By Josh Trent | Wellness + Wisdom Podcast Host & Identity Transformation Architect
“Emotions are not problems to fix or enemies to defeat. They are messengers moving through you. Learning to sit with difficult emotions is learning to let them move, so they no longer have to run the show from the shadows.”
Josh Trent
Learning how to sit with difficult emotions is honestly one of the most freeing shifts you can make, because so many of us spend enormous amounts of energy avoiding, numbing, or running from what we feel. So many of us quietly distract ourselves, push our feelings down, or judge ourselves for even having them, until those unfelt emotions run our lives from the shadows. Learning to sit with difficult emotions gently reverses all of that, teaching you to be present with what you feel so it can move through you and set you free. This freeing work is beautifully supported by BREATHE™.
Here is the joy forward truth at the center of it all. Learning how to sit with difficult emotions does not mean drowning in them, it means being present with what you feel so it can move through you rather than controlling you from within. When you truly sit with difficult emotions, you stop being ruled by what you avoid and reconnect with the deep peace that comes from feeling fully. When you learn to sit with difficult emotions, you finally come home to a deeper freedom and calm. Let us explore exactly how.
Table of Contents
- What Sitting With Difficult Emotions Really Means
- Why We Avoid Our Emotions
- The Hidden Cost of Avoiding Your Feelings
- The Science of Feeling Your Emotions
- How to Sit With Difficult Emotions
- Feeling Versus Drowning in Emotion
- Sitting With Difficult Emotions and BREATHE
- Celebrating Your Emotional Courage
- Sitting With Difficult Emotions Is a Lifelong Practice
- When the Emotions Feel Too Big
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Studies and External Resources
- About Josh Trent
What Sitting With Difficult Emotions Really Means
Sitting with difficult emotions means being present with what you feel, allowing it to move through you rather than avoiding, numbing, or judging it. It is about meeting your emotions with real acceptance so they can be felt and released instead of running your life from the shadows. Sitting with difficult emotions is learning to let feelings move through you so they no longer have to control you.
This runs much deeper than simply managing your emotions, because sitting with difficult emotions is about changing your whole relationship with your own inner world. Rather than fighting or fleeing what you feel, you gently learn to turn toward it with presence and compassion, letting the emotion complete its natural movement. It is truly a shift from avoidance toward gentle presence.
Sitting with difficult emotions also gently restores a deep sense of peace and freedom, since avoiding our feelings tends to leave them stuck, quietly shaping our moods, choices, and reactions from beneath the surface. When you learn to be truly present with what you feel, you free up the energy that avoidance quietly consumes and move through life with far more calm and emotional freedom. Learning to sit with difficult emotions in this way is a true cornerstone of a peaceful, whole life, a theme we return to often on the Wellness + Wisdom Podcast.
Why We Avoid Our Emotions
We avoid our emotions because so many of us were never taught how to feel them safely, learning instead to suppress, distract, or push away anything uncomfortable. When big feelings were met with dismissal or discomfort in childhood, we slowly learned that emotions were dangerous or too much, so we found ways to avoid them. This avoidance of our emotions is truly a learned pattern, not a personal flaw.
On top of all this, difficult emotions can feel genuinely uncomfortable, and in a culture that prizes constant positivity, we often believe we should not feel them at all. So we tend to numb, distract, and stay endlessly busy, hoping the feelings will simply disappear, when in truth they only go underground. Understanding that this avoidance was simply learned, often for very understandable reasons, replaces self judgment with real compassion, which is where lasting change begins, much like the gentle work of reparenting yourself.
Seeing clearly why we avoid our emotions is genuinely freeing, because it means your avoidance is not a weakness but a learned pattern that can be gently changed. The avoidance was simply learned early, often because no one ever showed you how to feel safely, and like any learned pattern, it can genuinely shift. You can honor the part of you that once learned to avoid your feelings in order to cope while gently teaching yourself that you can be present with what you feel, which is deeply connected to healing our inherited limiting beliefs.
