For the most part, people are either much more in-touch with their thoughts than their feelings or vice versa. It’s rare to find someone who has a deep awareness of both. Let’s investigate this further:

First of all, negative emotions can be painful to experience. A lot of people want to block them out, whether they are consciously aware of this or not. There are many ways to block out your emotions; it is called escapism. Some common examples of this are:

Workaholism – Where you distract yourself with work.

Substance Abuse – Where you numb out your brain or experience “highs”.

Evasion/Repression – Where you simply block out things you don’t want to acknowledge, either consciously or unconsciously.

Pleasure-Seeking – Where you distract yourself with shot-term, transient pleasure like sex, gambling, buying expensive things etc.

Common Escapism – This is what most people think of when they hear escapism. It could include watching TV, playing video games, watching movies etc.

Some of these are fine in moderation. But when used for escapism, they are all just ways of distracting yourself from confronting unpleasant feelings.

There’s also the fact that a lot of people are conditioned from a young age to block out certain feelings. For example, when you’re upset some people might look at you like you’re strange. If you’re angry, someone might tell you to “bottle your rage”. Or people might tell you how you shouldn’t feel certain ways. After a while, the person experiencing these negative emotions might think there is something wrong with him and seek to block out these feelings altogether.

So if you are out-of-touch with your feelings, you should get back in-touch with them. It’s always helpful to being a certain level of awareness to your emotions. In fact, even when you directly ask people how they feel about a certain situation, they’ll often just tell you what they think about it. You could ask them, “How did this make you feel?” and they’ll respond, “I thought it was really bad.” They still don’t tell you what they actually feel.

To know how you feel about something, you have to slow down and pay attention to your body, how you’re breathing, your muscle tension, your heart rate, your mood (calm, agitated, elevated, depressed etc.). Bring awareness to your feelings that maybe even have a list of different emotions that you can compare with to best describe how you actually feel. It will help you develop the skill of emotional awareness. After all, there is nothing wrong with negative emotions; they help us solve problems. But if you let them linger in the background then they can cause health problems later on in the future and exacerbate your already present anxiety.

But then there’s people who need to get more in-touch with their thoughts. These people are typically very in-touch with their feelings. They can tell you how they feel about any particular thing, but they have trouble telling you what they think about it. If you ask them for their opinion on something, they tell you how upset or excited they are.

To find out what you think about something, you also have to slow down and think what something actually means to you. It’s the meaning that something has that’s important. In other words, “OK, I know I feel a certain way. Now why do I feel like this?” You need to ask yourself “why”. What is the meaning behind the emotion? Why do I feel this way? Start thinking about the context of the situation, what lead up to the events, what the ramifications are etc.

Learning what you think about things will take a lot of introspection and you will learn a lot about yourself. Some of these feelings have very, subtle roots that are very hard to pinpoint. It just requires a lot of conscious focus.

Now once you are very aware of both what you think about things and how you feel about them, you have some powerful tools at your disposal. You can being to realize which of your thoughts influence your anxiety and where they originate. You learn even more about yourself and different actions you can take to remove your anxiety. This is how your brain is supposed to work. You feel a negative emotion, you learn what it means and then you fix the situation (if there actually is one).