Lab Notes: Decoding Your Feelings
A deep dive on the science behind emotions, feelings, and how they arise within us.
So, what are feelings?
If you asked me this question seeking a scientific answer a few years ago, I probably would have been stumped. Likely, I’d have laughed it off and covered up my lack of knowing the exact science with some goofy or poetic frame – They’re me, of course. All of me. My feelings are me and my interpretation of the world… and oooooh, baby do I have a lot of them.
Or more likely, I’d lean on my poet side and share the words I’ve explored time and time again. My feelings are my colors – they are my internal weather. Sometimes I am ragey red. Other times, I am deep, sorrowful blue. Yes, my feelings are my colors, and I am all the colors in this one beautiful life of mine.
Worse yet, I might have said: “they’re emotions… duh.”
Fortunately, after nerding about psychology pretty aggressively over these past few years, I’ve learned that we use the word “feelings” all the time, but we rarely talk about its definition. (Furthermore, most of us use “emotions” and “feelings” interchangeably, when that’s not quite right (though no judgement if you do, I used to too!).)
So, let’s break it down as simply as possible.
Emotion = the body’s signal.
Feeling = the brain’s story about that signal.
As I wrote last week, in our first Feelings installment, “Feelings Aren’t What You Think,” this surprised me.
I had used emotion and feeling interchangeably for a long time. But the more I looked, the more I learned that this definition applies in every facet of science. I found nearly a dozen different definitions, but let’s start here with one of the most mainstream:
From Psychology:
Feelings are mental interpretations of emotions — the labels we give to our internal emotional experience.
If emotions are unconscious reactions, feelings are the conscious awareness of those reactions.
Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you were asking, But Kate, why should I care??? Seriously! And I don’t blame you. This is in the nerdiest of weeds (hey, you’re reading “Lab Notes” – its where my nerding grows wild) but I promise you, it matters. Why?
It can help you accept yourself more easily
It can help you apply the right tools to healing your body’s reactions and your mind’s interpretations.
It can help you regain control of your experiences and your story.
So, nerds unite. Let’s dive into the underbrush!
What are Emotions? What are Feelings?
Emotions are the automatic physiological responses generated by your nervous system. They occur before conscious awareness — milliseconds before you “feel” them.
Emotions include:
changes in heart rate
shifts in breathing
muscle activation
hormonal cascades
gut sensations
facial expressions
autonomic arousal
They are your body’s first attempt to orient toward threat, opportunity, connection, or change. Emotions arise before consciousness, and are widely recognized as survival signals.
Ok, now you’re probably saying, “Kate, I’m confused.” Hardcore, same. Or at least same before I wrote this, LOL. Because I will always err on the side of the poetic, I like to think of it this way:
Feelings are the stories we tell ourselves about the emotions we experience.
Simply, you cannot have a feeling without some emotion underneath it. But you can have emotions you never become conscious of — they may show up as numbness, shutdown, irritability, or “nothingness.”
This distinction matters for healing, because the body and the mind need different types of support.
An Example at the Park
Let’s take a person who is fearful of dogs. Let’s call him Frank. Frank is at the park and sees a dog.
The dog attacks and bites Frank on the leg: Brain and body wire a threat response in relation to dogs. All dogs.
Time passes. Two months later, Frank sees a puppy. Brain: hey, there’s a dog over there!
You might see nothing but an adorable furball waiting for a romp or a sunggle, but before he can think, Frank’s threat response activates in the body. Heart races, breathing quickens, adrenaline courses.
Frank’s mind tells a story: Brain: dogs are going to hurt me, I am afraid of dogs.
How should we treat ourselves in such a moment?
We could be ashamed with ourselves, (Ugh, I’m so stupid, why am I making such a big deal over this little fluffball?).
We could be angry (I hate myself, why am I such a scaredycat?)
Or we could be kind to ourselves. We could understand that our emotional response is a survival response that can be rewired.
What’s more, these healing benefits extend into so many crucial aspects of our lives and wellbeing, next, we’ll take you through six reasons why understanding this is so important.
6 Reasons Why Learning About Emotions & Feelings Can Change Your Life
1. Because they run your life whether you notice them or not.
Emotions drive your decisions, relationships, impulses, fears, mood, stress, healing and so much of the overall experience of being alive. If you don’t know how to read them or how they are wired, you react to life. If you do know how to read them, however, you get to respond to life – yup, choose your life instead of solely reacting to it.
2. Because emotions happen automatically — but feelings help you respond intentionally.
Emotion happens to you. It’s the body’s fast, automatic internal shift. Feeling is how you make sense of it — the meaning you assign. When you don’t separate the two, you are likely to believe every feeling is a fact, you can be overwhelmed by body sensations and most of all — you react instead of reflect.
Living in your emotions can easily cause you to blame yourself for things your nervous system is doing automatically (and likely for the sake of your survival).
Understanding the difference creates choice. And if you have been wth me the whole time you know the entire point of the healing lab – my whole reason for starting it — is because I don’t want you to be harmed the way I was. I want you to have a choice in your healing and recovery.
3. Because without this distinction, you can misinterpret yourself constantly.
Here’s what happens when emotion + feeling get mushed together:
A racing heart → “I’m unsafe.”
Loneliness → “I’m unlovable.”
Shame → “I am the problem.”
Fear → “I must avoid this forever.”
Numbness → “I don’t feel anything at all.”
Anger → “I’m losing control.”
Now, although all those feelings are valid (they are always valid!), they are interpretations of your physical experience and not necessarily truths.
