You can’t think your way through a feeling.

For a long time, I thought I was processing my feelings. I’d journal about them. Talk through them. Think about them from every angle, like I was polishing a stone. But no matter how much I analyzed, the knots stayed put.

Here’s what I wish I’d known sooner: thinking about a feeling isn’t the same as feeling it.

It’s like looking at a picture of a sandwich and calling it lunch.

We’re wired to live in our heads. Our brains are brilliant—great at solving problems, planning, protecting us. But somewhere along the way, we started believing that everything should be handled up there. Including emotions.

And that’s where we get stuck.

A wave of sadness comes up, and instead of letting it move through us, we try to name it, explain it, file it away. We think, “Why do I feel like this?” or “What does this mean?” And sometimes that helps. But often? It’s just a loop. A very convincing, very exhausting loop.

You replay the same thought. Scroll the same text thread. Tell the same story to three different friends. You’re in it—but you’re not moving through it.

Because feelings don’t live in the mind. They live in the body.

Your chest gets tight. Your throat closes. Your stomach flips. That’s not weakness—it’s your nervous system doing its job. Back before we had language or spreadsheets or therapy podcasts, we just… felt things. Fully. Then let them go.

But we’ve trained ourselves out of that. Most of us didn’t grow up in homes where emotional expression was welcomed. So we learned to think instead. To stay in control. To be “fine.” And those old feelings? We packed them up and carried them forward. Tidy on the outside, overloaded on the inside.

So when something small happens now—your partner forgets something you said, a coworker’s tone sounds off—it hits all those old bruises. And suddenly, you’re not just reacting to this moment, you’re reacting to all the ones that came before.

I’ve had moments where I knew, logically, that I wasn’t in danger—but my body was telling a different story. And if I stayed in my head, I’d get stuck trying to argue with it.

What helped? Getting out of my head and into my body.

Sometimes that means sitting still and noticing what’s there. Sometimes it’s a breath, a walk, a shake, a sob. Whatever helps the feeling move. Because once it does, there’s space again. You come back to yourself—not the overthinking version, but the grounded one.

That’s the whole idea behind Unsnag. It’s a tool to help you catch those “I’m spiraling and I know it but I don’t know what to do about it” moments. You drop in, follow a few simple steps, and feel the wave pass. No analysis required.

You don’t need to be a monk or a mess to want that. You just need to be human.

And being human means you get to feel what you feel—and then let it go.