Why You Keep Overthinking Your Emotions (and How to Actually Process Them)

Have you ever journaled for hours, talked it out with your therapist, listened to every podcast episode about healing — and still felt stuck? If you're a woman who lives deeply in her mind, constantly analyzing her emotions instead of actually feeling them, this episode is for you. In today's conversation, we're diving into the pattern of over-intellectualizing emotion — what it looks like, why so many of us default to it, and why all the self-awareness in the world won't set you free if it stays in your head.

Through the lens of devotional somatic yoga for women and nervous system healing, we'll explore how to gently move out of analysis mode and back into your body — where real transformation lives. Whether you're new to gentle and restorative yoga and inner work or you've been on this path for a while, this episode will give you practical, embodied tools to start feeling, expressing, and releasing what you've been carrying. This is the heart of what we do here at The Nourished Woman — and it just might be the permission slip you didn't know you needed.

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Meet Keri Marino 

Keri Marino is a Somatic Yoga Therapist and founder of The Nourished Woman, helping women move beyond overwhelm, anxiety, and self-doubt into embodied confidence and nervous system balance. Through women’s empowerment yoga, somatic healing, and inner work, she guides women to regulate their bodies, break old patterns, and reconnect with their strength, pleasure, and purpose. Her approach blends grounded spirituality with practical tools for real-life transformation.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:54

