What Your Feelings Are Trying To Tell You

• Feelings tell you when your needs need to be satisfied.
• Distracting behaviour can never satisfy your true needs.
• Understanding your feelings leads to a satisfying and happy life.

In the last article we looked at how feelings are the body’s way of telling you whether your wants, needs and desires are being fulfilled.

You saw that good feeling means you’re on track and are fulfilling your needs, whilst a bad feeling means some area of your life needs attention.

By listening to your feelings, especially your bad feelings, you are given a clue as to how to satisfy a certain need which is currently unfulfilled.

This principle of fulfilling needs is similar to how we respond to hunger. When our body needs food it makes us feel hungry, which then causes us to look for something to eat.

As soon as we have finished our meal, our feeling of hunger disappears, until our body signals to us again that it needs more food.

So satisfying your emotional needs is just like satisfying your hunger. Your feelings tell you what your body and mind needs, and if you fulfil that need that feeling will go away.

However because our life is constantly changing on a day to day basis, our needs are likely to change, and so just like hunger, they need to be fulfilled from time to time. The only way you can do this of course, is by listening to your feelings.

To help demonstrate this principle, I will talk about something I am using right now to write this article, my laptop.

Just like a person a laptop has some basic needs, one of these needs is the need for power. To ensure that this need is met, my laptop will tell me when it is running low on power by showing me a battery icon. 

This indicator tells me when I need to recharge my batteries, and connect my laptop to a power supply. So just like the laptop battery indicator, our feelings tell us what need we need to fulfil in order to keep ourselves running smoothly.

Distracting Yourself From Feelings

If you have ever used a laptop before and your batteries were running low, you can probably relate to the example I just gave.

When your power is low, your see the indicator and you react as soon as possible to give your laptop some more power.

However when it comes to fulfilling our own needs, most people aren’t so quick in reacting to their bodies indicators, their feelings.

Rather than taking action to address their need, most people tend to engage in some sort of “distracting behaviour” which temporarily makes them feel better, but does not actually fulfil the need their body was trying to tell them about.

So sticking with the same analogy, let’s suppose I am using my laptop and the battery indicator tells me my batteries are running low, so I start to get a bad feeling.

In this case, the bad feeling might be that I start to worry whether I can find a place to plug in my laptop so I can finish my work.

The battery indicator is not bad for telling me I am running low on power, it is simply a signal telling me that my laptop needs something.

This is why in the previous article I made the point that there is no such thing as a bad feeling, as all feelings serve some beneficial purpose.

Let’s now suppose that something falls from a shelf behind me, and hits me on the head. After I finish rubbing my sore head, I return back to my laptop and see the battery indicator, but now I have no idea what it means!

As my battery begins to drain my laptop starts to beep, but because I don’t know what it means I find it annoying and try to ignore it by distracting myself from the noise.

I might distract myself by playing some music loudly, turning the volume down or getting something to eat.

Whatever I do to distract myself from the noise makes me feel better, and so I feel that I have taken the right course action. Problem solved, right? Wrong!

In reality my actions did not actually solve anything, they simply distracted me from my laptops need for power.

I may have made myself feel temporarily better, but as soon as I finished distracting myself my attention was brought back to the beeping noise, and so I started to feel worried and annoyed again.

Dangerous Distracters

Distracting behaviours are a very useful way of immediately eliminating or reducing bad feelings which come as a result of our unfulfilled needs.

For example, if I feel sad and I find that by eating some chocolate I can make myself feel better, then the next time I feel sad I am likely to eat some more chocolate.

If this pattern continues, I may develop a habit of using chocolate as a means of distracting myself from my sadness. Eventually I may become addicted to chocolate and emotionally dependant upon it.

The term “emotionally dependant” simply means that I now need chocolate to feel good, and without chocolate I feel bad.

By becoming emotional dependent on something you rely on your distracter (e.g. chocolate) to cope with the painful emotion you are experiencing, rather than trying to satisfy the need, want or desire your feelings were trying to draw your attention to.

Although I have used chocolate in this example, a distracter can be anything you use to comfort yourself during painful times.

Some distracters are more harmful than others, for example drugs and alcohol are two of the most harmful distracters you could resort to.

Knowing What The Signal (Feeling) Means

Once you know what a signal means, such as the battery indicator on a laptop, you will know what to do when that signal appears.

In this case, I know that the battery indicator means my laptop needs more power and so I can respond by plugging in my power supply.

By reacting appropriately to the signals I receive I get a sense of satisfaction when I see the low power indicator disappear.

I know that I have fulfilled a need of the laptop, and so can use it safe in the knowledge that I can complete my work, without having to worry about the battery running out.

Obviously this approach is a lot better than trying to distract myself from the warning my laptop was giving, as it addresses the root cause of the problem, whilst also avoiding any negative side effects of using a distracter.

In the next article, we shall have a look at some of the dangerous side effects these distracting behaviours can have. But before you move on, use the summary below to remind yourself of the main points raised in this article.

Summary

Your body has certain needs which need to be fulfilled.

Your body will let you know which needs need to be fulfilled via a feeling.

If you listen to this feeling and satisfy this need, you will feel good and satisfied.

If you choose to ignore this feeling by distracting yourself from it, your need will remain unfulfilled, and you will continue to feel the bad feeling whilst remaining unsatisfied.

Unfulfilled needs lead to a life of frustration, which eventually leads to depression.

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