You don’t feel worthless. You actually can’t. Feeling “worthless” actually “feeling” worthless at all. “Feelings” have been such a taboo topic for so long that we confuse our feelings, which are in our body, with our stories, which are in our brain. Society taught men they couldn’t cry, women they were too sensitive, children that they would be given something to cry about. We were given Prozac, alcohol, credit cards, and reality television to work numb the very sensations that our body offers us as real-time biofeedback, so we understandably don’t really know what “feeling our feelings” means.
Feelings are emotions, e-motions, energy in motion, and that’s what it is energy. A feeling is an energy that’s moving. It’s a real-life moving somatic response to something we are thinking, feeling, or experiencing. Feelings are natural, and they’re our body’s way of communicating with us.
When we experience a positive feeling, our body is saying, “yes, please, more of this.” When we experience a negative feeling, our body is communicating with us, “hey, the way you’re thinking about that doesn’t make me feel good. Can we maybe try a different perspective?”
The intuition, the wisdom, the wise one within you loves, listens, and honors unconditionally. When our mind creates stories on how something should be instead of how something actually is, that is when we suffer. That is when we feel worthless.
“Worthless” isn’t a feeling. Worthless is a story that you’re telling. If you were to not tell or attach a story to the emotion, to the energy moving inside of you, you would actually describe it something like this:
“I am feeling heaviness in my chest. I feel the weight on my shoulders that’s affecting my posture. My head feels chaotic, and I don’t feel like I have the energy to do anything.”
When you tune in to your body and where the feeling is, you bring awareness to it, which allows that energy to move. When it moves, you detach. You don’t tell a story.
The stories that you tell become who you are, and worthless isn’t something anyone should want to become.
When you don’t describe the feeling or the energy and allow that response to guide you, you end up saying something like, “I am worthless.” These very words send out the intention and a declaration to the universe declaring that’s who and what you are.
Even when you say, “I am feeling worthless,” you are still doing the same thing, insinuating that the emotion IS you. That YOU are, in fact, worthless, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Our brains are there to help tell stories, to help piece together what’s going on outside of us, and these stories that our ego weaves together aren’t bad- if we tell the story to ourselves instead of listening to the one that the mind makes up, which is always negative. Your brain’s job is to keep you safe, and it processes everything as a threat. This doesn’t help you.
This doesn’t mean- you get mad at your ego or the voice inside your head. It just means don’t give it all the power or any of the credit.
Detaching from the stories that the mind creates isn’t easy, and it will require a conscious practice to “feel” your feelings instead of thinking about them and analyze what they mean. So in the meantime, if you find yourself actually feeling worthless, here’s what you can do.
- Detach from the story. When you catch yourself listening to the voice inside your head telling you how worthless you are, stop listening to it. Instead of listening to the voice inside your head, talk to the voice inside your head, just like you would a close friend. Remind yourself that this is not true, and it’s just a story that you’re brain is telling to keep you “safe.” Remind yourself that this “safety” is actually keeping you small, and you don’t need the protection.
- Breathe. Your nervous system regulates all of the emotions in your body, and the more you are able to breathe and turn on your parasympathetic nervous system, the faster the emotion will move. Breathe in for seven counts. Hold for seven counts. Exhale for seven counts. Do this for five full minutes focusing on your breath. When your mind wanders, and it will gently guide it back to your breath.
- Change The Story. After you have escaped fight or flight mode in your head, you have accessed a sense of safety within, begin to change your story. Start slowing by listing all of the things that make you worthy. This is not your job, your status, or what’s in your bank account. This includes your heart, your service to others, your joy, and your beingness. Don’t just fly through this list or dismiss it as an unnecessary exercise. Think of each thing slowly and keep thinking about it, one at a time, in detail, until you feel the emotion begin to move. When you start to feel better, move on to the next one. Keep going until you don’t want to stop.
So many people fail at improving their self worth or negative self-talk because they try to out-think it instead of feeling it. Emotions are somatic; they’re in the body. You can’t stay in your mind and think that you will outsmart it away.
Your thoughts are electric, sending out a signal straight to your heart, which is magnetic. To magnetize more feelings that you want instead of ones you don’t want (like feeling worthless), you need to be in your body and in your heart.
