Feeling

How to Healthily Feel Emotions

Connect to your emotions to reveal your deepest wants, needs and desires.

3 minutes

Feeling emotions can be difficult, especially if you have endured traumatic experiences, were never taught how to navigate emotions or think of them in terms of "good" or "bad. However, emotions reveal your deepest needs and desires, which makes connecting with them invaluable. With time and practice, feeling your emotions can help you, others, and the world around you thrive. So let's get into how you can healthily feel your emotions.

1. Awareness

Be mindful of your emotional state and physical sensations in the body. Notice how your thoughts may be influencing your emotions. Whenever a thought enters your mind, label it as "thinking" to avoid letting it carry you away. Awareness is the foundation upon which secure emotionality is built.

2. Embodiment

Breathe deeply. Notice how your body feels in space, your clothes, and the surface beneath you. Allow emotions to exist in your body without judgment or trying to change them. Breathe into areas of tension. Place a hand on your heart or abdomen to feel the warmth from your hands connecting to the rest of your body. If you need to move, move intuitively. Breathe into sensations and watch how your energy shifts from moment to moment.

3. Labelling

See if you can put a word or words to your emotions. Research shows higher degrees of emotional granularity (an individual's ability to differentiate between the specificity of their emotions) make challenging emotions more manageable and elevated emotions more powerful (Kashdan et al., 2015). Use an emotion wheel and keep practicing to expand your emotional vocabulary.

4. Investigation

Trace your emotion to its roots to understand where it comes from. Identify what triggers challenging emotions and what incites elevated emotions. Investigate what need(s) this emotion has arisen to convey.

5. Nurturing

Once you have brought your emotion into awareness, embodied it, given it a name and investigated its source and the need(s) it conveys, it's time to meet those needs. Whether you need to sleep, eat, give yourself space, go for a walk, journal, exercise, create, connect or communicate, set an intention and stick to it. Nurturing your needs goes a long way in healthily feeling emotions and balancing their effects.

In Summary

Healthily feeling your emotions takes time, patience and practice if you are not used to it or are more familiar with other coping mechanisms.


You must be kind and compassionate to yourself in this process because harshly criticizing yourself doesn't make navigating emotions any easier. So remember, there is no right or wrong way to feel, but there are helpful and harmful ways of responding to how you feel.


With time and exploration, you will find the methods of healthy emotional expression that work best for you. You never know, by feeling your emotions, you may learn to express them in ways to help you thrive. Perhaps writing, art, or communication are channels which await the manifestations of your emotions.


Thank you for taking the time and energy to read this. If you found this valuable, we invite you to practice feeling your emotions, healing painful perceptions and growing into your best self on the Sprowt App. Here you'll find integrative meditative practices on emotions of all kinds to help you experience your humanity to the fullest.

Feeling emotions can be difficult, especially if you have endured traumatic experiences, were never taught how to navigate emotions or think of them in terms of "good" or "bad. However, emotions reveal your deepest needs and desires, which makes connecting with them invaluable. With time and practice, feeling your emotions can help you, others, and the world around you thrive. So let's get into how you can healthily feel your emotions.

1. Awareness

Be mindful of your emotional state and physical sensations in the body. Notice how your thoughts may be influencing your emotions. Whenever a thought enters your mind, label it as "thinking" to avoid letting it carry you away. Awareness is the foundation upon which secure emotionality is built.

2. Embodiment

Breathe deeply. Notice how your body feels in space, your clothes, and the surface beneath you. Allow emotions to exist in your body without judgment or trying to change them. Breathe into areas of tension. Place a hand on your heart or abdomen to feel the warmth from your hands connecting to the rest of your body. If you need to move, move intuitively. Breathe into sensations and watch how your energy shifts from moment to moment.

3. Labelling

See if you can put a word or words to your emotions. Research shows higher degrees of emotional granularity (an individual's ability to differentiate between the specificity of their emotions) make challenging emotions more manageable and elevated emotions more powerful (Kashdan et al., 2015). Use an emotion wheel and keep practicing to expand your emotional vocabulary.

