How to express your feelings: 10 tips

Learning constructive ways to express your feelings isn’t always easy. When you feel angry, sad, scared, or any other intense emotion, it can sometimes catch you off guard. However, it’s crucial to experience and release these emotions instead of keeping them inside. 

There are healthy and unhealthy ways of expressing your feelings, whether in the workplace, at home, alone, or with loved ones. The first step in expressing emotions is learning about different coping mechanisms and identifying how you currently express yourself. 

Working with intense positive and negative emotions can be intimidating, but it’s important to remember you’re not alone. With proper support and self-compassion, you can learn healthy strategies to express your feelings. 

10 ways to express your feelings better

Becoming comfortable with expressing yourself takes time and practice. Self-awareness and perseverance are key. You can also rely on these 10 tips when setting emotional goals for greater self-expression:

Learn to identify your feelings

It can be difficult to learn how to accurately identify your feelings. When you feel strong emotions, such as anger, sadness, shame, or embarrassment, it’s often hard to think clearly and know how to support your emotional well-being. For individuals dealing with alexithymia, which is the inability to express or understand emotions, it’s even more challenging. 

For help with identifying your feelings, resources like an emotion wheel can prove useful. The wheel breaks down how different emotions are connected. If you identify the feeling that resonates most, seeing related emotions can help you find what you’re truly experiencing.  

Practice verbalizing your feelings to loved ones

When you begin learning to express your emotions, it’s OK to start by practicing with only one person or a small group of trusted individuals. When expressing emotions you may feel scared at first, but try to keep in mind that these people won’t judge and critique you. They will listen attentively, show sympathy, and validate your emotions. 

In a 2024 study published by the journal Migration Studies, researchers reinforced the importance of emotions in effective communication. Eliciting and showing emotions allow for clearer communication and, at times, greater human connection. 

Let go of judgment

Aim to surround yourself with people who won’t judge you while you work on expressing your feelings. At the same time, it’s also necessary that you release any judgment of yourself. This self-criticism could cause you to condemn your mistakes or misunderstandings.

Often, letting go of self-judgment means practicing self-compassion to tame your inner critic. You likely won’t perfectly express your feelings all the time, and that’s OK. It’s important that you create space to practice, learn, and make mistakes as you develop new emotional regulation skills.

Practice being vulnerable

Vulnerability can be difficult because you might fear rejection, judgment, abandonment, or other adverse outcomes. Yet vulnerability is not a sign of weakness. By practicing being vulnerable in conversation, you may slowly grow accustomed to how it feels to talk through personal troubles. Over time, you’re more likely to become comfortable finding the words to express yourself. 

If you’re not accustomed to expressing your feelings, you may feel tired or drained after doing so, which is known as a vulnerability hangover. Remember, this is a normal physical reaction, and it might be overwhelming at first. Know that this feeling will pass and that you’re moving in the right direction. 

Work on your emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence, or emotional quotient (EQ), is your ability to identify, process, and express emotions. It’s different from your intelligence quotient (IQ), which captures your ability to problem solve, reason, and think critically. 

With a high EQ, you likely have healthy emotional coping techniques. You may also be good at creating space for uncomfortable and intense emotions to ensure you process them. When intense emotions arise, such as anger or sadness, you tend to react calmly and approach them with curiosity.

In her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, Harvard brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor states that feelings should last around 90 seconds before they leave the body. If the feeling lingers or causes you to feel anxious, it can be a sign that you’re trying to control the emotion instead of accepting it. Practice first recognizing and then releasing emotions to help manage them. With practice, you’ll improve your emotional intelligence and have better EQ skills for self-expression. 

Write in a journal

Journaling can be a form of self-expression that helps you become more aware of your feelings. You might write down your physical sensations and thoughts using journaling prompts. If you’re feeling frustrated or anxious, journaling can help you understand where that emotion might be coming from.

Journaling can also help you prepare for a challenging conversation with someone. For example, when you write out what’s on your mind, you’ll likely gain greater clarity and notice nuanced aspects of the situation or feelings you hadn’t before. This allows you to better identify and express your feelings.

Be kind to yourself

While learning how to express your feelings better, you likely won’t always say or do the right thing. Remember, this is a key part of the learning process, and learning from your mistakes demonstrates a high EQ and growth mindset. 

Self-compassion, self-love, and self-efficacy allow you to accept and embrace insecurities. Experiencing negative emotions is normal and healthy. You can welcome challenges related to personal development, trusting that you’ll persevere with time and practice. 

Adopt a creative hobby

Creativity can be one of the best modes of self-expression. When it feels too difficult to talk about positive or negative emotions, you can use creativity to express them in another way. Painting, writing, pottery, gardening, or any other hobby that asks you to think outside the box is a great way to express your feelings. The result of your creative hobby doesn’t need to be perfect. Rather, your creative outlet is a way for you to express yourself freely. 

A 2020 study published in Society & Sustainability discovered a strong connection between emotional intelligence, creativity, and job performance. When an individual portrayed healthy characteristics of one category, it was likely they would also be proficient in the others. So not only does creative thinking boost your EQ, but it can also help increase your outcomes at work.