The Hidden Cost of Avoiding Your Feelings
Recognizing the hidden cost of avoiding your feelings helps motivate the shift toward sitting with them, because running from your emotions quietly takes far more from you than you realize. What feels like coping or staying strong often quietly leaves your feelings stuck, shaping your life from beneath the surface, all while the peace you long for stays just out of reach. Seeing this clearly makes sitting with difficult emotions feel not just nice but genuinely essential.
Avoiding your feelings quietly costs us our peace over time, since emotions we refuse to feel do not disappear but linger, quietly fueling anxiety, tension, and unease. What we do not allow ourselves to fully feel tends to leak out in our moods, our reactions, and even our bodies, keeping us from the calm we long for. This slow, quiet buildup of unfelt emotion is one of the heaviest costs of avoidance.
It also quietly costs us our own aliveness, since numbing our difficult emotions inevitably numbs our capacity for joy, connection, and wonder as well. We simply cannot selectively shut down only the hard feelings, so avoiding them slowly dims our whole emotional life. Avoiding your feelings can also quietly cost us our growth, since our emotions often carry important messages and invitations that we miss when we refuse to feel them.
Perhaps most importantly of all, avoiding your feelings costs you the deep freedom and peace of a life that is fully felt. Recognizing that avoiding your emotions is costing you the very peace and aliveness you long for is genuinely motivating, because it helps you choose to be present instead, supporting the kind of wholehearted living that lets you truly thrive, which deepens your whole spiritual wellness.
The Science of Feeling Your Emotions
The science of emotion offers real support for learning to sit with difficult emotions. Research by Matthew Lieberman and colleagues, published in Psychological Science, found that putting feelings into words reduces activity in the brain's alarm center. When you gently name what you are actually feeling inside, rather than avoiding it, you help calm your body and make the emotion far easier to be with, supporting genuine neural system regulation.
Expressing emotion reaches the body too. Research by James Pennebaker, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, found that putting our difficult experiences and feelings into words supports both emotional and physical wellbeing. Allowing yourself to feel and express your emotions, rather than always bottling them up inside, is genuinely good for your whole health, which draws on real emotional intelligence.
There is an uplifting dimension too. Barbara Fredrickson's research, published in American Psychologist, shows that positive emotions broaden our awareness and build lasting inner resources, and when we stop spending our energy avoiding hard feelings, we free ourselves to experience more genuine joy. Being present with all of your emotions makes far more room for the good ones to flow freely, which is why breathwork is such a faithful companion to emotional presence.
How to Sit With Difficult Emotions
Learning how to sit with difficult emotions is a gentle, gradual, lifelong practice of turning toward what you feel with presence and compassion, again and again, until being with emotion feels natural. It grows with steady practice over time, and every single time you stay present, feeling grows a little safer. Here are practices that help.
1. Name What You Feel
Gently name the emotion you are experiencing, since putting a feeling into words takes away some of its raw overwhelm and helps you meet it. Naming your emotion out loud is truly the very first step in being present with it.
2. Locate It in Your Body
Notice where the emotion actually lives in your body, the tightness, the heaviness, the flutter, since emotions are felt physically and meeting them in the body helps them move. Feeling your emotions right there in the body allows them to complete their natural movement, which pairs beautifully with learning to honor your body.
3. Breathe With It
Use slow, conscious breath to stay present with the emotion, since the breath gently helps your body feel safe enough to let the feeling move through. Breathing gently with your own emotions is a powerful way to sit with them, which is beautifully supported by breathwork.
4. Let It Be Without Judgment
Allow the emotion to simply be present without judging it as either good or bad, since acceptance lets feelings move while resistance keeps them stuck. Meeting your own emotions without any judgment is what allows them to release, which supports learning to practice self compassion.
5. Trust That It Will Pass
Remind yourself that emotions are much like ocean waves that rise, peak, and pass when we let them, since trusting their natural movement helps you stay present. Trusting that all feelings pass frees you to sit with them, which supports learning to make peace with uncertainty.
Begin with whatever practice feels most accessible to you and be patient and kind with yourself, since learning to sit with emotions you have long avoided genuinely takes time. Every single moment of presence makes the very next one easier. When you want community and support for this journey, the Liberated Life Tribe is here for you.
