“I Don’t Know Why I Feel This Way”
Have you ever said that out loud, sitting with a friend or a counsellor, trying to make sense of what you’re feeling?
I know I have. Sitting there, feeling the wheels of my mind turning, searching for any reason that could explain it. And the thing is, whenever I go looking for a reason, I always find one. I’ll explain a feeling away with whatever makes most sense in that moment.
Psychology has a name for this. The neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, studying people whose brain hemispheres had been surgically separated, found that the left hemisphere would confidently invent explanations for actions it had no real information about. He called it “the interpreter”. Its job is to make a story fit, not to check whether the story is true. And it isn’t only a quirk of unusual brains. In a classic 1977 paper, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson showed that ordinary people regularly give confident, sincere and wrong reasons for their own choices and feelings.
So when we ask “why do I feel this way?”, we will get an answer. It just might not be the right one.
I know I’m not alone in this. (Yes, you. I’m talking to you.) I’ve heard that same sentence from so many people in therapy, and it’s what made me want to write about it. Not knowing exactly where a feeling comes from often brings up guilt or frustration, as if being unsure of your own feelings means you’ve somehow failed at being a person.
But not being able to explain what you feel isn’t a sign that you’re disconnected from yourself. I’d argue it can be the opposite.
Our Obsession With Knowing
We live in a culture that values knowing. From a young age, we’re taught that the goal is to figure things out, to analyse, to explain. Remember school? There was always a right answer, and if you didn’t know it, you just had to try harder. That lesson sticks.
As adults, we bring the same mindset into our emotional lives. We treat feelings as problems to be solved rather than experiences to be felt. We think that if we can just understand why we feel something, we’ll have done it right.
The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes beautifully about this. In The Master and His Emissary, he argues that Western culture has come to favour a way of attending to the world that’s detached, categorising and focused on control, which he links to the left hemisphere of the brain. It’s brilliant at making sense of things, but less good at leaving room for what can’t be neatly explained.
It’s worth knowing that his argument is debated. Neuroscientists largely agree that both hemispheres are involved in almost everything we do, and McGilchrist himself says the difference is in how each side pays attention, not in a simple split between logic and feeling. I find his book most useful as a way of thinking about culture rather than as a brain map. But the picture he paints will be familiar to many of us: a world where knowing equals competence, and not knowing feels like failure.
What Happens When We Overthink Our Feelings
You may have come across the “90-second rule”, from the neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor. She suggests that an emotion, as a physical response, lasts about a minute and a half, and that anything longer is kept going by our thoughts.
It’s a lovely and memorable idea, and I’ve found it helpful myself. But I should be honest: the 90 seconds comes from her own observations, not from research measuring how long emotions last. When the psychologists Philippe Verduyn and Saskia Lavrijsen asked people to track their emotional episodes, durations varied enormously. Shame and surprise tended to pass quickly. Sadness lasted the longest of all, often for days.
What’s interesting is why some feelings lasted longer. Along with how important the event felt, the biggest factor was rumination: going over and over the feeling and what it might mean. Together, those two things explained around half the difference in how long emotions lasted.
So Bolte Taylor’s number may not hold, but her central point does. What keeps a feeling going is often not the feeling itself, but what we do with it.
Emotions tend to rise, peak and pass. They’re waves, not storms. But when we start interrogating them (Why do I feel this way? What does it mean? Should I be feeling this?), we keep stirring up the same response. It’s like pressing “refresh” on a page we don’t actually want to stay on.
That’s how sadness can turn into heaviness, how anger can linger as resentment, how fear can settle into anxiety. We end up feeling less of the original emotion and more of the story we’ve built around it.
And it can happen with any emotion. For some people, sadness feels unsafe. For others, it’s anger, or even joy. So the mind steps in to manage it: to think it away, control it, make it make sense. But all that thinking can keep us stuck inside the very feeling we were trying to escape.
Name It, Don’t Interrogate It
This is where I want to add a nuance, because it would be easy to read all this as “don’t name your feelings”. The research suggests something more interesting.
Simply putting a feeling into words seems to help. In a well-known brain-imaging study, Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues found that labelling an emotion (“that’s anger”, “this feels like fear”) reduced activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in alarm. Naming lightly can take a little heat out of a feeling.
What seems to cause trouble is the why. The psychologist Edward Watkins has spent years studying the difference between abstract “why” thinking (Why does this always happen to me? What does it say about me?) and concrete “what” and “how” thinking (What am I feeling right now? Where is it? How did this moment unfold?). The abstract kind tends to feed rumination. The concrete kind tends to help people recover. In one study, people with depression who practised more concrete thinking every day for a week showed a meaningful drop in symptoms.
So the emotions wheel isn’t the enemy. A simple word, if one comes, can help. It’s the endless investigation that wears us out.
