Learning to Feel Without Flooding

For the longest time, mostly during my teenage years and into my early twenties, I thought that feeling meant drowning.

The smallest sadness would quickly roll into a heavy fog of despair, a quiet anxiety would suddenly swing into a full-body alarm…I struggled to simply feel whatever came over me and instead I became these emotions. What I didn’t realise then was that this behaviour wasn’t a personality flaw and it didn’t mean that there was something inherently ‘wrong’ with me. It was a nervous system pattern.

In psychological terms, this is often described as emotional flooding which is when the brain’s threat system becomes so activated that it overrides the parts of us that think, reflect, and regulate. The amygdala (essentially the brain’s alarm centre) fires rapidly, while the prefrontal cortex (the part that helps us make sense of what we feel) goes offline. 

When this happens, the body reacts as if it’s in danger, even when nothing outwardly threatening is happening. Think about the sensations we may feel during a panic attack; heart racing, tight chest, a heavy feeling in the stomach…these are not merely delusions inside of our minds, but automatic nervous system shifts, booting us into survival mode.

People who grow up with chronic stress, emotional unpredictability, or early adversity often develop nervous systems that are highly sensitive. They’re exceptionally good at detecting threat coming from those around them, but less practised at returning to a calm state. So when an emotion appears, it doesn’t drift in - it goes in, full-steam ahead, and crashes. What changed everything for me was learning that true self-regulation doesn’t mean feeling less. It means feeling with more awareness.

To explain what I mean by this, we can look over to one of the more robust findings in affective neuroscience which is, rather simply, naming emotional experiences changes how the brain processes it. When we put feelings into our own words, activity in the amygdala decreases while regions of the prefrontal cortex become more engaged, otherwise known as ‘affect labelling’ (Lieberman et al., 2007). In other words, noticing and naming what we feel quite literally calms the brain…pretty powerful, if you ask me.

This is why subtle shifts in awareness can, with practice, make such a difference. An example of this process:

Instead of:
“I’m anxious…there is definitely something wrong with me.”

You could try:
“My chest feels tight. My breathing is shallow. This is anxiety.”

You haven’t actually fixed anything, but you’ve changed how you meet the feeling. Instead of being completely swallowed by it, you can sit next to it. You can notice it, breathe with it, and let it move through you without losing yourself. Through doing this religiously, you realise that you can become the one who notices the feeling, not the feeling itself.

I would love to share a few ways to practise feeling without being overwhelmed that have carried me through my own experiences, with one important thing to note first -

If you live with panic attacks, trauma, or intense anxiety, emotions don’t always build slowly. For many people, the body goes into a state of distress very quickly, often before the mind has time to catch up. This is in no way a sign of weakness, it’s just how a sensitised nervous system works. So if sitting with feelings feels impossible at times, that doesn’t mean you’re not doing it correctly.

With that being said, here are my top tips as an anxious gal:

1. Treat the feeling like something you’re meeting, not something you are.
Try quietly saying: “This is just anxiety” or “This is just me having a little panic.” Naming a feeling can help the brain regulate it, even when it’s still strong.

2. Find where it lives in your body.
Notice where you feel it…is it sat heavy on your chest? Does it live inside your stomach? Or is it a big lump in your throat? If it all feels like too much, gently shift your attention to something neutral, like your feet on the floor. Take your time to do this.

3. Watch it, don’t wrestle it.
Set a short timer and let the feeling exist without analysing it. Emotions often soften when they aren’t being fought…you’ll only make things seem worse if you’re shaming yourself or tiring yourself out.

4. Let your body help.
Slow, long exhales and small movements, like pressing your feet down and stretching your hands, can tell the nervous system it’s safe.

5. Remember you are the one noticing.
The feeling may be intense, but you are still here, watching it. ‘You are not the storm, you are the space it moves through’.

Some days these practices will feel gentle. Some days they won’t. That’s because regulation is a form of learning, and learning takes time. Each moment you stay with a sensation a little longer, the nervous system updates its intricate map of what is safe. A reminder: you’re not struggling because you’re weak-minded. You’re working with a body that became very good at protecting you. :)

M.M

Reference

Lieberman, M.D., Eisenberger, N.I., Crockett, M.J., Tom, S.M., Pfeifer, J.H. and Way, B.M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

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