Discussion How do emotions physically feel like to you?

[sandqueen]

I'm especially curious about positive ones. I barely feel emotions, and while I can't name them, they all feel uncomfortable. I only learnt they were feelings this year, I'm that emotionally repressed.

I wanna know which feelings corresponds to which emotions for people. Feelings I know are stomach hurting with anxiety and ears burning with shame. And there is this empty chest feeling which is the most frequent one for me but I have no idea what it means.

And how even does good feelings feel like? Do I actually feel them too but don't notice them, or don't like them so I think they are bad too? I tried hugs and other kinds of physical touch but it didn't feel any good or bad. Masturbation does little for me and it kind of feels uncomfortable like tickling but somehow addicting. I feel like I'm self harming during it. All the I know about good feelings is descriptions in fanfics which might be inaccurate and I never felt anyhing like what's being described there. So tell me how does it feel.

 

[junctionbox]

BIG. i often feel like i'm being filled to the brim by something, feelings can be very overwhelming for me. sometimes i can't tell what they are but usually i can make an educated guess or ask myself what it might be. what i notice helps me is to ask "what would feel good?" and that sometimes guides me to what it is i'm feeling. often the response would be sh but i'm trying to get clean, so it's more listening to music/watching youtube/listening to the radio... i'm not nearly as emotionally repressed as you describe and i'm sorry to hear you are. i know people who experience the same and it seems like torment. sorry this response is probably not coherent at all. it is hard to describe emotions even when i don't especially struggle with them. i just try to follow what makes me feel peaceful and content. are those feelings you recognise at all?

 

[sandqueen]

BIG. i often feel like i'm being filled to the brim by something, feelings can be very overwhelming for me. sometimes i can't tell what they are but usually i can make an educated guess or ask myself what it might be. what i notice helps me is to ask "what would feel good?" and that sometimes guides me to what it is i'm feeling. often the response would be sh but i'm trying to get clean, so it's more listening to music/watching youtube/listening to the radio... i'm not nearly as emotionally repressed as you describe and i'm sorry to hear you are. i know people who experience the same and it seems like torment. sorry this response is probably not coherent at all. it is hard to describe emotions even when i don't especially struggle with them. i just try to follow what makes me feel peaceful and content. are those feelings you recognise at all?

thanks for answering
for me feeling things all the time would be the real torment. i don't even have the tolerance for what little I feel normally. if i could feel nothing it would be much more preferable for me.
i also feel the urge to self harm most of the time in response to feelings, like hitting my chest when it feels empty. ignoring them and pretending they don't exist also helps get rid of them which makes me even more emotionally repressed i guess :)
peace and content for me is feeling nothing. the only fuzzy and warm feeling i get is real fuzzy and warm from my soft blanket. (i get to have outside feelings yay) but even warm feels bad in heat, so how is it a good feeling exactly? and how does it feels fuzzy inside? questions questions in my head...
i wonder if every emotion have an accompanying feeling to them. does wonder feel like anything for example?..

 

[junctionbox]

thanks for answering
for me feeling things all the time would be the real torment. i don't even have the tolerance for what little I feel normally. if i could feel nothing it would be much more preferable for me.
i also feel the urge to self harm most of the time in response to feelings, like hitting my chest when it feels empty. ignoring them and pretending they don't exist also helps get rid of them which makes me even more emotionally repressed i guess :)
peace and content for me is feeling nothing. the only fuzzy and warm feeling i get is real fuzzy and warm from my soft blanket. (i get to have outside feelings yay) but even warm feels bad in heat, so how is it a good feeling exactly? and how does it feels fuzzy inside? questions questions in my head...
i wonder if every emotion have an accompanying feeling to them. does wonder feel like anything for example?..

we might be on opposite ends of the spectrum then. my feelings are very big and i have never been able to ignore them and pretend they don't exist. but then they bug me endlessly until i find a way to deal with them. interesting and also not surprising at all how both of us resort to self harm. after all it seems that we both get the urge when the feeling is too big for whatever tolerance we have to handle. it's just that sh is just a temporary solution :') doesn't really solve anything except for in the heat of the moment. i have had some good experiences resisting the urge but i still have sh thoughts daily and consider cutting probably daily atp.

peace and content for me is a state where i can think clearly and feel like myself. it's when i don't have a looping rumination going on inside my head, when i don't feel like i need to punish myself for anything, when i feel safe and not like there is some kind of impending doom or irrevocable failure or whatever. i guess it's feeling nothing for me too, but the nothingness comes with a general feeling of hopefulness / trust in myself, so it is a positive experience. it's very different from feeling numb which is what i would call feeling nothing, which is a horrible thing to experience.

outside feelings are nice, they are very grounding and can take a ruminator / overthinker like me out of a spiral. warm feels bad in heat, yes, and a positive inside feeling like happiness can also be too much for various reasons, in my experience it can be hard to feel very big purely positive emotions, i tend to not be able to feel those, i am always waiting for the buts and the what ifs. it is okay though because i am generally happy enough now that i'm no longer severely depressed.

feeling fuzzy inside for me would be something like when i see my family's cat after a long time. :) or my sister. just happiness about something or someone existing. i can also get that feeling from media, such as the ending of the movie secretary (2002 i believe, great movie)

interesting how you differentiate between feelings and emotions when for me they are pretty much synonyms. i find it hard to draw a line between outside and inside emotions, i think i tend to feel things rather physically or at least they are very all-encompassing. so if i feel something i really have to fight hard to operate through the feeling. that's what i mean when i say i have big feelings. i can push them away for example at work, but when i am just being myself or let my guard down, it comes flooding.

wonder in my case would feel like intense curiosity and the need to know something, like being unable to continue without knowing something.

a lot of my experience has to do with neurodivergence, i have adhd. i wonder if you are autistic?

 

[Passenger4224]

Emotions feel very uncomfortable to me. I experience them heavily, and it is honestly kind of exhausting