Separating them lets you find new interpretations
Separating emotions from feelings saves you from punishing yourself for symptoms and allows you to slow down and realize you can rewire one, the other or both… (Coming soon!! Yup, my inner exposure therapy enthusiast is getting fired up!!)
4. Because when you separate emotions from feelings, you can finally use the right tools for the job.
Let me be clear — if you are stuck treating feelings and emotions as the same thing, it can be serious barrier to healing. You might be where I was for years and you may end up “talking yourself out” of how you feel (hellloooo gaslighting). You might try to “logic” yourself through waves of emotion (can’t do it, it’s a response from the body). You might blame yourself for experiencing dysregulation (rather than honoring where your wiring is at in the healing process), and you might think you’re broken because the discomfort doesn’t go away.
In short, it’s a cluster.
But when you separate emotions from feelings and treat them with the right healing methods.
Emotion → regulated through the body
(breath, grounding, movement, safety, co-regulation)
Feeling → processed through the mind
(reflection, naming, journaling, therapy, meaning-making)
Healing becomes possible because you’re supporting each system in its own language AND you are hopefully choosing practitioners to help you who are experienced and trained accordingly.
5. Because trauma lives in the body. But the story doesn’t.
If you don’t separate emotion and feeling, you end up spending years trying to “understand” something your body actually needs to discharge.
For years (and years and years), I thought I needed to “just convince myself” that I was okay. When I finally acknowledged that I had emotions AND feelings and that my emotions were not yet feeling okay, I learned that I need to honor my emotions first before I can rewrite my brain’s story.
6. Because knowing both reconnects you to yourself.
Many people don’t know how they feel because: dissociation numbed it, survival shut it off, culture told them feelings were weakness, trauma rewired the threat system, and therapy taught them “feelings aren’t facts” (without nuance) Knowing the difference helps you build internal trust again.
You begin to understand:
why your body reacts
what your mind is making of it
how the two can work together
This is how self-trust begins and where true intentional growth and agency becomes possible.
Is Exploring Feelings a Practice That’s Right for Me Right Now?
Great question — and an essential one.
Exploring feelings can help if:
your body can access safety and parasympathetic activation regularly
you can sense internal signals in your body without becoming flooded
you feel grounded enough to experience discomfort with support
you’re curious about your emotional patterns
you have capacity to pause and reflect
Exploring feelings is not recommended if…
For many trauma survivors, including people with chronic dissociation, exploring feelings too early can increase overwhelm rather than reduce it. In those cases, stabilizing the nervous system comes first; meaning-making comes later. So exploring these right now may not be recommended for you if:
you are in acute crisis
your body is consistently in survival mode (fight/flight/freeze)
connecting to inner sensations triggers dissociation or flashbacks
noticing feelings increases panic
you feel unsafe in your environment or in your body
And please know this – you’re never “behind” wherever you are at in this. That fallacy is one I fell prey to, and it’s why a considerable amount of my exposure therapy work was re-traumatizing for me. And truly, I do not want that for you so please, honor you and take your time!
What Does the Science Say About Feelings?
There is surprisingly strong consensus in several areas:
1. Feelings depend on your brain’s ability to sense your internal state. Studies show that people with higher accuracy in sensing their internal states experience emotions in more nuanced, regulated ways.
2. Feelings are shaped by prediction. Your brain predicts what your bodily sensations “mean” based on prior experience. This is why the same sensation can feel like anxiety or excitement.
4. Naming feelings helps regulate them (not that we are shaming dysregulation – come and be as you are!). Research shows that affect labeling reduces amygdala activation and increases prefrontal cortex involvement — creating more emotional stability.
5. Feelings change with context. Where you are, who you’re with, and what you’ve lived through dramatically shape your felt experience.
However, the science is not settled on some other key areas:
1. Are emotions universal or constructed? There are different theories about whether or not basic emotions are biologically hardwired,1 or constructed by culture and context.2
2. Do feelings require language? We know naming helps, but it’s unclear whether conscious language is required to “feel.”
3. Can you have emotion without feeling? Evidence suggests yes — especially in trauma and dissociation — but the mechanisms are still being studied.
5. How do trauma and neurodivergence alter feeling states? Many people with PTSD, autism, ADHD, and depression experience emotions and feelings differently than others — and science is still catching up. There’s growing research, but not enough.
The Bottom Line
I really care about emotions and feelings — and their difference — and I hope this piece helped you understand why because our entire inner life depends on them and you are worthy of them mattering to yourself and the world.
Working with feelings lets you work with your body instead of against it.
It frees you from thinking you’re “too much” or “not enough.” Because you’re actually neither. (And nor am I.)
We are just wired like a human – and though often that sucks, at least knowing this helps us recognize that there is more we can control than we once might have thought.
Alrighty that was only a few thousand words y’all. How dare you call me a nerd? LOL.
Wishing you a day.
Kindly,
Kate
A Lab Notes Reminder…
You deserve to make informed choices about your own healing.
Despite what a lot of experts, authors, and influencers say, nobody has The Answer. Humans heal in thousands of ways, and here, instead of telling you what to do, we’re drawing a map of all the possible paths you can take in your own healing — your route across this map will be as unique as you are.
Each story, each tool, each practice is merely an offering. We’re not here to tell you what to do, but to help you sort through the noise and learn what might actually work in your own life. Around here, the only (near) universal truth we’ll name is that growth requires getting uncomfortable, and you can’t do that from a place of danger or shame.
Beyond that, the road is yours.
Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 6(3–4), 169–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939208411068
Barrett, L. F. (2006). Are emotions natural kinds? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(1), 28–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00003.x