What to Try When You Can't Sort Out Your Feelings — Tips for Putting the Fog Into Words

Are you angry, or sad? You can't quite tell yourself. All kinds of feelings well up at once, your head stays in a tangle, and you don't know what to do. Not being able to sort out your feelings is something that happens to everyone — it's very natural.

In this article, we'll talk — calmly — about what to try when you can't sort out your feelings: how to name your emotions and put them into words, and the tip of writing them out and setting them outside yourself.

You can't sort them out because they're mingled together

The first thing worth knowing is that not being able to sort out your feelings isn't because you're overthinking. In most cases, several emotions are welling up at once and simply aren't being separated cleanly.

Toward one person, for example, it's not unusual for anger and sadness, loneliness and relief to exist at the same time. Precisely because contradictory feelings coexist, you end up in a "I can't even tell myself" state. The starting point is to see it as "just many feelings existing at once" and not force them into a single answer.

Separate "what happened" from "how I felt"

The tip for giving an outline to tangled emotions is to write the "facts" and the "feelings" separately. In your head, the event that happened and your feelings about it become one lump — and that tends to be the source of confusion.

So try writing "what happened (fact)" and "how I felt (emotion)" separately. Write the facts plainly, then put the feelings that arose into words. That alone lets the swirling emotions gradually take on names and shrink to a size you can handle.

• Don't try to make it tidy — the words as you feel them are fine.
• Contradictory feelings can stay contradictory; write both.
• You don't have to force a conclusion.

Write it out, and set it outside your head

Trying to sort out feelings inside your head alone makes the same thoughts circle again and again, and progress stalls. It helps to write it out on paper or in an app and set it outside your head. Getting it out where you can look at it lets you see your own feelings from a slight distance.

Yurusen is an app that quietly supports this "write it out and set it outside." File the person behind your unsorted feelings gently into a ledger only you can read, and entrust the tangled emotions outside as a record. Just setting it down so you don't collapse under the weight makes it far easier to breathe.

The goal of sorting isn't to reach an answer

When we hear "sorting out feelings," we tend to think it means "reaching a clean conclusion." But the real goal may not be finding an answer — it may be giving a name to what you feel right now.

Just having a name makes the fog a little easier to handle. For how to keep writing as a daily self-care habit, see also Self-Care Through Writing Out Your Emotions. And if distress lasts a long time, please don't forget that you can rely on a professional.