In this short monologue, Dr. Tabatha Barber explains the crucial distinction between emotions and feelings. She describes emotions as unconscious physiological signals generated by the brain and body, serving as barometers of what may be happening. Feelings, by contrast, are the stories we construct around those signals, shaped by past experiences, current mood, hunger, fatigue, and other contextual factors. Barber warns that mistaking feelings for direct indicators can lead to reactive, inaccurate responses. She advocates a practice of curiosity—asking why a feeling arises, recalling its first occurrence, and examining associated memories—to create a mental pause. This pause, supported by a deep breath and activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, allows the brain’s higher-order regions to engage, leading to better decision‑making. She ties this approach to a biblical reference (Isaiah 30:15), framing repentance and rest as a form of emotional regulation. The overall message is that emotional intelligence grows from recognizing the difference between raw emotion and constructed feeling, investigating the latter, and deliberately slowing down before reacting.
Chapters
I think you need to understand. All of us need to understand there's a difference between emotion and feeling. Okay? So emotions are these unconscious things that our body gives us. These signals that come from physiology and come from brain. And emotions are inherent, and they're not bad. And what they are is barometers to tell you that something's going on or something might be going on. Doesn't necessarily mean that there is something going on. Feelings, though, are what we take from that subconscious indicator that something may or may not be going on. And we wrap it in a story based on our past experience, our current mood, the way we feel, whether we're hungry, tired, healthy, or not, all those things. All of a sudden we're building a story to try to make contextual sense out of what it is that we are emotionally processing in our body. The problem is, if you're unaware of that and you just think that when you feel your heart racing, it means that you're having an anxiety attack, or that it means that somebody's about to hurt you or something, when you feel a certain thing, that it means this every time, then you're again, you're re reacting to bad information from the weakest parts of your brain, right? And so, in other words, if you want to be accurate in how you respond to things that you feel, the first thing is to investigate them, become curious about them, ask questions. What is. Why is it that I'm feeling this? What was the first time I ever felt this? And is that why I'm thinking about it in the same way now? Because it was December, it was February, and. And I was wearing a red coat, and I saw this thing happen. And now every time it's that weather and I'm wearing a red coat and something similar happens, I feel the same things. Like, you evaluate, you get curious about what it is that you're feeling instead of letting the previous story or your current emotional state tell you what it has to mean. And if you can do that and just again, build that little space in there, that little pause. And that's why the Bible says in Isaiah 30:15, in repentance and rest is your salvation. Like he's saying, learn how to rest for a second. Learn how to pause for a moment, learn how to take a deep breath for a second, get your parasympathetics activated and calm your physiology down before you reach. React to things. Because when you're in a reactive posture, you're in a very inaccurate posture most of the time. You're just in a protective defensive mechanism, and you're not using the parts of your brain that are designed to help you make good decisions, right? So I think that that's the secret.