Feeling Versus Drowning in Emotion
One of the most important distinctions in this work is the difference between sitting with an emotion and drowning in it, because being present with a feeling is not the same as being swept away by it. Sitting with emotion means feeling it while staying grounded in yourself, while drowning means losing yourself in the feeling, and understanding this one difference is key to feeling safely.
Drowning in emotion means being completely overtaken by it, losing your center and getting swept away into the story and the spiral. Sitting with emotion is something completely different, it means staying present and grounded while you feel, keeping one foot in the observer who can witness the feeling without being consumed by it. Where drowning loses you completely in the wave, sitting with an emotion lets you ride it.
The key difference here is that sitting with an emotion keeps you grounded while you feel, rather than lost in it. You can feel the full depth of any emotion while still remaining connected to your own steady inner center, which is what makes feeling safe rather than overwhelming. This gentle understanding truly frees you to feel deeply without fear of being swept away, which is a beautiful part of your whole self growth journey.
Sitting With Difficult Emotions and BREATHE
Learning to sit with difficult emotions is beautifully supported by BREATHE™, our breathwork system for regulating the neural system and returning to calm. The breath is a truly powerful ally in feeling, because difficult emotions activate the body's stress response, and the breath is the one system that can consciously soothe that alarm and create the deep safety needed to feel.
When a difficult emotion first arises, your breath often grows shallow and quick, keeping your body braced and tense and making the feeling harder to be with. Conscious, slow breathing gently reverses all of this, calming your body, creating a real sense of safety, and giving the emotion the space it needs to move through you. In this beautiful way, the breath becomes a steady anchor that lets you stay present with even the hardest feelings.
This is exactly why we hold breathwork as such a genuinely powerful ally for sitting with difficult emotions. Rather than avoiding or forcing your feelings, you can simply breathe your way into the presence and safety that let them move, using the body to hold what the mind alone cannot. Each conscious breath then becomes a small act of courage, a way of staying present with what you feel until it can complete its movement and release, deepening your whole L.I.F.E. Method™ journey.
Celebrating Your Emotional Courage
The joyful heart of this work is celebrating your emotional courage, honoring every moment you turn toward a difficult feeling as a genuine act of bravery rather than dwelling on the times you avoided. When you begin to truly celebrate your willingness to feel rather than judging it, sitting with emotion grows a little easier each time.
Celebrating your emotional courage means truly noticing and honoring the small moments you stayed present with a hard feeling, the emotion you let yourself feel, the avoidance you gently set aside, and the wave you let move through you. Each single one of these small moments is genuinely worth truly celebrating, and honoring them reinforces your growing capacity to feel, which is a beautiful part of learning to celebrate yourself.
And here is the beautiful part. When you sit with difficult emotions and let them move through you, you naturally become more free, present, and alive, quietly inspiring the people around you to feel their emotions too. Your own emotional courage quietly gives the people around you permission to be present with what they feel too, showing them that emotions are genuinely safe to feel. In this beautiful way, learning how to sit with difficult emotions becomes a gift that ripples far beyond yourself, bringing more presence and freedom to every relationship you touch, which is a spirit we cherish in learning to feel your feelings.
Sitting With Difficult Emotions Is a Lifelong Practice
Learning how to sit with difficult emotions is not a single change you make once, but a lifelong practice of turning toward what you feel across the changing seasons of your life. Emotions will keep on arising for as long as you are alive, so sitting with them is far less a destination and more an ongoing practice of gentle presence. This is truly wonderful news, because it means you can always return to being present with your feelings no matter how long you have avoided them.
This understanding takes the pressure off getting it perfect. You will certainly have times when you avoid again, moments when emotions overwhelm you, and seasons when feeling feels much harder, and all of that is completely human. What matters most is the gentle returning, the steady practice of turning toward your feelings with presence and compassion whenever you possibly can.
Understanding sitting with difficult emotions as a lifelong, ongoing practice also gently keeps it compassionate. Each time you notice you have been avoiding a feeling once again, you have a fresh opportunity to turn toward it with presence, and every single moment of feeling deepens your emotional freedom. Over time, sitting with difficult emotions becomes far less something you have to brace for and more simply how you naturally meet your inner world.
