Your Emotions Are Information, Not Instructions

The uncomfortable truth about “protecting your energy”

“I think you might be using your feelings as a reason not to do things,” my therapist said, pulling her glasses off. Her words knocked the wind out of me. Obviously, I didn’t go back after that session.

She was the one who first taught me about my emotions. Before her, I didn’t have language for what was happening inside me. I just knew something was wrong. She helped me see that I wasn’t broken. I was anxious. I was depressed. Naming it felt like the first real relief I’d had in years. So when she suggested I was using my emotions as an excuse, it felt like a betrayal.

Looking back at this now, I completely understand her point. I was in college and had refused to go home for Thanksgiving break because I thought I needed to process how depressed I felt. But in reality I was just isolating myself further. What I couldn’t see yet was that my therapist wasn’t asking me to stop feeling. She was pointing out that I’d given my feelings authority they were never meant to have.

That was over a decade ago. But if I posted that story on Instagram today — skipping Thanksgiving because I needed to honor my mental health, and getting pushback from my therapist for it — the comments would be full of people telling me the therapist was wrong. “Protect your energy.” “You don’t owe anyone your presence.” “If it doesn’t feel aligned, don’t force it.”

Mental health counseling has become less stigmatized, which is genuinely a good thing. More people than ever are going to therapy, talking openly about their inner lives, teaching their kids emotional vocabulary most of us never had. But somewhere along the way, “Your feelings are valid” became “Your feelings are always right.”

A bad day can no longer be just a bad day. It needs a diagnosis, a root cause, and a treatment plan. If you push yourself to do something you don’t feel like doing, you’re supposedly abandoning yourself. The logic is hard to argue with because it borrows the language of healing. But there’s a difference between a feeling that’s telling you something important and one that just means you don’t want to be inconvenienced.

The problem isn’t that we feel things. It’s that we’ve started building identities around them. “I’m an anxious person” doesn’t describe a passing experience — it is a permanent forecast, suggesting you should cancel, retreat, and reorganize your life around feeling bad. Todd Kashdan’s research on emotional flexibility finds exactly this: people who treat feelings as passing states move through them. People who treat them as fixed identities get stuck.

To be clear, I’m not arguing we should go back to suppressing our emotions. Emotions carry important information about what you value, what hurts, what needs attention. But information isn’t instruction. The clinical psychologist Harriet Lerner says it best: “Feelings are like children. You don’t want them driving the car, but you shouldn’t stuff them in the trunk either.” They belong in the passenger seat. You hear them out; maybe they even change your route. But your values are driving. What do you want your life to look like in five years? What kind of person are you trying to be? Those questions should steer, not whether you woke up feeling motivated.

When feelings take the wheel, most of us veer in one of two directions. Some of us react — we feel angry and fire off a text we can’t take back, or feel excited and commit to something we haven’t thought through. Others retreat. We feel anxious and cancel our plans. We feel overwhelmed and give up on our goals.

There’s also a sneakier version of retreat that doesn’t look like avoidance at all. It looks like researching the decision for three more weeks. Talking it through with every person you know. Compulsively checking your email or your ex’s social media or the news, convinced you’re being responsible when really you’re just trying to outrun the discomfort. You feel like you’re doing something, but you’re spinning in place.

The solution is to notice which one you do and practice the opposite. (In therapy we call this “opposite action.”) If you tend to react, practice pausing before you commit. If you tend to retreat, practice showing up even when it feels uncomfortable or wrong. Letting our feelings run our lives feels good in the moment, but it hurts us in the long run.

Most days I don’t feel like doing the hard things. I don’t feel like having the difficult conversation, being patient with my daughter, or showing up when I’m running on empty. But if I waited until my feelings gave me permission to move, I’d spend a lot of my life on the couch eating ice cream. The life I actually want requires me to show up on days when everything in me says to stay home.