Feelings wheels are fascinating. Feelings wheels are also flat.

I first saw a feelings wheel about 3 years ago. My initial impression was how cool it seemed; all the human emotions, neatly mapped, just like that!

But the more I looked at it, the more I realized: this doesn’t actually do what we might hope it should. And after a few passing glances, I realized:

The feelings wheel is “neat,” but about as meaningful as plastic apples in a display case.

Most emotion apps are equally problematic, as they ask us to either name an emotion (a skill some people notably lack), or they offer the emotional label for them, a tiny sign to press into the tomato garden that is your inner makeup.

The task becomes one of logging and tracking (i.e., simply looking at, and soothing ourselves with the false reassurance that to do something is to do enough.)

It feels good to label things. Makes them tidy, organized, and gives us the fleeting impression that they are therefore “handled.” The problem is that by naming it, we do nothing by way of touching it.

The challenge, of course, is that we walk away from these tools having stopped short of something meaningful, most notably experiencing the feeling, moving full through its cycle, feeling as the thing rose, was felt (not just named), and released on its own.

Which is why we so often find ourselves returning to the tools day after day, dutifully logging the same themes (“ah yes, here’s anxiety again, right on schedule.”) We never integrated them.

Most emotional tools begin by asking: “What are you feeling?” but many people cannot answer that question. Not because they are resistant, or “too closed off,” or withdrawn, or lying, but because nothing is registering clearly enough to name.

The point isn’t the name. You can call it whatever you want. The point is the relational experience. Understanding what it is for you, in your own lens and language, and stepping into it enough to let it take shape, state its claim, and then step away, on its own, peacefully.

It’s not about pinning it to a board, but rather putting ourselves beside it, with regard.

Many of us are uncomfortable with some area of our emotional landscape.

Maybe we don’t like our “laziness.” Maybe we don’t like our anger. Maybe we don’t like when we’re too soft. Maybe we just don’t like the intolerable vacuum of being alone, and what rushes in to fill it when we are.

A lot of us move through picking up things to stave these off, some more productive than others (e.g., work, hobbies), some framed as beneficial (e.g., working out, meditating), some just ordinary distractions (e.g., media, social media, some friendships, etc.), and others doing much heavier lifting (e.g., obsessions, addictions, ruminations and mental looping.)

But almost all of us have a set of things we reach for with the sole purpose of “feeling better,” at least in the moment, and sometimes, we tell ourselves, in the long-term.

The problem is that emotions behave a lot like children (which is meant much more directly than just metaphor, given that emotions make up a lot of the human experience, and children being young humans who don’t yet have a full grasp of emotional management.)

What I mean by this is that when we ignore emotions, or “force” ourselves to “feel better” through other means, those underlying “less pleasant” emotions are going to continue “tugging on our sleeve.”

If we ignore emotions or simply try to “make ourselves feel better,” they instead come out as:

• emotions get louder
• or messier
• or come out sideways, in other places
• or in ways that are disproportionate to the issue at hand when they do, having bottled so much
• or they’ll turn to destructive things, the equivalent of “coloring on walls,” at whatever scale they need
• or they’ll turn inward and direct their vandalism there

In short: they’ll do whatever they have to, and whatever they can. But the emotions we find “unpleasant” do not simply go away. They swell.

Actually “feeling better” requires the same thing of us that children need

They need us to pause, look down at them tugging at our sleeve, and regard them. For our attention to land and lock in a moment, to register as “this matters.” And it does, because it is essentially what’s a part of all that’s running through you. And the reason you feel like you’re constantly having to outrun it all and chase down “feeling better” is because you’re running at all.

Very often, that regard alone is sufficient, the energy is released, and the day moves on. Sometimes, the energy has built up, and regard requires a matter of untangling, unraveling, and compassion.

The solution is simply turning toward whatever is there. Sitting with the uncomfortable pangs that come up if we don’t reach for whatever it is we want to reach for (we all have the list, maybe our own, maybe those we look down on with others), but when we set those things aside, and really allow the vines to crawl across the forest floor, we will find that taking the time to do so, as counterintuitive (and at times uncomfortable) as it sounds, is the solution.

We don’t “release” feelings. They release themselves once we look.

