Should We Really Trust Our Feelings?
I used to think that if I felt something strongly enough, that settled it. The feeling was the evidence, and whatever action followed was based on something concrete. Feelings, after all, are valid guides, aren't they? Well, I'm not so sure they are, and it's something I've begun to question more and more in recent years, even if society has veered in the direction of believing feelings are everything.
Follow your heart. Trust your gut. Honour your truth. We've absorbed that advice from every direction, until the feeling itself became proof enough: if it feels true, it is true, and you're entitled to act on it.
Many of us were raised on the opposite instruction, to keep our feelings to ourselves and get on with things. Now we're told, by our children's generation and by a culture fluent in therapy language, that feeling something is reason enough to trust it completely. Nobody has quite explained why one instruction was wrong and the other is right, or stopped to ask whether either one, on its own, is actually true.
Last week I was given a very ordinary reminder of just how untrue it can be.
A boy in my class decided that lesson wasn't going to happen. Not for him, not for anyone else in the room. He made sure of it with a stream of rude insults, aimed at me, that didn't let up.
None of that is unusual in the classroom. It happens most days, in one form or another, and I don't ordinarily give it a second thought once the bell goes. This time it landed at the end of one of those weeks where the classes had been coming hard, one after another, and there was nothing left in the tank by the time I got home.
I went home exhausted, and immediately convinced it was my fault. I should have been more understanding, I told myself. Maybe I should apologise.
It didn't lift by the next morning. It sat with me all weekend, coming back at odd moments, doing the washing up, lying awake, and each time it returned it felt a little more like proof that I owed him an apology. That's what made me stop and ask a question I don't ask nearly often enough: why was this the one, out of the dozens like it, that got to keep arguing its case for three days?
Because when I went back over what had actually happened, my first reaction was the correct one, and my second reaction, the guilty one, had nothing to do with him at all. What I was actually feeling that evening was exhaustion. My brain had simply reached for the nearest story to explain it, and the story it landed on was that I'd failed to be understanding enough with a boy who, on an ordinary day, wouldn't have cost me a second thought.
That's the piece I want to write, because it isn't a small thing. If a tired body can talk me into believing I was in the wrong about something I handle without flinching most weeks, in a culture that tells me to trust that feeling completely, I want to know what else my feelings have talked me into over the years, and how a person is actually supposed to tell the difference.
Can you trust your feelings after 50?
Not automatically. A feeling is information about how your body and brain are reading a situation, not a verdict on what's true or what you owe anyone. The feelings worth building a decision on are the ones that keep returning over time, not the ones that arrive loudly and then leave. A feeling that vanishes once you've slept on it wasn't asking you to change your behaviour. It was asking you to sleep.
That's the plain answer. The harder part is why a feeling that's wrong can still feel, while you're in it, completely certain.
The theory that explains why the guilt felt so certain
The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has spent her career studying where emotions actually come from, and her book How Emotions Are Made argues something that still unsettles me every time I take it seriously: emotions aren't reactions we have to events in the world. They're constructions. As she puts it, "emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world." Your brain takes the raw sensations coming from your body, adds whatever it already knows from a lifetime of experience, and produces a feeling that then presents itself to you as fact, not as one interpretation among several.
Barrett has described, in interviews, the moment this became personal for her. She went on a date early in her career and spent the evening flushed, her heart going, unable to concentrate on the conversation in front of her, and read all of it as attraction. She went home, took to her bed for a week, and realised she had been coming down with flu. The physical sensations were real. What her brain told her they meant was not.
She calls this affective realism: the habit of treating a feeling as evidence about the world, rather than as one possible reading of what's happening inside your own body. This is not a minor quirk of perception. It's the reason a feeling can be completely wrong and still not feel like a guess. It feels like the truth arriving.
That's exactly what happened to me, except my flu was a hard week of teaching. The tiredness was real. The verdict my brain built on top of it, that I'd been unkind, that I owed a boy an apology for holding an ordinary line, was not evidence about him or the classroom at all. It was evidence about how depleted I was by the end of that week, wearing the costume of a moral failing so convincingly that I nearly acted on it.
There's a version of this that gets taught to us directly, not just absorbed from the culture at large. As a teacher, or as a parent, you're taught that you must always consider other people's feelings, and somewhere inside that instruction sits a trap: it opens you up to denying your own feelings, or worse, to taking responsibility for someone else's actions towards you. They were rude, and somehow that becomes evidence that we hurt them, or disappointed them, or failed them in some way we're now required to locate and confess to. It inevitably leads to taking responsibility where it was never ours to take.
That's how a teacher learns to blame herself for a child's inappropriate behaviour. It's also how a child is never quite held to account, because somewhere along the line it must be the parents' fault. As adults, it's how we end up blaming ourselves for a husband's affair, because we didn't take his feelings into account closely enough, or blaming our own parents for who we became, because they failed to consider our feelings when we were children. This overvaluing of feelings hands out a great many get-out-of-jail-free cards, and I don't think we understand yet how much harm it does.
Barrett's theory is one of the most influential accounts of emotion in psychology at the moment, not an established fact the way gravity is. It's contested, and other researchers argue emotions are more built-in than she allows. But even as a strong hypothesis, it explains something I couldn't otherwise account for. My guilt didn't feel like a passing mood I was entitled to question. It felt like a fact about what kind of person I'd been that week. That is affective realism doing exactly what Barrett says it does: dressing up a feeling as a report from reality, when it's actually a report from a nervous system that had every reason, that particular week, to be exhausted.