4. Investigation

Trace your emotion to its roots to understand where it comes from. Identify what triggers challenging emotions and what incites elevated emotions. Investigate what need(s) this emotion has arisen to convey.

5. Nurturing

Once you have brought your emotion into awareness, embodied it, given it a name and investigated its source and the need(s) it conveys, it's time to meet those needs. Whether you need to sleep, eat, give yourself space, go for a walk, journal, exercise, create, connect or communicate, set an intention and stick to it. Nurturing your needs goes a long way in healthily feeling emotions and balancing their effects.

In Summary

Healthily feeling your emotions takes time, patience and practice if you are not used to it or are more familiar with other coping mechanisms.


You must be kind and compassionate to yourself in this process because harshly criticizing yourself doesn't make navigating emotions any easier. So remember, there is no right or wrong way to feel, but there are helpful and harmful ways of responding to how you feel.


With time and exploration, you will find the methods of healthy emotional expression that work best for you. You never know, by feeling your emotions, you may learn to express them in ways to help you thrive. Perhaps writing, art, or communication are channels which await the manifestations of your emotions.


Thank you for taking the time and energy to read this. If you found this valuable, we invite you to practice feeling your emotions, healing painful perceptions and growing into your best self on the Sprowt App. Here you'll find integrative meditative practices on emotions of all kinds to help you experience your humanity to the fullest.

Feeling emotions can be difficult, especially if you have endured traumatic experiences, were never taught how to navigate emotions or think of them in terms of "good" or "bad. However, emotions reveal your deepest needs and desires, which makes connecting with them invaluable. With time and practice, feeling your emotions can help you, others, and the world around you thrive. So let's get into how you can healthily feel your emotions.

1. Awareness

Be mindful of your emotional state and physical sensations in the body. Notice how your thoughts may be influencing your emotions. Whenever a thought enters your mind, label it as "thinking" to avoid letting it carry you away. Awareness is the foundation upon which secure emotionality is built.

2. Embodiment

Breathe deeply. Notice how your body feels in space, your clothes, and the surface beneath you. Allow emotions to exist in your body without judgment or trying to change them. Breathe into areas of tension. Place a hand on your heart or abdomen to feel the warmth from your hands connecting to the rest of your body. If you need to move, move intuitively. Breathe into sensations and watch how your energy shifts from moment to moment.

3. Labelling

See if you can put a word or words to your emotions. Research shows higher degrees of emotional granularity (an individual's ability to differentiate between the specificity of their emotions) make challenging emotions more manageable and elevated emotions more powerful (Kashdan et al., 2015). Use an emotion wheel and keep practicing to expand your emotional vocabulary.

4. Investigation

Trace your emotion to its roots to understand where it comes from. Identify what triggers challenging emotions and what incites elevated emotions. Investigate what need(s) this emotion has arisen to convey.

5. Nurturing

Once you have brought your emotion into awareness, embodied it, given it a name and investigated its source and the need(s) it conveys, it's time to meet those needs. Whether you need to sleep, eat, give yourself space, go for a walk, journal, exercise, create, connect or communicate, set an intention and stick to it. Nurturing your needs goes a long way in healthily feeling emotions and balancing their effects.

In Summary

Healthily feeling your emotions takes time, patience and practice if you are not used to it or are more familiar with other coping mechanisms.


You must be kind and compassionate to yourself in this process because harshly criticizing yourself doesn't make navigating emotions any easier. So remember, there is no right or wrong way to feel, but there are helpful and harmful ways of responding to how you feel.


With time and exploration, you will find the methods of healthy emotional expression that work best for you. You never know, by feeling your emotions, you may learn to express them in ways to help you thrive. Perhaps writing, art, or communication are channels which await the manifestations of your emotions.


Thank you for taking the time and energy to read this. If you found this valuable, we invite you to practice feeling your emotions, healing painful perceptions and growing into your best self on the Sprowt App. Here you'll find integrative meditative practices on emotions of all kinds to help you experience your humanity to the fullest.