Sometimes we feel uncomfortable or unclear emotions, or are vaguely uncomfortable with the landscapes of our inner experience, and it’s very common in these moments to seek help; a friend, a partner, a parent, a therapist, a framework, a tool.

And while these may seem helpful in the moment, the goal is not for anyone (or anything) outside of yourself to “tell you how you feel.” While individuals may indeed do this, and it often happens as an attempt at a co-regulation gesture (i.e., one of soothing), the act undermines the relationship with our own internal experiences.

Someone else stepping in as the authority on your feelings is akin to helping a butterfly out of its cocoon. It will perish.

“Helping a butterfly out of its cocoon (or chrysalis) often permanently dooms it. The physical struggle to emerge forces vital fluids from the insect’s abdomen into its wings. Bypassing this process leaves the butterfly with a swollen body and shrivelled wings, rendering it permanently unable to fly.”

While it may feel nice to be “free of the cocoon,” and for someone else to “help you” do the emotional toiling effort (especially someone who seems to have a more robust emotional vernacular, or is in a position of authority (such as a therapist), or a piece of software), this can be detrimental in the longterm.

While you may now have a word, a gaze, a receipt, you lack the skillset by which to actually feel the full fabric of the thing and understand it more dynamically, especially as it relates to you and other emotions.

The goal of these conversations, and tools, is not to “tell you how you feel,” or “give you a result,” or “tell you the answer.”

The healthiest conversations about our feelings are often not the ones where someone explains us to ourselves. They are the ones where another person helps us remain present long enough to discover something on our own. It’s about shared presence and non-judgmental understanding, not labeling, explaining, answer, or fixing.

Nobody else can actually verify your feelings.

They can suggest, reflect, wonder, hypothesize, resonate, disagree even… but they cannot know.

A therapist cannot know. A framework cannot know. AI cannot know. A partner cannot know. At best, they can help you look.

The container of a relationship, framework, or tool used in a healthy capacity is meant to be a safe space to explore emotional terrain, not the how-to guide of trails to stay on.

Our work is finding the footing, feeling around, fumbling, dealing in fragments and fuzziness. And this work is as essential to the human condition as emerging from the cocoon is to the butterfly. Feeling complete in our capacity and experience requires us to beat against our internal awareness ourselves.

The person who ultimately gets to decide what your experience is remains you.

There is a spectrum to the ways in which humans will handle their emotions, from “very expressive” at one end, to very subdued at the other.

Expressive individuals may fold their energy into emotional language, amplifying it because they feel something, and by creating action and output around that, it invites a moment for others to “turn towards” in return. It makes the energy look and seem as though it must be proportionally, “bigly” true.

Expression and feeling are not synonymous.

But very often, externalized emotions are not being felt, they are simply being broadcasted as means for connection and feeling seen and heard as a person (though they may also identify as those feelings.)

But the performative nature of the expression is intensified not because it is necessarily felt more strongly, but because their resistance to feeling it is stronger.

To express dramatically is fundamentally to externalize.

Very often, emotionally expressive and loud individuals do so not because it proportionately reflects deeper feelings, but rather a more prominent unease with being alone with whatever feelings they have.

To feel is first fundamentally internal.

And to feel deeply is often very quiet work.

It requires that the focus be turned toward, not out (whether that’s expression or rumination, e.g., whatever “they” did.)

To feel anything at all, we need moments to let things catch up with us, to snag on our attention, to have space on the shelf of our awareness. Contrary to some frameworks, this does not necessitate carving out whole stretches of time, or learning to meditate, or “finding a quiet space.” You can do it at any moment. We have flickers and fragments and layers of feelings all the time.

It’s just a matter of being aware of them, of noticing the lightning bug of a flash in our psyche as something moves across our tertiary awareness.

And we can share afterwards, if we choose, of course. The real benefit here being that if we do the internal part first, whatever we share is a much more authentic expression of our selves.

Things with vitality are not uniform.

Forests aren’t, rocks aren’t. Bodies of water, the way waves hit the shore, the way the sand ripples just under the surface. Droughts across plain lands, dead trees and stark branches. Decaying things, animal hides, the dirt mounds of anthills, the way the clouds are always different every day.

To be alive is to be inconsistent, varying, layered, and organic.

The human nervous system needs texture

A preoccupation with perfection is anxiety overriding our other values.

The reason our need to understand everything, and do everything “right,” leads us to such weathered ways of existence is because it’s inherently anti-alive.

