This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 1246, all the feels by Casey Main of KCMain.com

and my very own personal narrator Justin Mollick, reading to you from some amazing blogs to help

you optimize your life. Happy Friday, almost to another weekend, and have a brand new author

for you today, Casey Main. She's an author, her new book is called, I gave up men for lent,

the story of a jaded, hopelessly romantic health conscious party girl search for meaning,

highly reviewed on Amazon, and you can find it on her site at CaseyMain.com. I have that

link in this episode's description. Without further ado, let's get right to our very first post

from her and start optimizing your life. All the feels by CaseyMain of KCMain.com.

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?

Why, yes, Joni Mitchell, it does seem to go that way. But I argue there's also another way it

goes that you don't know what was gone till it's back. This realization hit me hard the other day

as I struggle to handle the return of some unfamiliar feelings, emotions. Now at first that might

not make sense. We often think feelings and emotions are the same, but they aren't. In doing some

research, I learned that emotions are physical states while feelings are mental associations and

reactions to emotions. Basically your brain looks at an emotion that arises in your body,

assigns meaning to it, and that results in a feeling. Feelings may be the effect,

but emotions are the deeper rooted cause. Well, we don't want to feel a certain way we tend to

repress the emotion that causes the unwelcome feeling. Push it down, bury it, pretend it isn't there.

I did that for years. Not wanting to feel the pain of heartache, I suppressed the emotion of

sadness altogether. And that's where it gets tricky because feelings are subjective.

There are brains interpretation and therefore influenced by experiences, memories, and beliefs.

Ultimately on some level, we choose them. And oftentimes we choose wrong. In all my years of

...