Practice mindfulness

Mindfulness has long been considered one of the best ways to improve mental health. It’s the practice of rooting yourself in the present moment. For example, you might use breathing exercises or stand outside barefoot, focusing on how the grass feels. 

You can also practice mindfulness through meditation or yoga. These habits can help calm your nervous system and clear your head. As a result, you may be able to identify your feelings better and note how to best care for them. 

Talk with a mental health professional

Learning healthy emotional coping strategies and getting comfortable with self-expression is no small task. It can feel overwhelming to approach it alone, so working with a mental health professional, such as a therapist or coach, can be helpful.

These types of professionals can offer expertise as you navigate your feelings and find the right words to express your emotions. They can create a safe space for you to practice hard conversations and provide tips for better self-soothing.

It’s brave to ask for help. Sometimes, seeking mental health support is the first step in improving your well-being. 

7 basic emotions

At times, your feelings may be disguised as other emotions, such as anxiety that looks like anger. Other times, your feelings are clear, and you just need the right words for them. 

In English, dozens of words can describe how we feel. To help you better identify these feelings, you can condense most of them into these seven basic emotions:

• Enjoyment: You can enjoy things like watching a sunset, engaging in your hobbies, or being around people you love.
• Sadness: This can creep in when you watch an emotional movie or reflect on memories or missed opportunities.
• Fear: You might experience fear if you’re interrupted unexpectedly or remember past things that have frightened you before.
• Anger: This can sometimes explode quickly, especially if it’s been bottled up for a while.
• Disgust: You can feel disgusted by people’s behavior, food, and even smells.
• Surprise: This can cause you to suddenly feel other emotions, such as enjoyment or even anger.
• Embarrassment: Everyone is embarrassed by different things, but the emotion generally makes you feel awkward and uncomfortable.

Within each of these seven emotions are many others. Again, an emotion wheel can help you name what you’re experiencing. 

Understanding feelings vs. thoughts

It’s easy to confuse thoughts and feelings. However, when it’s time to express feelings, try to be mindful about whether you’re sharing your true feelings or simply your thoughts. Here are some ways to differentiate the two:

• Thoughts: These are words or ideas in your head. You can often control your thoughts by reframing your mindset or opinions. Thoughts don’t always turn into feelings.
• Feelings: These are a symptom of your emotions and tend to be less controllable than thoughts. You’ll likely experience a physical sensation throughout your body as part of the feeling. 

There are additional differences when you compare feelings versus emotions. In short, emotions are instinctive reactions to life experiences or stimuli, whereas feelings are your physical and mental responses to those emotions. 

Because of the relationships between feelings and emotions, you might intellectualize your emotions. It happens when you overthink and analyze your feelings to determine why and how they’ve arisen. However, thinking about your emotions is not the same as processing them. The only way you can truly process your emotions is to feel and experience them. 

Another tip to help you differentiate feelings from thoughts is to put them into words using the “I think versus I feel” rule. If you say something like “I feel embarrassed,” that’s a feeling. You didn’t think that you were embarrassed; you felt it.

Why is it so hard to express your feelings?

It’s not easy to express yourself. No matter your EQ, being vulnerable with yourself and others might always feel uncomfortable. Here are five reasons why it might feel difficult to express your feelings: 

• Unpleasant past experiences with vulnerability: You may struggle to express your feelings if you received negative feedback for being vulnerable in the past. This experience might make you worry that self-expression will have the same result. 
• Difficulty identifying emotions: Alexithymia is common for neurodivergent individuals or people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The condition makes it hard to identify and express feelings in yourself and others.
• Fear of judgment: Because humans are social beings, you may feel a drive to be accepted. This can result in a fear of being judged or ostracized, causing you to refrain from expressing your feelings.
• Past emotional trauma: If you grew up in a household where emotional expression was ignored or unwelcome, you may have learned to suppress your feelings. This early childhood trauma can make sharing your emotions feel risky. 
• Attachment wounds: Attachment trauma from your formative years can make expressing your feelings feel unsafe. Your inner child may fear abandonment. As a result, you push aside your emotional needs and avoid sharing your feelings. 

With time and intentional practice, self-expression and vulnerability can become easier. 

Why do I feel bad after expressing my feelings?

Your upbringing and background influence how you view expressing feelings. If, when you were a child, your parents told you indirectly or directly not to raise your voice or cry when upset, you may have learned that expressing negative feelings isn’t acceptable. 

As a result, you may even develop feelings of fear and anxiety associated with expressing positive feelings like enjoyment. If your family doesn’t support strong emotional expression, it can be hard to start sharing your feelings as an adult. 

This is because we carry our childhood lessons into adulthood, including how we deal with our feelings. So if we’ve never learned how to deal with our emotions constructively, we’ll struggle to express ourselves.  

However, overcoming the fear of expressing how you feel can be empowering. It can boost your self-awareness and confidence and also show you that it’s healthy to be authentically yourself. 

Learn how to express your feelings

Finding someone who can keep you accountable when you’re working on expressing yourself can be helpful. With the support of one-on-one coaching, you can learn communication skills to get better at expressing your feelings.

It’s a big task, but a BetterUp Coach can provide the guidance you need to grow personally and professionally.