This isn’t to say you can’t optimize. I like goals and improvement, too. I train in the gym for over 10 hours a week and am wholly committed to the happy task of tracking my macros down to tablespoons and grams, so I’m not here to suggest you can’t pursue measurable things to improve your physical or emotional wellbeing. But I am suggesting that:

A sense of MEANING in betterment requires imperfection.

Measurables don’t matter if we don’t have essential vitality around them. If we don’t leave space for small human messiness, rough edges, watercolor marks seeping gently from their intended shapes. This isn’t to say that we should crash out or spiral every day, but it is most certainly to suggest that if we want to feel alive, we have to let life, and a semblance of it, gently rise and fall through us every day.

And what I mean is: we have to feel.

The reason lives on emotional lockdown feel unfulfilled isn’t because the solution remains in some infinite long-tail. It’s because we’re missing the essential texture and temperature of life itself.

To feel alive, we have to feel the small energies, and emotions, rather than suppress or “solution around” them.

Many people are living as though life will finally begin once they solve themselves completely. But life is not waiting at the end of optimization. Life is the texture moving through us in each moment, in the present.

All too often, our efforts at “self-improvement” in the realms of happiness, love, and emotional wellbeing begin (and end) with “analysis.”

We think that the right approach to feeling better is “understanding” what’s wrong, and why. We consume content, pore over resources (of varying degrees of credibility), learn the big words and the explanations, and intellectualize the hell out of everything we must be experiencing (after all, it’s right here on paper saying so.)

This feels good - in the moment.

“Rabbit-holing” always feels good. It soothes a specific anxiety that will have us wholly convinced it is the path out of this mess; that “reason” and “explanation” feel good because they seem like progress. But in reality, they are only fueling our anxiety, not actually resolving or touching any underlying states, which is why it quickly becomes so compulsive, never-ending, and exhaustive.

At the end of the day, we don’t feel better.

We feel strung out, wired, “informed” and “soothed” in an immediate sense, on the surface, but still strung out beneath the surface, all the underlying, important things left without contact.

The way to feel better

Is not to intellectualize, label, or analyze, but to actually feel the things we are avoiding when we do things like this. To be aware of the uncomfortable rising up and swelling of anxiety — to notice it and allow it, rather than scramble to feed its demands with more information in an effort to appease it and “make it go away.” To experience the sharp pang or hollow pull of sadness. To feel the heaviness in our shoulders of stress, the ache in our lower backs of financial worries, the restlessness in our legs as we lay down in bed, struggling to find a position that will resolve it.

The way to feel better is to feel these things. It’s counterintuitive, and directly contradicts everything we do, and the internal messaging we get around them (to varying degrees of volume, intensity, and insistence.)

The way to feel better is to acknowledge small things as they come up throughout our day. Because as we become more familiar and accustomed to smaller things, instead of explaining them away or externalizing them in other explanations (of what he or she did, or “why” we are the way we are), we afford ourselves the opportunity to exist as full humans, and the space to actually breathe and experience different emotional energies, which is the entire baseline of feeling comfortable in our own skin; i.e., feeling good.

Many people, when they think they are talking about their feelings, are actually doing one of the following instead:

• Ruminating on an external story or circumstance of what he, she, or they did, how much of a “narcissist” they were, or all they did wrong
• Intellectualizing, labeling, and categorizing by way of learned terminology and frameworks

Neither of these are feelings. And neither of them will ever in a million years (or countless cycles) ever yield a state of feeling truly alive. On the contrary, they are stifling, limiting, and flat, devoid of a real internal experience.

Feeling alive requires internal experiencing

In other words: feelings. This is not to say you have to move through life being “overly-sensitive,” or “soppy,” or subject to taking everything personally, or coming undone at the wrong time and place.

But it does mean that if you’d like to move through life with a general sense of vitality and aliveness and connection to it, that relational strength really has to begin in you. If we want to feel alive, we have to also feel things inside.

Feelings aren’t found in “frameworks”

Your feelings don’t care about the labels. Some parts of you may, and it may seem soothing to your conscious and cognitive anxiety, seeking to strike a sense of security by lining up plastic walls in a tote in which to toss things, but these actually do nothing for your underlying lived experience or longterm sense of vitality.

