now I know that sounds extreme, but that's the trauma, right? I'm I'm bracing for there to be some drama, for the person to be mad at me, for something to be wrong. If
Typically I hear from them in the morning and then I haven't heard from them in the morning and then the whole day goes by, right? I have this physiological response. Now, part of the reason why that response is so impactful is because of how I understood what was happening when I was younger. So the feeling behind it is that the relationship is done, there's a problem, I've done something to mess up. It's it's the stories that I'm telling myself.
Consciously or subconsciously about what has happened. And those are subjective, those are based on context, those are based on experience. And they're not necessarily, I don't want to say they're they're not bad. They're not helpful in this context, but they are a learned interpretation based on the situation that I had. So I don't want to judge them. So whatever you're thinking of in your own life, I don't want to judge.
Asha (13:42.584)
That feeling that you have that interpretation. But as I am dating and learning new people, I am remembering and reminding myself that I may have this physiological response, this emotion that is based on a previous experience, but I can change the feeling because the situation is not the same. So I may not hear from the person that I'm dating all day, and I may have this physiological response.
And my first step would be to sit with myself in the response, to not judge the response, to notice what's happening and say, okay, Asha, you're feeling anxious. That's okay. You're okay, you're safe, you're you're fine, there's nothing wrong. And then I can get more information and decide how I want to respond. So previously I might close down because I think that the end of the relationship is coming. Now I would say,
Maybe I'll just call and see what's going on. Or try to go back and remember what did they tell me their schedule was? Or maybe they're just busy. Or hey, just because there's a change in communication in this relationship doesn't mean that it is like any past relationships or the relationship you had before with your father. Right? I can I can actively consciously change how I am interpreting the data.
From my emotions, from the physiological response. And that is so important because you will be triggered. You will have experiences, you will encounter outward stimuli that will trigger an emotional response in your body. There, it's just life. You can't go through life and be untriggered. You are human, you have emotions, they are part of how you navigate the world, they are part of your
Navigation system. They give you valuable information. What matters is what you do with the feeling. What matters is what story you tell yourself, how you rewire your brain to reinterpret the emotion that is coming up in your body. Okay? So emotions can get stored in the body before they ever become feelings, especially if you have childhood trauma.
Asha (16:06.616)
You may not even understand how to interpret them. So on your healing journey, somatic practices like breath work or body work or energy work or tapping are really going to help you release emotions, physiological responses that are stored in the body. I cannot tell you how many times I've led breath work and participated in breath work where I'm guiding people and they're having a a a physiological release. They're they're crying.
They're moving around, they're making some noises, and they don't even actually understand what it is that's coming up. But it's because we've created the space for the emotion to be be released from the body. We also did a Rage and Release retreat back in the fall of last year and we did physical movements, not quite dancing, but I turned up some music really loud and and
led us through some movements to really just get our body moving and to start to release stuff in the beginning. We're all composed and yep, I'm just stomping my foot, just stomping my foot. And then the more we were able to move our bodies, the more emotions started to come up and they were starting to release. People started screaming, we started crying, we started yelling, we started speaking, all kinds of stuff. So emotions can get stored in the body.
And if you haven't had a chance to release them, it's really important to release them. And then that will also help you decide what feelings you want to have around the emotions. You cannot always control your emotions, but with practice, you can develop more agency around your feelings, which means you can decide how you interpret them, how you hold them, and how you respond to them. So I really hope that this little talk about emotions versus feelings has been helpful.
I encourage you to also do a little bit of your own research. So there's a couple articles that I have for you today that I'll post in the show notes. There's an article on Psychology Today called The Important Difference Between Emotions and Feelings. It was published in February 2022. And there's a great line in there that says, Emotions are the raw data, a reaction to present reality.
Asha (18:25.122)
While feelings can be diluted by the stories we've created based on past events and future fears. So I will link to that. That's in Psychology Today. There's also an article on BetterHelp. BetterHelp is the website that connects patients to therapists. It's called Feelings versus Emotions. Is there a difference? And this references the research of psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen.
And confirms that emotions occur unconsciously as a result of the body's reaction to external external stimuli. And once the brain recognizes those physical changes, a feeling arises. So again, emotions and then feelings. And then there's one more, Karla McLaren. Her book is called Is It a Feeling or Is It an Emotion? Revisited. She's a somatic educator and researcher.
And she defines an emotion as a physiological experience that gives you information about the world and a feeling as your conscious awareness of that emotion. Okay. In this article or in this book, she also cites neuroscience work, which is the gold standard on this topic from Antonio Damasio. So even though I'm talking about this in a physical, I'm sorry, in an energetic context, there is
Scientific backing to help explain emotions versus feelings. And it's really important for you to know as you go on your healing journey. And if you'd like to know more, please let me know. I'm happy to explain it. I love this stuff. I think it's so helpful, very, very useful. And I want you all to have the most tools that you can have and to be as successful as possible. All right. I will talk to you later. Ciao ciao.