We all experience unwieldy feelings. But between our emotion-phobic society and the debilitating uncertainty of modern times, we usually don’t know how to talk about what we’re going through, much less handle it. Over the past year, Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy’s online community has laughed and cried about productivity guilt, pandemic anxiety, and Zoom fatigue. Now, Big Feelings addresses anyone intimidated by oversized feelings they can’t predict or control, offering the tools to understand what’s going on, find comfort, and face the future with a sense of newfound agency.
Weaving surprising science with personal stories and original illustrations, each chapter examines one uncomfortable feeling—like envy, burnout and anxiety—and lays out strategies for turning big emotions into manageable ones. You’ll learn:
• How to end the cycle of intrusive thoughts brought on by regret, and instead use this feeling as a compass for making decisions
• How to identify what’s behind your anger and communicate it productively, without putting people on the defensive
• Why we might be suffering from perfectionism even if we feel far from perfect, and how to detach your self-worth from what you do
Big Feelings help us understand that difficult emotions are not abnormal and that we can emerge from them with a deeper sense of meaning. We can’t stop emotions from bubbling up, but we can learn how to make peace with them.
