Embodiment and feeling
The difference between emotion and feeling
Despite the enormous amount of research published on consciousness, emotion and feeling in recent decades, a surprisingly neglected question remains: how can we distinguish between emotion and feeling? In everyday life we often use these two terms interchangeably but they actually point to meaningfully different aspects of our experience.
Emotion has its roots in the Latin term ēmōtiōn, which referred to action, outward movement and agitation. That definition suggests a strong link between emotion and actions or adjustments, or more simply, behaviour. It is true that we can behave emotionally without being fully aware of the emotion itself. Emotion can, in a real and important sense, be present in our behaviour but outside of our awareness. In fact, strong emotions can overtake us in ways that we might only be able to reflect on later, if at all.
The term feeling, by contrast, has older etymological roots relating to the sense of touch and inner awareness. Feeling, as distinct from emotion, refers to an awareness, however subtle. It is always, and by definition, conscious. At times we might even feel something without really knowing why.
A simple way to sense the difference is to consider the statement I am sad and how it differs from the statement I feel sad. The first refers to a general state or orientation, whereas the second, the statement I feel sad points more directly to a present, bodily experience. These phenomena are simply not the same thing, even if they are closely related.
What contemporary neuroscience tells us about emotion
One of the most significant challenges to traditional views of emotion has come from psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett. Contrary to what classical emotion theory had long assumed, her research, summarised in the book How Emotions Are Made, found no consistent physiological fingerprints for basic emotions like fear, anger or sadness. Barrett found that the same pattern of physiological change in the body can produce different emotions, such as fear in one context and surprise in another. Emotions are much more variable than the classical view suggests.
Barrett’s work highlights two concepts now central to understanding emotion: interoception and homeostasis. Interoception refers to the brain’s sensing of the body’s internal state, its ongoing physiological changes and energy needs. Homeostasis is the continuous process of regulation that keeps the body within the ranges it needs to survive. Barrett argues that emotion emerges from these homeostatic requirements of the body, or, as she terms it, the body budget. In her view, the brain predicts what the body will need in a given situation. Feeling and emotion follow, as the result of those predictions.
Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, whose research into fear responses and neural pathways has been equally influential, makes a related point. Decades of research have led him to conclude that much of our emotional responding is nonconscious. In fact, in his book Anxious, LeDoux argues that complex behavioural responses, including decision making and even processes that look like deliberation, can all be nonconscious. These can all occur without our explicit awareness. Therefore, what we call emotions are often better understood as appraisals of situations, responses that the whole organism makes before consciousness fully catches up. This view aligns emotion and behaviour. For LeDoux, the subjective experience of feeling is something that emerges from these nonconscious processes rather than causing them.
Where the brain-centred view falls short
Both Barrett and LeDoux, despite their differences, share an underlying assumption. They understand the brain as the central regulator of experience. In Barrett’s framework, feeling becomes a kind of by-product of the brain’s body-budgeting activity. In LeDoux’s, feelings are the conscious manifestation of nonconscious neural processes. The body appears important in both accounts, but functions essentially as an instrument of the brain.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio offers a more nuanced perspective in his book The Strange Order of Things. His work places feeling firmly in the context of the whole organism, linking it to an expanded understanding of homeostasis. For him, homeostasis refers not merely to the maintenance of survival, but contains an orientation towards development and flourishing. For Damasio, feeling is the subjective experience of this life-regulating process, and it is deeply rooted in the viscera, the organs and the chemical signalling systems of the body, not just the brain. He describes the nervous system not as a master controller but, historically, as a servant of whole-organism homeostasis, a perspective that significantly shifts the picture.
Damasio’s framework tends to operate within broadly hierarchical assumptions about brain and body, and these assumptions require further explanation. The deeper problem running through all of these contemporary accounts is one of metaphysics, of the foundational assumptions underlying the theory. Positioning the brain as controller and regulator of the body and consciousness reflects a broader tendency in Western thought that understands the world in terms of separation and control: brains control bodies, genes control cells, chemistry controls physiology. None of these descriptions are fully accurate. They are based on an underlying view of materialism, which sees the world as composed of separate things that act upon one another, often in linear chains of cause and effect.
Feeling as a whole body phenomenon
A different philosophical starting point leads to a different understanding of feeling. If we understand living systems not as isolated entities directed by a central controller, but as dynamic, self-organising processes always existing in relation to other processes and to their environments, then feeling looks quite different.
From this perspective, feeling is not a by-product of brain activity. It is a holistic inner sensing that arises at the level of the whole body — a way the living system orients itself in relation to its situation, its history and its world. Feeling, in this sense, is more fundamental than emotion. It is the foundational level of our experience. Feeling is always present even when subtle or quiet, and it is through feeling that meaning first arises in living systems.
This is not to dismiss the importance of interoception or the brain’s role in experience. Rather, it is to situate both within a larger picture, one in which the body as a whole, including its history and its present relationships, is the ground of conscious experience.
Questions about embodiment, emotion and feeling:
What is the difference between emotion and feeling?
The term emotion is historically associated with outward action and agitation. We can link this to complex responses that can overtake us, sometimes without our full awareness. Contemporary neuroscience increasingly supports the view that much emotional responding is nonconscious. Feeling points to something else, something more inward and conscious: an awareness, however subtle, of present, bodily experience. A theory of feeling needs to account for both, and to clarify the relationship between them.
Isn't feeling just what the brain produces?
Influential researchers including Lisa Feldman Barrett and Joseph LeDoux argue that emotions and feelings emerge from nonconscious brain processes, with the brain functioning as a central regulator of experience. Antonio Damasio offers a more body-centred view, grounding feeling in the whole organism’s homeostatic processes. An alternative perspective goes further, understanding feeling as arising from the whole body as a dynamic system, not directed from above by the brain, but emerging from the living body in its history and its present relationships with the world.
Why does the distinction between emotion and feeling matter practically?
If feeling is understood as a whole-body phenomenon rather than a brain output, then working with the body directly, through somatic therapies, embodiment practices and careful inner attention, becomes a meaningful way to understand and shift experience. It also suggests that our feelings carry genuine present-moment information about our situation and our needs, rather than being simply the residue of the brain’s predictions from past experience.
What does it mean to say that consciousness emerges as feeling?
Rather than consciousness arising from neural computation in the brain, this view proposes that consciousness first emerges as feeling at the level of the whole body. Feeling is not a by-product of cognition but its foundation. It is the most basic form of inner sensing from which more complex forms of awareness and understanding develop. This positions feeling not as a peripheral or merely functional phenomenon, but as central to what it means to be a living, experiencing being.
A conceptual adventure: read more about these topics
If you are interested in delving further into these fascinating ideas, my book Taking Heart and Making Sense: A New View of Nature, Feeling and the Body, explores emotion and feeling from multiple perspectives and with reference to a wide range of thinkers—from embodied cognition and theoretical biology to speculative philosophy and developmental psychology. An ambitious, adventurous and readable exploration that explains theories, makes connections and provides genuinely new insights into the nature of feeling and its relationship to the living body.