Emotions vs. Feelings

We often use the words emotions vs feelings as if they were twins.
But the truth? They’re more like close cousins born from the same experience, yet living in different worlds inside us.

• 1. Emotion: The Spark You Don’t Control

An emotion is your body’s first responder swift, instinctive, and older than language itself. It’s a biological sense, as vital as sight or hearing, scanning the world for signals of safety, danger, connection, or loss.

It rises from deep within the brain often the limbic system before your conscious mind has time to name it. In a heartbeat, it can tighten your muscles, quicken your breath, and flood your bloodstream with hormones, preparing you for action.

You don’t summon it.
It summons you.

Picture this: you’re walking home under a quiet night sky. A sudden crash of metal shatters the stillness. Before you can think, your pulse spikes, your body stiffens, and every sense sharpens. That fears the pure, unfiltered spark arriving to guard you, not to harm you.

• 2. Feeling: The Story You Tell Yourself

A feeling begins the moment your mind turns toward an emotion, holds it in awareness, and starts to give it shape. It’s the conscious translation of what your body has already decided an inner storyteller taking the raw spark and wrapping it in words, meaning, and memory.

Where emotion is universal, feeling is personal. It’s filtered through your past, your beliefs, and the way you see the world.

So, the crash in the alley becomes, “That might be a thief, I’m scared.” The instant fear becomes a story, coloured by your history and imagination.

Unlike emotions, feelings can linger long after the moment passes, kept alive by the thoughts you feed them. A single spark can burn for minutes, hours, or even years depending on the story you choose to tell.

Why This Difference Matters in Real Life

Understanding the gap between an emotion and a feeling is not just an intellectual exercise it’s a survival skill for the mind and heart. Most of us live as if they are the same thing, swept away in a single tide. But the truth is the first wave the emotion can be met with a choice before it turns into the second wave the feeling that carries us further out.

If you can catch yourself in the emotion phase, you gain a rare moment of control. Not over the emotion itself it arrives without your permission but over what happens next. It’s like noticing the first drop of rain before the storm gathers. You can’t stop the clouds from forming, but you can choose whether to seek shelter, open an umbrella, or stand in the rain.

This pause is the birthplace of self-awareness. In that breath between emotion and feeling, you have the chance to become the author of the story you’re about to tell yourself. Fear can remain a brief alert instead of becoming days of anxious spiraling. Anger can be acknowledged as a boundary alarm rather than exploding into conflict. Sadness can be allowed to speak softly without pulling you into hopelessness.

Karla McLaren’s The Language of Emotions Workbook puts it simply: emotions themselves are wise messengers, but the stories we attach to them can either amplify their wisdom or distort it. When you pause here, you’re not rejecting the emotion you’re respecting it enough to hear what it’s saying before translating it into the language of your conscious mind.

The spiral begins when we confuse signal with identity.

• Emotion says: “Something feels unsafe.”
• Feeling might twist that into: “I am unsafe.”
  That shift changes everything. One is a passing state; the other becomes a lens through which you see the world.

So the work is not to silence emotions (impossible, and unhealthy), but to shape the narrative that follows them. That narrative is where your personal power lies. It’s where choice begins. It’s the moment where a spark can warm you instead of burning you.

Because in the end, emotions are weather; feelings are climate. You can’t stop the rain, but you can decide whether to plant seeds in it or drown in it.

Emotions arrive like uninvited guests sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, but always carrying a message. Feelings are the conversations we choose to have with them. One is the spark; the other is the story.

When you learn to pause between the two, you step into authorship of your inner life. You can let fear be a guide instead of a jailer, anger be a protector instead of a destroyer, sadness be a truth-teller instead of a weight.

You will never stop emotions from arriving nor should you. But you can choose how their visit is remembered. And in that choice lies the art of living not just reacting to life, but shaping it from within.

In the end, emotions write the first line.
The rest of the page is yours.

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