How good are you at trusting your gut?
And how to actually listen to your emotions
The world of wellness tells us all the time to tune into our emotions. We're urged to reconnect and listen to ourselves, to "speak our truth" and "trust our gut".
Now, if you're anything like I was before I burned out so hard I was forced to go to therapy (about 16 years ago), then when you see this kind of advice plastered all over social media, you might find yourself thinking something like "that sounds great but HOW???"
Platitudes like these are bandied around all the time, but we're rarely given a game plan. To remedy that, I have three steps for you that break the process of listening to your emotions down, so you can gradually build the skills required to be someone who can trust their gut – and do a whole lot of other important things like meeting your own needs, setting healthy boundaries, kicking unhelpful habits, and speaking up when something isn't right.
Here are the three steps (3 Ns) of emotional awareness:
STEP 1: NOTICE
This is the tuning in part. You do it by pausing every now and then – especially when things aren't going right – to just get curious about your emotional state. But this doesn't have to be a fluffy, abstract question. Your emotions show up in very physical ways.
So, what do you feel in your body, exactly? Is there tension, constriction, vibration? Perhaps your throat feels blocked, your heart heavy, or your stomach knotted. Whatever's there, just notice it.
Interoception: the ability to sense and understand internal bodily sensations
If you're really out of touch with your emotions, you can practise this step on its own at first so you can build your interoception skills before attributing meaning to these feelings. As a neurodivergent person, I spent a lot of time on this. It's okay to go slow.
STEP 2: NAME
This is about labelling your emotions with the words that resonate most strongly in the moment you're feeling them. This sounds arbitrary but it is not – giving names to your feelings is an important part of understanding and accepting them, and it vastly improves your ability to respond to them appropriately and effectively.
If you feel bad but you don't know whether that feeling is fear, guilt or anger, then it's really hard to know how to respond, and even harder to justify your actions when you do.
So naming is an important step. When you do this, stay curious about your experience – and resist the urge to judge or analyse. Look for the specific name or term that fits most with what you’re experiencing. It might go something like this: I'm feeling angry. No, I'm feeling scared and angry and hurt…Actually, it's more like jealousy. Jealousy clicks.
STEP 3: NEEDS
Finally, feelings exist to get us moving (that's why they're called e-motions), and you can think of negative emotions as needs-based calls to action. Left unanswered, they'll persist. Answer the call by meeting the need, however, and your feelings are free to change. So the questions to ask for this final step are these:
What is this emotion asking me for?
What's the most pressing need at the root of this experience?
Are you craving connection, safety, excitement, love, change? What do you need at that moment? You might be surprised by how often you have an answer to that question when you stop to ask yourself. And when you do have an answer, the final task is to do something – anything – that can help you begin to better fulfil that need.
Literally anything that pushes the needle (in a safe and respectful way for both you and anyone else in your life) is a good thing because it communicates a really important message to your system.
It's a way of telling your emotional self that you're on it, and when your unconscious self feels assured that the issue is in hand, it might just stop screaming to get your attention.
NOTICE
NAME
NEEDS
Those are the three words. Write them down somewhere, or save this post so you can come back to it when you need to. I hope it helps.
Thank you for reading!
We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.
Love the article! So helpful to get out of the „bad“ states just by noticing.
As an English teacher, I really dig mnemonic devices. I like the simplicity here of tending emotions.