It’s why doing this can feel soothing in the moment, but you still feel so drained, beaten down, hardened, or worn out in the long run.

Feelings don’t need frameworks. They just need contact.

When things come up, we look at them rather than dismissing them or handing them to someone else, or doing something externally, to equally “make them go away.”

When we experience things, go or bad, really let that awareness register and move through its cycle and release on its own. And if we do this with everything (or most things) throughout our day, we will over time build a weave of fabric that is permeable but also strong. It can provide a beautiful net in which to support ourselves as we move through life, and also catch things we would’ve otherwise let slip by, that serve our sense of being a part of it, i.e., aliveness.

A lot of people move through life unable to feel much of anything meaningful.

Often, they may not even feel “lows” other than the occasional melancholy (and very often, they may not even feel that.)

Rather, many of us move through life as though surrounded by a constant “white,” or enveloped in a cloud of “gray,” and we may know we don’t feel “everyday emotion,” even if we don’t realize that not everyone lives like this.

We may feel that we have to chase things down and turn up the volume to even hear anything; that, in the words of Goo Goo Dolls in their 1998 hit Iris: “yeah, you bleed just to know you’re alive.” Or, in the words of Nicolas Cage’s character from the 2018 film Spider-Verse: “sometimes I let matches burn down to my fingertips just to feel something, anything.” And we don’t usually mean this literally, or physically, but rather to say: it takes a lot to feel anything.

I was one of these people. For most of my adult life I lived a way that I knew was pretty “even keel,” but didn’t recognize as being particularly notable until I psychologist with a PhD asked me, “what’s the most common emotion you feel everyday?” The question was so bizarre to me that he might as well have been asking “what color balloon do you typically carry?” Like, I understood the concept, and had certainly held a balloon before, but the very idea of doing so not only every day, but in multiple ways, with multiple different colors, was mind-blowing (and frankly, life changing.)

The reason many of us don’t actually feel “the highs” or “ups” is because we never let ourselves experience “the lows” or “downs.”

If you suppress one end of a wavelength, it’s going to dampen the other side, too. If you arrest the movement of a swing at one end, it’s going to fall flat before it reaches the full arc on the other side.

Suppressing emotions to avoid pain creates emotional flatness. Research shows that constant emotional suppression dampens the experience of positive feelings, leading to numbness and chronic stress rather than the intended control.

Discomfort with “unpleasant” emotions creates a shortcoming with “pleasant” emotions. If we withhold our full human experience in some areas, it seeps into our ability to fully

The solution to wanting to feel more joy and happiness is not in forcing happiness, but rather allowing ourselves to fully experience our human capacity, which includes feeling sadness, anger, fear, etc.

Because the human expression does not intuitively understand our arbitrary assessment of what’s “good” vs. “bad,” even if this judgment is submerged within our own subconscious. When we suppress some emotion, the system learns over time to suppress all emotion.

To feel happy, genuinely, we have to lean into the full kaleidoscope of human feelings, starting with everything we feel day to day, however tiny. The solution is in acknowledging and learning to become familiar with, and experience, the myriad of things that course through us every day, big or small.

There are a lot of different ways to approach relationships, many of them normalized, not all of them great.

Conventionally, the social structures around relationships (i.e., marriage) were a matter of social status, stability, and security. And to some degree, we’ve maintained this storyline in much of how we approach love. Even if the marriage rate is lower, and individuals do not need to enter into marriage in order to have access to resources, it still provides the backbone of many relationships.

For many, relationships are also a haven in which to build an identity and a container in which to structure our sense of self (and ego, in the psychological sense) through the ways in which it is contrast to another. If we have a gentle partner, we can look strong. Or, conversely, we want to appear a certain way and so we find a partner that echoes those values. Also very normal.

For others, we enter into relationships to subconsciously aggravate unknown wounds, dredging them back up, unknowingly, in hopes of resolving them. We fall in love with our shadows, our secrets, the things within ourselves that go bump in the night, and end up resenting each other in search of resolving something that actually lives inside us.

For some, it also simply provides some buffer against the fear of dying alone, a very human anxiety.

There is, of course, a more compassionate approach to love, wherein the purpose of a relationship is: simply to practice love. To receive and support each other as human beings and bear witness to who they are, moment to moment and across their lives.

This framework, of course, requires something different of us; a looser grip on relational expectations around how our partner represents us or meets the unresolved pains we call “needs.”