So approach your own journey here with real patience and warmth toward yourself. There is no finish line at all, only the ongoing, freeing practice of being present with your feelings and celebrating the courage you show along the way. This steady presence quietly supports every single dimension of your wellbeing and deepens your whole experience of being alive, growing richer with time, which is closely tied to learning to be present.
When the Emotions Feel Too Big
If your emotions feel too big to sit with right now, you are in very good company, and it is completely understandable, especially if you carry deep pain or have avoided your feelings for a long time. Learning to sit with difficult emotions does not mean facing everything all at once, it means gently building your capacity to feel a little at a time, at a pace that truly honors you.
When emotions feel too big, it genuinely helps to start very small, staying present with a feeling for just a few breaths, feeling one wave and letting it pass, or simply naming an emotion without pushing it away. You do not have to feel everything all at once at all, you simply keep on gently turning toward your own feelings in small doses, and over time your capacity to be present steadily grows. Even just a few breaths of presence with a hard feeling is a real and meaningful beginning.
It is also genuinely worth remembering that deep, overwhelming emotions, especially those rooted in trauma, are best approached gently and with support, and a qualified therapist can offer a safe space to feel them. There is real and genuine strength in seeking help, and a skilled professional can offer effective tools for feeling and processing your emotions safely. Wherever you happen to be, be patient and kind with yourself, honor your own pace, and trust that sitting with difficult emotions is truly something you can genuinely cultivate, one wave at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean to sit with difficult emotions?
Sitting with difficult emotions means being present with what you feel, allowing it to move through you rather than avoiding, numbing, or judging it. It is meeting your emotions with acceptance so they can be felt and released instead of running your life from the shadows, letting feelings move so they no longer control you.
Why do we avoid our emotions?
Because many of us were never taught to feel emotions safely, learning instead to suppress or distract from anything uncomfortable, and difficult feelings can feel genuinely hard. Understanding that this avoidance was learned, rather than a flaw, opens the way to gently being present with your feelings instead.
How do I sit with difficult emotions?
Name what you feel, locate the emotion in your body, breathe with it, let it be present without judgment, and trust that it will pass like a wave. Start with whatever feels most accessible and be patient, since learning to sit with emotions you have long avoided takes time and gentleness.
What is the difference between feeling and drowning in emotion?
Sitting with emotion means feeling it while staying grounded in yourself. Drowning means losing your center and being swept into the story and spiral. Where drowning loses you in the wave, sitting with emotion lets you ride it, keeping one foot in the observer who can witness the feeling.
Is there science behind feeling your emotions?
Yes. Research shows naming your feelings calms the brain's alarm center, expressing emotions supports emotional and physical wellbeing, and no longer spending energy on avoidance frees you for more genuine joy. Sitting with difficult emotions genuinely supports your peace, health, and aliveness.
What if my emotions feel too big to handle?
That is understandable, especially if you carry deep pain or have avoided your feelings for a long time. You do not have to feel everything at once. Start small, staying present for just a few breaths. Deep, overwhelming emotions, especially those rooted in trauma, are best approached gently with the support of a qualified therapist.
Studies and External Resources
The science in this article rests on peer reviewed research. These are the sources referenced throughout.
- Lieberman MD, et al. (2007). Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli. Psychological Science. PubMed: 17576282
- Pennebaker JW, et al. (1988). Disclosure of traumas and immune function: health implications for psychotherapy. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. PubMed: 3372832
- Fredrickson BL. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist. PubMed: 11315248
About Josh Trent
Josh Trent is an Identity Transformation Architect and the award winning host of the Wellness + Wisdom Podcast, with over 15 million downloads since 2015. He is the creator of the L.I.F.E. Method™ Identity Transformation System and steward of the Emotional Epigenetics™ and BREATHE: Breath + Wellness™ systems of self mastery, impacting over 1,000 students worldwide. Join the Liberated Life Tribe and receive your 10 day Self Liberation Blueprint at liberatedlife.com. Josh lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Carrie, daughter Nayah, and son Novah. Peace and power.
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