To be human is to feel, but when feeing discomfort, we may try to run away from it as fast as possible. Every time you fight against those uncomfortable emotions by distracting, suppressing, or running away from them, you spend all your energy in that battle, and at the end of the day, you end up with less energy to do what truly matters to you.

Although it’s hard, it’s not impossible to step back, learn to have all your emotions—the fleeting ones, the overwhelming ones, and the brutally chronic ones—and still check your values, evaluate the workability of your action-urges, and choose your behavior.

Choosing to Accept

You can choose to feel a feeling and yet still notice and name your feelings as if you’re angry at them, or you can choose to feel and accept them as they come, with the discomfort, the strong urges, and the body noise they make. You don’t have to like or love your feelings, and you don’t have to choose to feel them while forcing yourself and gritting your teeth either; you can learn to choose your feelings with acceptance, taking them as they are. Acceptance is about easing out of the emotional machinery and beginning to stay with what’s happening under your skin, right there, wherever you are.

Learning to accept your feelings without becoming them is like being here, in emotion land, before rushing there, to action land. Share on X