The approach also requires both people to actually be in touch with who they are. Because without this knowing, there is nothing to share, nothing to witness, nothing to offer to have loved, or love in exchange (leaving those within the relationship falling back to one of the other patterns in its place.)

If we want compassionate love, where we enter into relationships with the lens of them serving as vessels purely to love one another in close regard (which is admittedly not for everyone, as it contradicts many other, more conventional and common approaches), then we have to be prepared to offer the “meat” for the potluck to exchange.

To have compassionate relationships, built on the goal of simply loving one another, we have to first love ourselves enough to sit with and experience our emotions, deeply, while resisting the urge to either dismiss them or delegate them to others / things outside of us to resolve.

To love compassionately, and love another for the full fabric of their being and offer our own in return, requires us to first know the full fabric of what we experience day to day, and many of us do not exist in that mental model. It can be built, however, with small simple attunements to anything and everything that comes up for you in a day (and there are countless, layered, often conflicting things.) When we build an intimate and comfortable familiarity with all of the details of what makes us up, we are better equipped to actually relate to others in order to offer ours, and receive theirs with equal compassion.

I genuinely have no idea where people come by their emotional vocabulary.

My best guess is that it’s taught to some people by their parents during early attunement (e.g., a child loses a toy and the parent reflects, “you must feel so sad”), but on the few occasions I’ve asked people with children whether this is the case, I haven’t gotten clear or consistent answers.

This leaves the next likely possibility that we pick them up through seeing others express emotions and then hearing them name them. We see someone crying, for example, and then hear them say, “I feel so sad.”

The challenge with both of these is that they are building an internal map based on external surveying. Either:

• Someone else ascribing a word to what we feel, and then we, in the absence of having a better word handy, feel as though we’re in a position to accept that this must indeed be the hat for it.
• Someone else describing their internal state and labeling it, and we, in the absence of our own internal gridwork, accept that when something looks and acts like this, it must be the same word.

Both of these leave us without our own understanding of what we’re experiencing, instead relying on a language that may not match. And while, in a sense, this is how much language works (and really, most of society, including social norms, financial structures, and institutions, with us collectively agreeing that concept x is called x and means x), when it comes to the realm of own lived experience, vernacular like this may not ever actually reflect what we’re feeling. And then some part of us is left standing outside the exchange.

There is often pressure to package up the complexity of our experience neatly. But when the signals are layered, fragmented, dynamic and changing, and in various states of vagueness, volume or oscillation, to do is in fact not to “connect” with anyone, or ourselves, at all, but rather cheapen the experience, and cut it down to something pocket-sized, handy, and easy to hold, hand over, receive, and then drop.

But human experiences don’t actually work like that. The reason we so often struggle to know what we’re feeling is because what we’re feeling can’t be wrangled into simple terms.

Humans are complex creatures. We do not “experience” in primary colors.

To understand how we feel, the solution is not a feelings wheel (though they are cool), nor is it a tighter understanding of emotional language (though it can be helpful.)

The solution to understanding how we feel is in opening up all the doors and windows on our full linguistic capacity. It’s exploring everything we know about the language we speak, even beyond “reasonable” or conventional connections and associations.

Instead of “sad,” it’s saying what it really is, which is probably something more like: “everything is gray and quiet,” or “I feel like I’m wearing a coat the size of a duvet and the weight of a house,” or, as Teddy Roosevelt wrote in his diary on Valentine’s Day 1884, when both his wife and mother died the same day: “the light has gone out in my life,” written under a simple, articulate: “X.”

Instead of “happy,” we might feel like we did “on the first ride with a new bike as a kid,” or “I can’t stop smiling,” or “I feel so warm, light, and lit up.” We could cheapen this to “happy,” but to do so is to strip away the vibrance of what we were actually feeling, before we rinsed it through a single word.

Why does this matter? Because this is how we truly experience emotions.

To speak in genuine and layered, fragmented, or implicit emotional language is to truly see them, and the only way in which we truly see and experience ourselves to know how we feel and, just as importantly: it’s also the only way in which we can be truly seen by someone else.

To speak in forced simple terms is to leave ourselves outside of the dialogue. To speak as we actually feel, at times vague or layered or fragmented or indirect, is to share what we truly feel and truly connect.