It's worth saying plainly that the boy was operating on exactly the same logic, just pointed the other way. Whatever he was feeling in that moment felt strong enough, and valid enough to him, to justify a stream of insults at a teacher trying to run a lesson. That isn't a judgement on him particularly. It's the inheritance all of us are handed now, the belief that a feeling, once it arrives with enough force, is its own justification for what you do next. In his case it came out as contempt. In mine it came out as guilt. Neither of us checked whether the feeling was actually telling us anything true before we very nearly acted on it.
Why the guilt gets read as proof
Here's where this stops being a story about one week and starts being a story about a great many of us.
If you grew up being told to keep your feelings to yourself, and you're now on the receiving end of a culture that tells you to trust them completely, you've inherited a genuine contradiction, and it has a cost. Once a feeling is treated as the final word on what's true, causing someone else a bad feeling starts to look like doing them harm. Holding a line, any line, starts to feel like cruelty. Their upset becomes your verdict.
Say no to an adult child who wants you to fund something you can't or won't fund, and their disappointment can feel like proof you've failed them. Hold a boundary with a grandchild's parents about how often you're available, or what you're willing to do, and the flicker of hurt on the other end can feel like proof you've been unreasonable. It isn't. It's proof that someone else is having a feeling, which is a different thing entirely from proof that you were wrong.
The psychologist Susan David, who writes on what she calls emotional agility, suggests a way of catching yourself in the act of doing this: naming the feeling as yours rather than as a verdict. Instead of "you're being unfair to me," try "I'm experiencing this as unfair." It sounds like a small change of wording. It's actually a change of jurisdiction. One version hands someone else the authority to rule on your character. The other keeps that authority where it belongs.
So should you follow your feelings?
Not the first one, necessarily, and not the one that arrives loudest.
I've written before about the dream I carried for decades of becoming a barrister, a feeling I first had at seventeen and am apparently still having now, in my sixties, often while doing the washing up. That one has earned trust. It has survived nearly fifty years, three careers, and every reason I've ever had to let it go. The guilt about last week's classroom, by contrast, had a beginning I could name and, once I looked at it properly, no real evidence behind it at all, only a very tired week.
That's the actual test, and it deserves to be taken as seriously as it sounds. A feeling that arrives, argues its case hard for a few days, and then collapses once you examine the facts is weather. It can still be intense while it lasts. It is not, on that basis alone, telling you the truth. A feeling that has been there for years, that survives good weeks and bad ones, that returns in different forms across different decades, is closer to climate. That is the one worth building something on.
Susan David's term for the actual method here, emotional agility, is more useful than either "trust your feelings" or "ignore your feelings." Her sequence is roughly this: notice the feeling, understand what it's actually telling you, decide what you genuinely value in the situation, and then choose your action based on that, not on the feeling's volume. I didn't have her language for it at the time, but that is, in hindsight, exactly what I was doing over that weekend, however slowly.
The distinction that matters
None of this is an argument for ignoring your feelings, and I want to be exact about that, because plenty of people reading this spent decades doing precisely that and are only now learning to notice what they feel at all. I've written before about loneliness as a signal worth listening to, not a fault to hide. That still stands. A feeling is real information about your body and your history. Refusing to notice it doesn't make you wiser. It makes you someone working without the data.
But there's a cost to swinging all the way to the other extreme, to treating every feeling as sufficient permission, or sufficient prohibition, and I don't think we've been honest about what that cost is. If not feeling like doing something is reason enough not to do it, resilience has nowhere left to stand. A great deal of an ordinary week, and an ordinary life, runs on doing things you don't feel like doing: turning up, holding a line, finishing what you started, showing up for someone when it would be easier not to. None of that requires the absence of feeling. It requires the willingness to act regardless of it, which is a different muscle entirely, and one that gets weaker the less we use it.
The distinction is narrower and, I think, more useful than either of those two instructions. Noticing a feeling and being governed by it are different acts, and very little in the culture around us teaches people to tell them apart. I could register that I was exhausted, and guilty, and take both seriously as information, while still asking whether either was telling me something true about what had happened or something true only about how depleted I was by the end of that particular week. Most of the time, it's the second, especially with the feelings that arrive fast and argue hardest.
If Barrett is right that emotions are assembled from a lifetime of stored experience rather than read straight off events as they happen, then after fifty that stored experience is considerable. Every feeling you have now is built from decades of old information, some of it accurate, some of it a lesson from a marriage, a childhood or a workplace that ended years ago and is no longer the room you're standing in. That isn't a reason to distrust every feeling you have. It's a reason to ask, far more often than most of us do, whose evidence you're actually looking at, and how old it is.
The psychologist Julie Smith, whose work is more practical than either Barrett's or David's, makes a point that finished the job for me that weekend: you do not have to feel ready, or resolved, or at peace, before you act on what you already know to be right. Waiting to feel settled can keep a person stuck in the guilt indefinitely, since the feeling has no particular reason to resolve itself on its own schedule. I didn't wait until the guilt disappeared before I decided not to apologise for something I hadn't done wrong. I decided, and the feeling caught up with the decision some days later, on its own time.
I spent a weekend building a case against myself out of a feeling that, examined properly, was tiredness wearing guilt's clothes, not evidence of anything I'd actually done. I don't think that instinct in me has gone. I think I've got slightly better at recognising it while it's still running, which is not the same as making it disappear, and is probably the more honest thing to aim for after fifty than any promise of finally feeling at peace with everything.
If you recognise that habit of turning your own feelings into a verdict on yourself, my guide It's Not Too Late — A Practical Guide to Starting Over After 50 has a section on exactly this. Read more here.
