Get In Touch With Your Feelings To Improve Your Well-Being

How comfortable are you with your big emotions? It can be difficult to sit in your own feelings. Yet, understanding your thoughts and sentiments is a powerful way to support your well-being.

TaskHuman Coach Pam Adams found her own ability to guide people through their feelings when her mother was in the hospital after having a stroke. In fact, it was her mother who recognized that Pam was helping other people process her mother’s health scare.

Soon, the retired Air Force veteran and former corporate worker became a chaplain. Now she helps people learn how to become more present and comfortable with their emotions. 

Recently, Coach Pam chatted with Jamie Carroll on an episode of TaskHuman Talks to explain her perspective on how we handle the many feelings we experience in life. Here are the key takeaways:

1. Bad Days or Bad Moments?

Negativity is easy. When something bad happens in our day, we can color the whole day with that experience. But Pam reminds us that often it was just a moment, and we don’t have to let one negative experience impact our entire day. 

“Don’t say you are having a bad day’” she says. “Just say, ‘I’m having a difficult moment.’ Take the time in the moment to get what you need, whether it be a walk, whether it be some guided meditation, whether it be a coach on TaskHuman or whatever, definitely getting over that difficult moment so that you can then continue with your day.”

Accepting the difficult parts of our days and lives in small ways, like getting stuck in traffic, can prepare us to be more open to what we’re experiencing in bigger ways. We have the capacity to become more comfortable with our feelings.

2. Label Your Emotions

Sometimes we just don’t know how to label what we’re feeling. When we lump our feelings into broad categories, like happy, sad, or angry, we don’t fully open ourselves to experiencing those feelings. It takes work to dig deeper down within ourselves to find the specific feeling. For Pam, not getting to the real sentiment can cause us to mislabel the sensations we’re truly experiencing.

“Nine times out of 10, that may not even be that emotion,” she says. “And if it is the emotion, that’s probably within the top 10, let’s talk about the top five that you’re dealing with, the guilt, the pain, the shame of things that you’ve experienced.”

Learning to use the entire set of emotions to describe what we’re feeling opens us up to understanding why we’re feeling that way. Then, we can explore why and work through them more effectively.

3. Allow Grief to Happen

One feeling people tend to hide from is grief. We are afraid to let ourselves experience the full cycle of grief because it hurts. Pam says we also want to rush through our grief because it tends to make other people uncomfortable. 

“We want to hurry up and stop crying because we don’t want to affect other people around us,” she says. “Instead of being able to deal with our own emotions and be present with ourselves, we want to hurry up and get to the rainbow because now it feels as though we’re bringing everybody else down. But beloved, if you’re sad at that moment, let your tears fall.”

Learning to be present in your grief—and all of your other emotions—allows for you to be authentic and open up to others.

4. Have Hope

For Pam, hope is the feeling that things will get better in the future. You can have hope for a relationship, a situation, or even just your own wellbeing. Leaning into hope can feel awkward at first. If you haven’t practiced it, hoping can seem like you’re opening yourself up to disappointment. But hope also means you’re seeing the power of making the change, according to Pam. She says that when we have hope, it gives us a reason to work to make things different.

But having hope does not mean there is a guarantee that it will work out the way you thought. Pam has insight for those moments.

“Did it not turn out the way that you wanted to turn out or did it turn out the way that it needed to turn out?” she says. “Right. Because I think a lot of times we have faith and hope that things will go this way, but this way may not have been a part of my purpose. And so it went this way because this is the road that I’m supposed to be on.”

Learning to be comfortable with your emotions takes time. Give yourself the grace you need to keep trying, and consider using a coach to help you through your more difficult moments.

Feeling inspired? Hear more from Coach Pamela Adams by clicking here.

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