Are There Health Benefits to Feeling Emotions?

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, United States, discovered that people had different beliefs about whether emotional feelings are helpful or unhelpful in their lives. More people felt emotions are helpful, and more women than men endorse this belief. People in the group believing that emotions are helpful said that emotions contributed to their sense of wisdom and personal strength. People in the unhelpful group thought emotions were a form of weakness and interfered with making rational choices. The people who found emotions helpful reported greater well-being and were more accepting of their emotional response compared to people in the “emotions are unhelpful” group, who reported less well-being, greater emotional suppression, and more substance use.

Research done at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, on 403 women with fibromyalgia compared to 126 women with no such symptoms, found that emotional suppression was significantly more likely in the fibromyalgia group. Beliefs that emotions are not helpful, therefore, can be a factor in the formation of inflammation and disease states. On the other hand, people who are able to feel and express a wider variety of emotions have lower biomarkers of inflammation, which makes them less susceptible to chronic illnesses such as fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, and immune system dysfunction. Similarly, people who are more able to express their grief after the loss of a spouse also have lower levels of inflammation compared to those that try to suppress their emotions.

Research done at the University of California, Berkeley, United States, shows that Vipassana meditators who practice attention to felt experiences in the body and dancers who are trained especially in proprioceptive awareness of the felt sense of the body in motion, have higher levels of emotional awareness compared to people who are not trained in any embodied practice[v]. This link is likely due to the fact that interoceptive feelings related to emotions, such as heart rate, overlap in the anterior insula with emotional evaluations.

A research study done at the University of Washington, Seattle, United States, explored a clinical intervention that helped people get more in touch with emotions. One client from the study, a 40-year-old woman with chronic back pain, is asked by her therapist to feel the ache in her back. As she is exploring the pain, an emotion starts to arise.

“She feels her throat tighten and tears come to her eyes. The therapist asks what she is noticing, and she says ‘I just feel so sad,’ crying quietly with her eyes closed. The client explains that she is remembering her brother who died two years ago and that she’s not had a chance to really mourn: ‘I feel like I just need to cry and let him go. I miss him so much.’”

The pain in her back begins to lessen and the client reports that she was not aware of how she was holding back the emotion of sadness. She is fully feeling the grief, perhaps for the first time, while at the same time trying to make sense of where it comes from in her thought process.

In restorative states of embodied self-awareness of emotion, we simply surrender to the feeling of sadness and grief (or whatever is there). We allow it to arise and be felt with no effort to understand, interpret, or modulate it. The result is usually that the emotional feeling builds, peaks, and then subsides into a felt sense of relief and parasympathetic relaxation.

It seems easy, doesn’t it? If we just let ourselves feel our emotions and not try to figure things out, we’ll be rewarded with peace, immune system healing, and contentment. Something long-suppressed and hidden can come to the surface and we are finally relieved of a traumatic burden. If we are in a dysregulated pattern, however, this does not seem easy at all. We may have a deep-seated fear and accompanying ruminative thoughts that the emotion will consume us, that we have to do everything in our power to suppress it, hold back our tears or rage or even joy.

Restorative emotions happen when we let down our guard, when we let our emotions arise spontaneously. It is, in fact, not so easy to be in this state. It takes practice, guidance, support, and a sense of total safety and security. Restorative emotions can’t happen when we stop the process of felt experience in order to explain it to ourselves. We have to notice those thoughts and let them go as we surrender to wherever the emotion may take us.