Our Feelings: Love Them or Hate Them, They’re Our Greatest and Most Reliable Ally

Last month I had a client, I’ll call her Helen, tell me she had a rare moment of calm waking up that morning.

She said that typically, the very moment she becomes conscious in the morning, and remembers herself and her life, her regrets from yesterday fill her head instantly.

Things she blurted, a problem she avoided that’s now a bigger problem, a snitty email she sent. She’d have to get up and start doing things to get away from the shame and pressure.

Everyone on the planet gets swallowed by regret or shame at times, maybe a lot. Everyone’s feelings rise and fall, and our well-being rise and fall with them.

What I find interesting is that everyone on her street might have a different flavor. Some people don’t focus on themselves, but instead get critical of what other people did wrong yesterday. Snitty emails they sent.

Some people don’t get critical or feel regret, but they say no to everything – every invitation, every new idea, every change. They’re closed and resistant to life in general.

Other people are consumed by who likes them and who doesn’t.

Then there’s people that wake up thinking about how behind they are in life and are in a constant feeling of lacking.

Many people get a variety platter with several that they rotate through in a given month.

Low feelings and bad feelings are a constant for some percent of our mental lives. Just like catching colds is part of our physiology. It's a fact of humanity.

Having our thoughts take a dive and bringing our emotional state with it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us or our lives.

In fact human feelings demonstrate our innate drive toward emotional balance and homeostasis. The same way fevers restore our physiology.

It might feel terrible, and like we’re sick or broken, but our feelings, like fevers, are a sign of our universal strength, vitality, and the fight to survive that’s embedded in all of nature’s DNA.

A little bit of insight into that wisdom and intelligence that’s working behind the scenes of our well-being gives people a profound sense of reassurance, and allows people to feel a level of calm and faith, sometimes even in the face of their lows.

A learning curve in this realm allows people to find more grace moving through the lows, regain their perspective and clarity sooner, and bounce back to neutral faster.

For Helen, her insights about her regret took a bunch of the intensity away from those morning lows.

The power drained right out the bottom, not all of the time, but a growing percentage of those mornings. Some mornings the intensity is there, yet some mornings she feels the regret, but she describes it as “just a little annoying, like a fruit fly, and then it wanders off.”

And some mornings, like last month, it’s not there at all. That happens more and more often for her.

One of Helen’s insights is captured in today’s video.

Today’s video is by Dr. George Pransky, my former business partner of 20 years.

This video is a free module from the online course ‘INSIGHT: The Principles of a Fulfilling and High-Performance Life. George and I co-created this course along with our colleague Kara Stamback, M.S.

We created this course to share some of the most essential insights that have created the biggest changes in our clients like Helen.

This is a sample from the course so people can see if it’s a good fit for them.

For more info on the course click here. The course is 50% off from Oct 7 - 31, 2022.

I hope today’s video is helpful. Click below to watch.