Emotional Realities Part 3: Feeling is Believing

How to step outside your emotional story and see clearly again

Photo by Jossuha Théophile 

The other day I was in a bad mood. Not for any obvious reason. Just a slow drift into something heavy and gray. It was the middle of the afternoon when I noticed it. One of those subtle shifts in emotional weather.

There wasn’t a clear trigger. I hadn’t had a difficult conversation or gotten bad news. I was just down. And like many of us, my first impulse was to power through, distract myself, stay busy.

That works sometimes, especially with low-level moods that pass quickly. But when distraction doesn’t work, or when the mood keeps coming back, what then?

Do you just let it run its course?

That’s an option, but sometimes when a mood sticks around, it doesn’t just stay in the background. It starts shaping how the world looks. It colors our thoughts, influences our behavior, and rewrites our sense of what’s true. For example:

If we’re anxious, the world looks dangerous.
If we’re depressed, it looks bleak.
If we’re angry, it looks wrong.

That’s when a mood becomes more than a mood. It becomes reality.

Not objective reality, of course, but these feeling-shaped realities don’t just stay inside us. They leak out and influence how we treat others. How we argue. How we read neutral gestures as threatening or hear criticism in a neutral tone of voice.

That’s where we’re picking up in this post.

·       In Part 1, we explored how the brain builds reality from prediction more than perception, and how interoception (the raw sensations inside the body) shapes what we feel.

·       In Part 2, we looked at how those bodily sensations combine to form our affect (our basic feeling state), and how it shapes the world we see, especially in emotionally charged situations.

Now in Part 3, we’re getting practical. Here’s what we’ll cover:

·       How emotions quietly reshape reality

·       How to catch that process while it’s happening

·       How to interrupt it by dropping the story and tuning into the body

The Mood Trap

When I find myself in a bad mood, the first thing I check is my body. Not for an emotion—like anger or sadness—but for the raw interoceptive data: things like tingling, pressure, heat, or tightness. I also try to notice exactly where I’m feeling it.

In this case, there was some foggy confusion in my head and a steady tightness in my stomach. If I had to use an emotion word, I’d say it was an inkling of dread. Unpleasant, but not overwhelming.

So that was my interoception (fog and tightness), my affect (unpleasant), and just an inkling of an emotion (dread).

What’s interesting is when I turned my attention to what I was thinking it was mostly a slow churn of undone tasks. Nothing especially dramatic. Just the usual weight of the day.

But then I noticed something strange. The more I focused on the tasks, the worse I felt. And the worse I felt, the more urgent the tasks became.

Ever notice that kind of escalation? How does that happen?

It starts with interoception and affect, which are mostly physical feelings. Then the mind goes looking for a reason, wrapping those feelings in meaning and crystallizing it into and emotion. And before long, the reason starts to feel like the cause. But it’s not—the feeling causes the reason, not the other way around.

This is why it can be difficult to think our way out of a bad mood. As thoughts arise to explain what we’re feeling, the feelings intensify in response to the thoughts—creating a loop. A self-reinforcing cycle  that feels undeniable.

Sometimes that loop builds slowly, like fog rolling in. Other times, it happens in a flash.

Let me show you what I mean.

The Tool in the Tesla

Just the other day, I was driving down Pacific Coast Highway when a car in the next lane swept past and cut into a tight space in front of me. Instantly, I felt a burning sensation in the middle of my chest, followed by the thought: Tool.

But let’s slow this down.

What I actually saw was a white Tesla swerving in front of me. Through the tinted windows, I caught a glimpse of what might’ve been half a head.

That’s it.

So how did I get all the way to tool?

Simple: my brain made a prediction. Based on past experience, expressed through the jolt of interoception I felt in my body, it filled in the image of a guy with a smug expression who didn’t care whether he endangered or inconvenienced anyone.

My brain showed me that image, but my eyes did not. It didn’t feel constructed. It felt obvious.

It appeared in my mind fully formed, as automatic and convincing as a dream.

But how to get rid of it?

Alternative Fictions

To dissolve a bad mood—or in this case, a knee-jerk narrative fueled by emotion—I first had to recall that my brain is constantly generating interpretations, not simply observing facts. And for any given situation, there are always multiple ways to see it.

In this case, for example:

·       Maybe the driver had just gotten some bad news and was distracted.

·       Maybe he was late picking up his child from daycare and was feeling rushed.

·       Maybe his elderly parent had taken a fall and he was frantic.

