Feelings: How You Should and Shouldn’t Feel

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Yummy Food of the Day: A burger!

“I know I shouldn’t be mad at her, but…” “I should be grateful to have a job at all….” “I shouldn’t care so much but…” “I know I should acknowledge how lucky I am…” “I shouldn’t feel guilty, but….” “You would think I’d be happy about it, but….”

And so on.

If you’re a fairly normal person, you probably have some ideas about how you should and shouldn’t feel about things. You shouldn’t be jealous of other people’s accomplishments. You should be glad to celebrate another birthday because it beats the alternative, right? You should be excited about your upcoming vacation. Etc.

These ideas about how you should feel about various life events or situations serve as a sort of reference point and social guideline. Probably not socially appropriate to express feelings of sexual arousal when you hear someone got beheaded in a terrorist attack. Cuz that’s just gross, not to mention terrifying and possibly enough to land you on some sort of a watch list. And it’s good to remember that most people express sadness or grief when their mother dies.

But the truth is, you’re probably going to spend a fair amount of your life not feeling what you’re supposed to be feeling.

Here’s why.

Feelings are what your body produces when it compares and a contrasts a few different things.

These things are:

1. Your ideal state. You generally have an idea, unconscious maybe, of what an ideal state would be. Not necessarily perfect in all respects but good. Like having enough to eat, having a place to live, someone to love, a good night’s sleep, etc., etc.
2. What you think is going on right now. You think you’re having a hamburger with a few members of your family. Or listening to your incredibly annoying sister-in-law whine about roasted peanuts for some godawful reason. Or whatever.
3. Whether what you’re doing right now is close or far from your ideal state, and whether you are moving toward or away from an ideal state. If, for example, you are puking your guts up as a result of food poisoning, then you are probably going to assess your current situation as being far from your ideal state. And as you continue to puke, you may think that you are moving closer to death and farther from a healthy non-puking state. In this food-poisoning situation, you experience feelings of despair, pain, fatigue, and fear. You despair of the puking ever ending. You’re puking so much your stomach muscles are burning and your throat stings. You are exhausted from all the puking. And you are afraid that things are going to get worse or that there’s something really wrong with you that’s even worse than food poisoning.

Or maybe not. Maybe you’re thinking “Food poisoning! This is going to get me out of having to do that work presentation that I’m deathly afraid of doing. Oh thank you God, thank you. Thank you for this unexpected bout of food poisoning.”

In other words, you could feel grateful and relieved to have food poisoning. Feelings depend on the situation.

Simple enough.

But feelings can get more complicated.

Sometimes you accidentally have ideas about your ideal state, current situation, or ongoing trend that you aren’t aware of. You’re hiding things from yourself. And then your feelings don’t match up with what you expected to feel or think you should be feeling.

This happens all the time. You think you should be worried about losing your job. But really you kind of hope you do. You think you should feel good when you engage in healthy habits like exercise but really you just feel like never exercising again. You think meditation should calm but somehow you just feel more agitated every time you try.

And this discrepancy between what you think you should feel and what you actually feel is good.

Kind of.

Actually, it’s just information. Helpful information that brings you closer to the truth of your situation so that you can make more realistic decisions.

Your feelings contain valuable information.

Your feelings of not really caring whether you lose your job or kind of hoping you do contains valuable information. Mainly, that you don’t like your job and you’d really rather not have it. You’d rather be doing something else. In fact, you shouldn’t be trying to save your job. You should be on LinkedIn doing your best to rustle up something better–if you want to be realistic about what makes you happy.

Admitting that exercise and meditation don’t actually make you feel good will allow you to make more realistic decisions about how to de-stress yourself and what strategies are willing to employ to keep yourself healthy. Maybe running isn’t for you, but you don’t mind trudging to the ferry on foot or engaging in some vigorous house-cleaning on the weekends.

Maybe meditation really isn’t for you (it isn’t for everyone for sure) and you’d do better off running around a basketball court with your out-of-shape friends.

Or whatever.

The truth is, you just feel how you feel. And that’s that. You don’t have to tell everyone if how you feel is that your life is going to be way better now that your abusive mother is dead. But you also don’t need to change how you feel. The truth is just the truth. You don’t need to change it.

But….ironically enough, once you know what the truth is – you often can change it if you want.

Say you feel profound grief when your boyfriend breaks up with you. Pretty normal. You may want to tell yourself, though, that you shouldn’t feel that way, he wasn’t good enough for you, he cheated, etc.

But if you don’t tell yourself you shouldn’t have heartbroken feelings, and let yourself just realize that you are heartbroken – mostly because he’s the best-looking man you’ve ever been with and you don’t think you’ll ever be as sexually attracted to anyone else ever again….

If you just let the truth be the truth – then you might realize that there’s no law of nature that says you’ll never again be with someone you’re wildly sexually attracted to. That’s just a gloomy prediction not a reality. Maybe this actually is a good opportunity to get rid of someone not so great and hook up with someone better.

Now I’m not saying that everything will magically transform in your favor every time you acknowledge how you truly feel about something, even when it isn’t what you think you should be feeling.

Sometimes you’ll have a really painful feeling and it will last awhile.

But it will dissipate if you just let it be what it is. Whereas feelings that you repress because they aren’t what you should be feeling – those suckers hang around forever! Strange but true.

So, while it might be good to know what you should be feeling – it’s even better to know what you actually do feel.

Even if what you feel right now is pretty fed up.