What Are Feelings: The Most Fascinating Facts About Our Emotional States

A feeling is a conscious experience of emotion. While the term “feeling” can also be used to describe purely physical sensations, such as touch or pain, in the context of this article we are going to talk about feelings as psychological phenomena, such as being head over heels in love or simply feeling like a cool dude.

Feelings are important because they are a major part of our entire experience of life. It’s our feelings that determine whether we experience ourselves as happy or sad, content or frustrated. There is no shortage of examples of people who seem to have it all yet feel unhappy, unfulfilled, and depressed. On the other hand, there are people who lead happy and fulfilling lives despite serious disadvantages, such as extreme poverty or physical disabilities.

It is also our feelings that motivate many of the things we do:

• working out to feel attractive,
• studying to feel smart and/or accepted,
• working extra hard to compensate for our real or imagined flaws in order to feel like a worthy romantic partner.

Some people donate money not only because they care about those who are less fortunate but also because giving makes them feel better about themselves.

Many of us buy products not because we really need them but because we hope they will make us feel better about ourselves. Feeling beautiful, stylish, rich, luxurious, or cool are just a few examples.

People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may intellectually understand that something is clean and still feel compelled to wash it because it doesn’t feel clean enough.

Counseling and psychotherapy often involve understanding a client’s feelings and then working from there, whether that means examining the thoughts behind them, changing behavior, processing experiences, or learning different ways of responding to those feelings.

If we can learn to understand and change some of our negative emotional patterns, we can change our experience of life without necessarily changing everything around us. Change your feelings, change your life!

Our feelings about the world are heavily influenced by our past experiences. In this sense, our feelings are closely connected to our perception of things and events. Young, middle-aged, or old, we have all had different experiences in life. We may come from different cultures, and some of us possess knowledge and experience that others don’t have. It’s only natural that we react differently to the same events. Each of us looks through the filter of our own perception and feels accordingly.

Feelings vs. Emotions

There are several websites that suggest that feelings and emotions are different, or no, VERY different things, and that knowing the difference is crucial for your success and self-improvement. While some theories suggest that emotions precede feelings, others use the terms somewhat differently. You can easily disappear down a rabbit hole of competing definitions.

For our purposes, there is no need to make things that complicated. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, a feeling is a conscious subjective experience of emotion. In everyday English, the words “feelings” and “emotions” also overlap considerably, so throughout this article we will use them loosely and sometimes interchangeably.

If you got an assignment at school to explain the technical difference between feelings and emotions, then this article probably isn’t what you need. If, on the other hand, you are wondering about human feelings (and emotions) and how it all works, then read on!

The Relationship Between Thoughts and Feelings

If you have ever read at least one self-improvement book in your life, it probably told you that to improve your life and reach your goals, you need to change the way you think. Self-help junkies know that, basically, half the self-help shelf seems to come back to this one idea, which can make these books a little repetitive after a while.

Still, there is something important behind the advice. Our thoughts have a profound impact on our feelings; our feelings influence the way we behave; and our behavior affects the results we get.

Both our thoughts and feelings are important parts of our experience of life. For example, if you feel sad, both thoughts and feelings may be part of the experience of being sad.

The good news is that thoughts can be challenged for accuracy, and feelings can be examined rather than automatically treated as facts. Sometimes changing the way we interpret a situation can also change how we feel about it.

Feelings, Hormones, and Brain Chemicals

Things would be so simple if it were just a matter of “thinking right” or if we could force ourselves to think exactly the way we need to at all times. Sometimes we simply can’t.

Our physical health, hormones, and brain chemistry can all influence how we feel. Some of the hormones and neurotransmitters involved in mood, motivation, stress, attachment, and emotional responses include:

• testosterone,
• estrogen,
• progesterone,
• norepinephrine,
• epinephrine,
• serotonin,
• dopamine,
• GABA,
• oxytocin.

Gut Feeling

The concept of feelings and emotions is fascinating by itself, but one of the most interesting parts of it is the phenomenon of gut feeling. A gut feeling is intuitive rather than consciously reasoned. It can be positive or negative: you might feel that you can trust someone without really knowing them, or you might sense danger when, rationally speaking, you can’t explain why you are afraid.

The weirdest part is that sometimes our gut feeling is actually right.

Many attempts have been made to explain intuition or gut feeling. One explanation is that it can draw on previous experiences without us consciously recalling all the details. The more experience you have in a particular area, the more information your brain has available when making a quick judgment.

It is almost as if all your knowledge and experience suddenly show up without showing you how it got there. You feel like you know something but can’t explain exactly how you know it.

That explanation makes a lot of sense in many situations. Having said that, you can probably think of a time when a correct intuition felt much harder to explain.

The Six Basic Emotions

Paul Ekman, an American psychologist known for his work on emotions and facial expressions, proposed six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. His cross-cultural research found evidence that facial expressions associated with these emotions could be recognized across very different cultures, including cultures with little exposure to Western media.

Another interesting area of research is the facial-feedback effect. Some studies have found that forming certain facial expressions can influence how people feel, although the size and consistency of this effect are still debated.

So smiling may not magically transform your mood, but your facial expression and your emotional state aren’t completely separate from each other either.

Six basic emotions image credit