·       Maybe he was a teenager and simply inexperienced.

There are lots of stories that fit the little information I had. But my brain didn’t show me a stressed parent or a panicked kid. It showed me a selfish tool.

Just to be clear: that’s not a flaw in the system. It’s a testament to how powerful and efficient the brain is. It constructs reality on the fly, based on the data it has and the world it knows. And most of the time, we don’t even notice.

In fact, the most interesting part of this story isn’t whether my perception was accurate—it’s how automatic it was. And how convincing.

As soon as I felt that shot of adrenaline, I saw a tool. Not a maybe, not a possibility. A fact. As clear as day.

So why is that a problem? What’s wrong with thinking he was a tool? Maybe he was. And even if he wasn’t—so what?

I’d say it depends on what happens next.

If I’d just slowed down and given the guy some space, no harm done. But if I’d leaned into that perception and let my anger take over—that’s how a bad feeling can turn into reckless driving. And that’s where the trouble starts.

It’s the same in relationships. When are looking at our partner through a distorted emotional lens and don’t realize it, we’re more likely to snap at them, shut down, or treat them like the enemy.

We’ll dig into that more in Part 4, when we apply this to marital communication. But right now, let’s talk about how to work with this loop directly: how to dissolve a bad feeling, a bad mood, anger, anxiety, even depression.

It’s all the same mechanism. And with a little practice, we can all learn to interrupt it.

How to Dissolve a Simulation

Before we can dissolve a simulation, we have to notice that we’re in one. Experientially, a simulation includes three components:

·       Thoughts and images in your mind (cognition)

·       Sensations in your body (interoception)

·       A general feeling tone (affect)

And onto these parts, the mind imputes a reality that feels seamless and self-evident—like a dream that makes perfect sense until we wake up.

It all begins with a trigger: something that sets the simulation in motion. In the Tesla example, it was the car cutting me off. But it could be anything: a partner’s tone, a difficult conversation, even a memory that surfaces for no apparent reason.

Once the trigger hits, the brain launches a predictive model, drawing from memory and context. We might feel it first in the body: a rush of heat, a tightening in the chest, a sudden jolt of energy. Almost instantly, thoughts and images rush in to match, casting those raw sensations into a story. Within seconds, our affect has shifted, the narrative has formed, and we’re inside a version of reality that feels completely true.

Take a colleague, for example. You recall something she said last week, and suddenly there’s a churn in your stomach, a tightening in your chest. The affect is unpleasant, and your brain starts filling in the gaps—projecting those sensations into a story about who she is or what she meant.

Maybe you're right about her and maybe you’re not, but the essential point is that you’re no longer reacting to the real person. You’re reacting to a vivid simulation shaped by mood, memory, and meaning.

How to Dissolve a Simulation

Once we see how easily our minds create these vivid inner stories, we can begin to do something powerful: interrupt the loop by turning toward its parts. That’s how we dissolve a simulation—not by pushing it away, but by breaking it down, gently and deliberately.

Here’s how to work with a simulation once you’ve noticed it.

Step One: Check Your Body

Start with two simple questions:

• Do I feel pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral?

• Do I feel calm or activated?

These aren’t emotion labels. They’re indicators of affect—your overall feeling state. And unless you’re in deep sleep, you’re always feeling something. The work is noticing.

Next, ask: Where do I feel it?

Not “What emotion am I having?” but “What’s happening in my body?” Tightness, heat, pressure, queasiness. In my car example, it was a burning in my chest. My wife sometimes says, “My skin is boiling.”

It may take practice—especially if you’re not used to checking in with your body—but those sensations are always there. Affect is what your brain builds from those signals, even before thoughts or images assign it a storyline.

In everyday life, we collapse all of this into one word: feeling. But it helps to start teasing it apart.

• What’s happening in my body?

• What’s the overall tone?

• What emotion is forming around the story?

This is how we start to loosen the grip.

You can try it anytime. In fact, try now: notice your breath. Scan your shoulders or jaw. Tune into your belly, hands, feet. Just observe. Nothing to change.

Step Two: Check Your Mind

Now ask: What story is my mind telling me about this situation?

What thoughts and images are forming around the feeling?

In my case, it was the tool in the Tesla. A full storyline arrived in an instant: careless, arrogant, aggressive. A perfect match for the burning in my chest.

