You can't be happy unless you're comfortable being happy

One night last winter, I was sitting in the living room. Tim, my cat, was on my lap. It was cold out but he, being mostly fur, was warm. I was scratching his neck and he was purring and it was – for a time – a perfect moment.

The feeling started in my chest. I know “warm orange glow” isn’t a feeling, but stick with me here, that’s how it felt. A fuzzy orange glow, a gentle ball of tacky 80s shag carpet, expanding in my chest and into my throat.

It was a wave of deep, true happiness. It was so powerful I almost cried.

Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t have had this moment if I hadn’t been in tune with how I feel happiness in my body.

All your feelings – happiness, sadness, grief – have physical components. They start in your body. And, if you’re anything like me, you’ve spent years ignoring them.

No, I’m just tired

I’ll summarise how I used to understand the physical side of my feelings in two lines of dialogue.

My partner: How are you feeling?

Me: Eh, tired.

I was compressing universes of feeling and sensation into “tired”. Sad? Happy? Angry? Nah. Tired.

My partner, patient though she is, hated this.

To be fair to me – I was tired. My body felt tired. Heavy, lethargic, foggy. All signs of “tired”. But also: other things. Things that, had I interpreted them with a slightly more nuanced touch, I could have addressed.

Because I was also:

• Stressed about money.
• Frustrated with my job.
• Lonely.
• Creatively stifled.
• Burning out.

I didn’t know that feelings have physical signs, so I lumped everything in with a physiological reality I understood: tired. In the process, I repressed everything until I couldn’t do that anymore.

The physical side of emotions

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio put it simply:

Feelings are mental experiences of body states.

He argued that they signal:

• Bodily needs (like hunger).
• Injury (via pain).
• Whether you’re functioning well.
• Threats (this encompasses things like fear or anger).
• Social interactions (compassion, gratitude, love).

In other words, if you ignore your feelings, you’re ignoring your life. They’re the thing helping you regulate everything.

And it starts in the body. Your mental sense of them – the internal monologue that names, fuels or bemoans feelings – comes second (if at all).

Damasio puts it more bluntly:

The mistake was to seperate mind and body. Descartes was wrong. You’re not a thinking machine that feels. You’re a feeling machine that thinks.

If you ignore your feelings, you’re not dismissing some namby-pamby, fluffy guff – you’re sidelining the fundamental way you interact with the world.

Speak your own language

Feelings start in the body – and so does emotional repression. Are you aware of what’s happening in your chest, fingers or toes? How do you interpret any given sensation?

Pop quiz: where do you feel sadness? Excitement? Fear?

Follow up: what would your emotional vocab look like if you only knew how to read physical reactions as one thing (like anger)?

Here’s how feelings break down for me:

• Sadness: like tentacles going down my chest.
• Restlessness and stress: electricity in my hands, tension in my shoulders. (When I’m really in a tizzy, I’ll start running my fingertips over my palms.)
• Happiness: warmth in my chest.
• Irritation or anger: tightness in my jaw and neck – this feels more repressed, though.

I’m all upper body, but everything feels distinct.

Now, when my partner asks how I’m feeling, I take a beat and scan over my body. What’s going on in there? What’s calling out, what’s trying to tell me something?

It’s all info, right? But you can’t tell what’s worth listening to until you speak the language. Step one of that is just-plain getting comfortable with whatever it is you’re feeling. To throw it back to the beginning of this article, if I didn’t know what I was feeling was happiness – and if I wasn’t comfy with how happiness manifests in my chest – I wouldn’t have been able to sit with the feeling.

Maybe I would’ve panicked. Maybe I would’ve tried to push it away. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought “oh no, cancer”. (It’s technically possible.)

So. The challenge is to start getting comfortable with your feelings. There are a few ways to go about it:

1. Do an itinerary of your feelings and how they show up.
2. Tune into your bodily sensations when you’re not feeling something strong.
3. Practice meditations for specific emotions to help you manage them in the moment.

Your emotional inventory

The first one is simple enough, even if it’s not easy. Grab a bit of paper or open the notes app on your phone. List out some emotions – happiness, sadness, anger, whatever – and reflect on them. Try to figure out how your body feels when you’re aware of that feeling.

Where do they start? Do they move? Try to picture the sensations in your mind.

Personally, I’ve found that talking it out with someone helps. Even talking out loud to yourself can make it a bit easier to sift things through.

Scan your body

To start dialling into your physical sensations in general, dig into body scan meditation. They only take a minute or so.

It’s a classic for a reason. Here’s the breakdown we’ve spoken about before:

1. Sit comfortably. Or lie down. You do you.
2. Close your eyes.
3. Take a deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth to settle in.
4. Bring your awareness to the top of your head. Note any feelings or sensations. From there, slowly scan down your body. I find it helpful to name the body part I’m moving to (e.g. face, calf, toes). I also break my body into chunks to move around, e.g. going from my neck, shoulders, elbow, hands, before moving back to my chest.
5. Once you reach your toes, you can head back up and see if you’re aware of any changes.
6. To finish, take another deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth. Open your eyes.

You’re not looking to judge or fix or assess anything. You’re just noting how tired your feet are, for example, or how one elbow is inexplicably warmer than the other.

Body scan meditations are a helpful way to practice being aware of your body – and thus your feelings – without pressure. Get your reps in before you really need to hone in on your feelings.

Emotion-specific meditations

If you know there are some specific emotions you find overwhelming, look up meditations specific to them.

If you struggle with anger, for example, here’s a meditation from Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh in his book Present Moment, Wonderful Moment:

Breathing in, I feel my anger

Breathing out, I smile

I stay with my breathing

so I won’t lose myself.

Meditations like this help us stop, acknowledge and understand. They help us hone in on what’s really happening. In the case of anger, for example, Nhat Hanh says that this meditation helps us “be aware that it’s our anger that is making us suffer, not the other person”.

This is hard but worthwhile

If you’re anything like me, this will be a whole process. It’s not easy to slowly, steadily understand your feelings if you’ve spent years actively ignoring them. But it’s worthwhile.

Everything gets better. It’s easier to know people and be known by them. It’s easier to laugh.¹

And don’t worry: once you get a handle on this, you can start dealing with the fact that neither your thoughts nor feelings are entirely You. And, since they’re all transitory, they’re not necessarily real. So you don’t have to listen to them all.

So, you know, you have that to look forward to. Hooray.