Therapy and the Value of Not Knowing
Even in therapy, the “why” mindset sneaks in. Many of us are trained to look for root causes, to find patterns, to make meaning out of what hurts. And understanding can be powerful. But I’ve learnt that searching for answers too soon can pull us away from what’s most alive in the room: the feeling itself.
There was a time when I thought my job was to help people figure out their feelings and make sense of them. Over time, I noticed that the moments of real change didn’t usually come from explanation. They came from presence. From slowing down enough to be with what was happening, without rushing to label or fix it.
I’ve had to learn that myself, too. I grew up in the same culture that values analysis over experience. Learning to stay with uncertainty, to resist the urge to tidy things up, has been slow, and it’s still going. I still catch myself trying to decode something instead of sitting with it, as a therapist and as a person.
What It Means to “Stay With” a Feeling
So what does it actually mean to stay with a feeling? It’s simpler than it sounds and harder than it looks. It means noticing what’s happening inside you without rushing to understand or change it.
You might feel your chest tighten or your stomach drop. Maybe your jaw tenses or your breath gets shallow. Staying with it means allowing those sensations to be there without turning them into a story. No analysis, no self-criticism, no why. Just noticing.
If you’d like to try it, the next time you notice a strong emotion, pause before asking Why am I feeling this? Instead, bring your attention to your body. What do you notice? Where do you feel it? If a simple word comes (tight, heavy, sad), that’s fine. If not, that’s fine too. You could slowly scan from your head to your feet, or just follow your breath for a minute. That’s it.
It doesn’t offer quick answers. But over time, it can build a kind of trust in yourself, one that doesn’t depend on knowing.
When Turning Inwards Isn’t the Right Starting Point
This approach doesn’t suit everyone in the same way, and it’s worth saying so.
For people who have experienced trauma, paying close attention to the body can sometimes bring up more than feels manageable. If that happens, it’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. It can help to keep your eyes open, keep it short, notice something in the room around you, or stop altogether. This kind of practice is often best explored with a therapist first.
For some people, not knowing what they feel isn’t avoidance at all. Difficulty identifying and describing emotions, sometimes called alexithymia, is much more common in some groups. A review by Emma Kinnaird and her colleagues found it affects around half of autistic people, compared with about one in twenty in the general population. Some people also find it harder to read signals from inside their body. If that’s you, there’s nothing wrong with you, and “notice what you feel in your body” may not be the most helpful instruction. Movement, drawing, writing or simply noticing what you want to do can be gentler ways in.
And if a feeling is overwhelming, or stays with you for weeks and gets in the way of daily life, it’s worth talking to your GP or a therapist rather than trying to sit with it alone.
Understanding Comes Later
Staying with your feelings doesn’t mean giving up on understanding. It just arrives differently.
The philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin noticed something similar decades ago. Listening to recordings of therapy sessions, he and his colleagues observed that the clients who benefited most tended to pause and pay attention to a vague, bodily sense of their situation before finding words for it. He called this the “felt sense”, and his approach, Focusing, grew out of it. Understanding, in his view, often comes from staying with a feeling rather than before it. The research behind this is mostly older and based on correlations, so it can’t show that this way of paying attention causes better outcomes. But it fits what many therapists, from different traditions, see in the room.
When we let ourselves experience a feeling without rushing to explain it, understanding often comes in its own time. Clarity tends to follow presence, not precede it.
So if you’re sitting with an emotion and feel uncertain, remind yourself: it’s okay not to know yet. You’re simply feeling. And for now, that’s enough.
If this resonates, you might also like Why Trying to Calm Down Can Keep You Anxious and When Psychological Frameworks Help Us Understand Ourselves.
In therapy, there’s room for not knowing. If you notice the urge to figure things out instead of feeling them, it can help to explore that with support, at your own pace. At Trueform Therapy, I offer one-to-one sessions in person in Cardiff and online across the UK and EU. You’re welcome to get in touch to ask any questions before booking.
If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further
Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight (2008) is a remarkable personal account of a neuroscientist’s stroke and recovery, and the source of the 90-second idea. Read it as a moving memoir rather than a research summary.
Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009, expanded edition 2019) explores how different ways of paying attention shape our culture. It’s long and ambitious, and its arguments are debated, but it’s full of ideas.
Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing (1978) is a short, practical guide to paying attention to the “felt sense” before rushing to explain it.
And if you’d like to look at the research directly:
Kinnaird and colleagues on alexithymia in autism (2019): PubMed Central
Verduyn and Lavrijsen on why some emotions last longer than others (2015): BPS Research Digest
Lieberman and colleagues on putting feelings into words (2007): PubMed
Watkins on “why” versus “how” thinking: overview