We usually assent to the story so quickly that we don’t realize it’s been constructed. We believe we’re perceiving reality, but we’re inside a simulation: a self-reinforcing model of what’s happening.

And it’s okay if we don’t catch that right away. Most of us need to return to this step again and again—sometimes over weeks or months—before we can reliably catch a story as it’s forming.

That’s the practice.

Try it now, if you like: What’s the story your mind is telling you, about this moment, this person, this feeling?

There’s always a story. And once we can see it, we’re no longer fully inside it. We get a little more room to breathe. And maybe, to respond differently.

Step 3: Release the Story

This part can feel counterintuitive.

When we’re in a bad mood or emotional spiral, we usually try to think our way out of it. We analyze, rehearse, replay. We try to fix the problem by solving the story.

But here’s the truth: it’s usually the story that’s keeping the feeling alive, not the reverse.

We feel the discomfort in our body, register it as unpleasant, and then rush to explain it. That’s when the simulation crystallizes. And the more we engage with it, the more specific emotions form—anger instead of indigestion, fear instead of anticipation—and the more convincing the story becomes.

The real move is to let go of the story. Don’t argue with it. Don’t analyze it. Don’t try to fix it. Just let it go.

Then, return to your body.

Step Four: Relax into the Sensations

Here’s the surprising thing about sensations: when we’re absorbed in the story, they feel terrible. But once the story drops away, we can feel them for what they are. Just sensations. The story magnifies the discomfort.

The sensations that can come with anxiety, for example—clammy hands, a churn in the stomach, a racing heart—can feel unbearable when we’re lost in the narrative. But without the story, they’re no more intense than a hunger pang. Once we stop feeding the story, the physical discomfort often fades into something quieter, maybe even a kind of relief. Sometimes, it’s even pleasant: the same heat, but now it glows instead of burns.

This is what dissolves the simulation. What felt like reality starts to come apart. The sensation is just sensation. The story is just a story. And the emotion? It’s not a fixed truth. It’s just the place where story and sensation meet.

A Quick Aside before Step 5: How I Avoid Inventing a Crisis Before Breakfast

Let me show you what this can look like in daily life.

I’m a heavy sleeper, and when I first wake up, my baseline interoception is uncomfortable—groggy, tense and stiff, with a vague discomfort in my belly. My affect is unpleasant and low energy, and if I’m not careful, as my energy starts to increase, it can all start to feel like anxiety.

What I’ve learned is this: I have to keep myself from doing any thinking until after I’ve had my shower. If I let my mind start thinking about anything—anything at all—while I’m still in that negative-affect state, everything starts to feel like a problem. My car has problems. My marriage. My kids. Whatever I turn my attention to starts to look broken, urgent, like everything’s wrong and it’s all on me to fix.

And just like that, I’m anxious. Not because anything is actually wrong, not even because of what I’m thinking, but because of the state I’m in when I started thinking.

That’s the trick. When we feel those feelings, the mind looks for something to explain them. And if we’re prone to anxiety, it’s going to look for things to be anxious about. Or to get depressed over. Or angry at. Wherever our own mental habits tend to go.

So instead, I bring my attention to the sensations. I breathe into them. I wait. I let the body catch up. And most of the time, by the time I’ve dried off and had some tea, the unpleasant feelings are gone. I can think about all those same things but there’s nothing to worry about.

The simulation never got built.

Step Five: Repeat

With practice, this process can become natural. Eventually, we won’t need to think about the steps. It will happen quickly and intuitively. We’ll gain the clarity and energy to act when action is needed, and relax when it’s not.

Until then, a little patience is in order.                                                                                                                                       

Sometimes, even after we dissolve a simulation, it reboots. The sensations return. The story resurfaces. That’s not failure—that’s the brain doing what it’s designed to do. It wants to keep us safe. And for a while at least, it’s going to keep generating simulations that match its predictions.

But take heart. Over time, the brain learns from this practice. Our conscious inputs start to shape the model. You’ll be amazed at how many things simply stop bothering you.

So before that happens: take it easy. I’ve had days where I’ve spent two hours dissolving the same illusion over and over. Every few minutes, it would reappear. But because I could see it was just a simulation, I wasn’t fooled. I stayed calm and grounded, focused on the sensations even as the movie kept restarting.

It became a kind of meditation. And the more I persisted, the more ease and clarity I felt.

This kind of shift can change everything, from how we see, to how we speak, to how we connect.

That’s where we’re headed in Part 4—taking these tools into real conversations, where it counts most.