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Running from a feeling rarely feels like you’re running. It looks more like being busy by checking your phone or answering emails.

A bad feeling could be triggered by a message from a friend or a critical comment, and within seconds, your mood has turned sour and you just want to escape…

It can take years to see this as avoidance rather than busyness.

Once you realize that you might be avoiding big feelings, here are five things that can help:

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1. Learn to Catch the Exit, Not the Emotion

It’s reasonably difficult to notice your feelings because feelings tend to change quickly and we are often not truthful when putting our feelings into words. Instead a better way is to notice your actions.

Wendy Wood, who has spent her career at USC studying how habits actually work, found out that 43% of what we do in a day isn’t actually decided by us. It’s all just led by familiar cues, and this is mind blowing. Because, what we’re literally doing is reaching for something that feels familiar no matter how we feel about doing that “thing.”

Everyone has three or four favorite habits, and they are much easier to spot than the underlying feeling.

Once you know yours, use them as clues. When you catch your hand reaching for the phone, that means a feeling just arrived. Nothing more complicated than that, then to just notice it.

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2. Put the Story Down and Go Find the Sensation

A psychologist named Philippe Verduyn, based at a university in Belgium, spent years having people log their emotions as they actually happened, and found that two things decided how long a feeling stuck around more than anything else: how big the moment felt, and how much you replayed it afterward. The first one you don’t control. The second one is just a habit, which means it’s the one worth breaking.

What helps instead is a boring question: where is this in the body? Criticism might look like stiffness under the collarbone and anxiety as churning in the stomach. The location matters less than the looking. This sense even has a name, interoception, and its own dedicated stretch of brain, the insula, that lights up when you do it. There’s good evidence it can be trained, a bit like a muscle. Closing your eyes makes it easier, because with the room gone, whatever is happening inside feels closer, the way sounds feel closer in the dark. The rule is simple. Every time you notice you are back in the story, return to the sensation. Expect to do this ten times in two minutes. That is normal, and it still counts.

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3. Stay for the Length of a Song

Here’s the part that actually surprises people: any single wave of feeling, left alone, does not last nearly as long as it feels like it will while you’re in it. You’ve probably heard the claim that emotions only last ninety seconds. It’s a tidy number, and it’s not quite right. When Verduyn had people track full emotional episodes rather than single moments, the range was enormous.

Shame and fear tend to burn out in about half an hour, guilt can hang around for three or four hours, and sadness, given the chance, can take the better part of a week. But a single wave inside any of that, the specific spike you feel right after a bad meeting, behaves much more like what addiction researchers call “urge surfing.” It peaks and starts to ease within a few minutes, almost every time, provided you stop feeding it a story. The whole feeling might take a week to move through. This particular wave of it won’t.

So give the wave roughly the length of a song. Sit still, keep your attention on the body, and when the urge to leave shows up, and it always shows up, let it pass without obeying it. The urge to leave is not a sign you are doing it wrong. Noticing it and staying anyway is the entire exercise.

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4. Afterward, Say What It Was

When the wave has passed, name what it actually was, in plain words, out loud or on paper. Not “I was being stupid about that email” but “I felt hurt, and under the hurt I was scared it meant she is losing respect for me.” The first phrasing is a verdict. The second is information.

This step is easy to skip because it feels like the real emotional homework, the part that isn’t just sitting there. But naming does something real. UCLA researchers found that when people put a feeling into words, activity drops almost immediately in the amygdala, the part of the brain that runs the alarm, even though nothing about the situation has changed except the sentence describing it. Naming isn’t just a nice metaphor for calming down. It appears to be an actual mechanism for it, routed through a completely different part of the brain than the one that was panicking. The next time that feeling arrives, it arrives with a label already on it, and a labeled feeling is far less frightening than an anonymous one.

And, Know Which Feelings Not to Face Alone

There are limits to all of this, and it matters to be honest about them. Staying in a feeling works for the ordinary weather of a week: irritation, disappointment, loneliness, the sting of criticism. It’s not a technique for grief or for anything connected to real trauma.

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