How to Feel (When You Don't Know How To Feel)

If you’ve spent years staying busy, numb, distracted, or high-functioning… feeling things can feel impossible.

Not hard. 

Alien.

You might know what you should be feeling — sadness, anger, longing — but instead you just feel foggy.

Or irritated. Or tired. Maybe your body is tense, but your mind won’t connect to it. 

That’s not dysfunction. That’s survival.

Avoiding feelings worked. It kept you safe when there wasn’t room for truth. 

But eventually the cost shows up: in your health, your relationships, your digestion, your dreams. 

So what do you do when you’re ready to feel — but you don’t know how?

You start small. 

You feel your jaw. 

You notice the knot in your stomach instead of trying to fix it. 

You sit in silence for 60 seconds and see what floats up.

Feel the surface your body is touching.

You don’t reach for joy. You reach for the next closest feeling.

There’s a concept called the emotional scale (thank you, Abraham Hicks) that maps emotional states in a kind of ladder. 

If you’re sitting in numbness, you don’t need to leap to gratitude.

You just need to hit irritation. 

From irritation, maybe you move to pessimism. 

From there, you might find your way to bored. 

And eventually… relief. Maybe even hope.

But only if you let yourself start where you are.

Sometimes when you try to feel, there’s just static. A blank space.

And because nature abhors a vacuum, something in you scrambles to fill it — with food, noise, work, control. Anything but stillness.

It’s not about forcing emotion. It’s about letting it have a place again. And sometimes that means letting yourself feel… nothing. Because even numbness is a feeling. And it usually has something to say.

This isn’t about emotional performance. It’s about becoming safe inside your body again.

Which is the beginning of healing — whether you can cry or not.

If you're in that space right now — here's what can help:

• Drink something warm. Hold the cup with both hands. Stay with the temperature.

• Lay on the ground. Literally. Let your body feel held by the earth.

• Speak out loud: “I don’t know what I feel, but I’m willing to find out.”

• Turn on soft music — not to fix you, but to stay company.

• Write for five minutes. Anything. Even: “I don’t know what to say.”

• Move slowly. Light a candle. Wash your face. Change rooms.

• Text someone safe. You don’t have to make sense. Just say: “I need to feel less alone.”

If what you’re feeling is too heavy to hold alone — please reach out.

You can call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 any time, 24/7. You don’t have to be in crisis to reach out. You just have to be human.

You don’t need to climb out of the darkness today. You just need to not disappear inside it.

In service to the highest good,

Lindsay

Up next:

Feeling good should be easy... but it’s not.

In Part 2 of this series, I write about why joy, connection, and desire can be just as triggering as grief — and what to do with that.