I want you to imagine with me a small room, like dark green walls, white upper parts to the walls. It's divided in half. There's these like beautiful potted plants everywhere. They're overflowing. And then there's me and a small group of women sitting on yoga mats, and we are getting to know each other for the first time. And this is a group that I teach, it's called Embody. It's a series program that really takes women through nervous system nourishment, somatic yoga, and emotional well-being. It's all about women's mental health. And so I'm sitting there with these women in this gorgeous space, and two of them start sharing with me. Like part of why I'm here is because I over-intellectualize. I think all the time about what I'm feeling. I'm analyzing it, but I'm not actually feeling my feelings, and I'm not actually processing these emotions, and I feel really disconnected from my body, even after doing therapy, even after doing yoga alone. And so I just kind of want to name like this is part of the kind of women that I attract. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're like, holy shit, she's actually talking about me, but I was just not in that room. Or maybe you're one of the ladies who was in that room with me. I want you to know that I see you, and this is incredibly common. It is so common to overthink your feelings. Many of you don't even know that you're doing this. I see it all the time in my one-to-mine one-to-one clients. We'll be talking through something. I'll ask them a question about how they feel in the present moment, and they'll give me an analysis of that emotion instead. Or I'll ask them about where do you feel this emotion in your body? And they'll give me an analysis of the feeling rather than actually describing the felt sensation of that in their body in real time. And so you'll know that you're an overintellectualizer if you are doing these things. If you have a journal full of notes about the patterns that you see in yourself, if you are constantly trying to look at your emotions from different angles to try to understand them, if you have been to therapy and you feel like you have great self-awareness around your emotions, but you're not like fully moving through the cycle of them, and so it's just like, oh, I'm aware of the emotions and I know how to cope with the emotions, but I don't know how to actually feel and process and move them through me. If you notice despite doing yoga and doing psychotherapy, that you tend to still feel anxious and really reactive, or still feel like you're living in your head and not in your body, then this conversation is 100% for you. We are gonna unpack how to recognize overintellectualizing and what to do with it. But before we get into all of that, I want to talk about why you might be doing this. And there's a lot here. I want to be honest. Feeling your emotions rather than analyzing your emotions can actually be really overwhelming because sometimes emotions can be big, they can be uncomfortable, they can give us information about ourselves or someone in our lives that maybe we don't want to see. And so it can feel actually, this is a big word, but it can feel kind of unsafe or uncomfortable for you to actually feel emotion as opposed to analyze and intellectualize and overthink about an emotion. So it's not the most fun a lot of times. And it can also make you feel like you're losing control. So if you've experienced trauma, hello, all of us have experienced different degrees of trauma in our lives, then you likely want to stay in a range of control that feels good to you. You want to feel like you're not like out of control in your emotions. You want to feel like you can take the emotional temperature of other people around you and do some people-pleasing or fawning or make yourself the chameleon or adjust based on like who you feel like you need to be in any given moment. And to actually feel emotion and to move those emotions through your body requires a little bit of a loss of control. So, a little example of this: part of what I weave together in my women's empowerment yoga therapy is somatic tools with emotional tools, with nervous system tools, and with yoga tools. Like we kind of weave all that together. And so I was with a client the other day, and she was expressing this is a woman who is a mental health professional and is a yoga teacher professionally. And so she was talking through an emotion that she has that comes up every single week. And I asked her how she met that emotion, and she said that she acknowledges it, and then she does a yoga practice to soothe herself around it and to kind of bring the emotion down to a regulated place. And so I was talking to her about how actually just regulating all the time is not allowing her to own and embrace the full spectrum of who she is. It's actually a form of saying, okay, only these emotions are actually okay as part of me. The ones that fall outside of that are not okay, and I just need to kind of shut them down, I need to regulate them, I need to come back to a baseline. And so this is an example of the kind of like covert control that can come up when it comes to your emotions. And a lot of times if you are a yoga teacher or a yoga professional of any kind, this is like a sneaky thing that I actually see a lot going on. And it is this idea that okay, I have all these great coping skills and self-regulation skills, and the yoga really works, but if you're using yoga to actually say a part of you isn't good, like you can't go there with yourself, if you're just regulating all the time, that's not ideal either. Like you are a whole ass woman, right? And you have a whole sacred range of emotions, and every single one of those emotions are good. If you've never seen a wheel of emotion, Google one. If you're one of my clients, use the one that I have given you. This wheel of emotion represents every possible one. And it is okay, babe, for you to feel angry, and it is okay for you to feel envy, and it is okay for you to feel despair, and it is okay for you to feel bone-deep pleasure and joy and gratitude and happiness and all of the things. So, but you've got to be willing to lose control a little bit in order to feel all of those things. I personally have experienced this next one where people give you praise for being calm, for being kind, for being collected. Earlier in my life, I was perpetually calm in moments of conflict, and I would not raise my voice, and I would not become dysregulated. But the more that I've grown and healed, the more that I've realized that that was actually a different form of me shutting down and dysregulating. That was a really intense fawning that was going on. But I was constantly getting affirmations and praise and compliments from other people about how calm, cool, and collected I was. And so if you get bonus points, if you get accolades for that, and it kind of reinforces, like, oh, well, I'm not allowed to say anything that might ruffle feathers, or oh, I'm known for being the kind one all the time, oh, I'm known for being this or that, or people praise me for this, then it might be harder for you to actually feel the feelings because it might change, it might challenge your identity some around who you are and who other people see you as. And that can be sort of a rub under the scenes. And then the other reason why you overthink emotions and intellectualize them is because you've probably become really freaking good at living in your head rather than in your body. If you spend to if you are like really skillful, if you tend to be a person who's great at thinking, who's great at analyzing, who's great at considering. I see a lot of women in my practice who are really good at holding duality. Well, it's like, oh, this is not the only way to think about it. There's also this way to think about it, or that's this person's perspective, and then here's my perspective. All of this thinking, thinking, thinking is largely a big disconnect from you being in your body. And so all of these different reasons are why we over-intellectualize. It can feel overwhelming, it can feel like we're losing control, it can feel like it goes up against an identity that we have about who we're supposed to be. And it can go up against this part of us that's become really skillful at living in our head as opposed to living in our body. Now let's talk a little bit about emotions and what they actually are and how you can bridge this gap between overthinking and intellectualizing into actually processing emotion, which is important. So emotions are happening on many different levels. They are information from you to you. And if you were just talking to somebody that thinks about it somatically, then they would tell you that emotions live in the body, right? And that the body communicates with the brain. And if you're talking to a neuroscientist or somebody in the mental health arena, they might tell you that the mind is communicating emotions to the body. And the truth is that both are true, right? And if you look into the mental health arena, there's ideas that we can go like a top-down approach, so using mind to communicate with body, and we can use bottom-up approaches where we can use body to communicate with mind. And so, in reality, your emotions are happening on many different layers. They are happening in your body, and they are happening in your nervous system, and they're also happening in your mind, and in your belief systems, and in your past experiences, and in your desires, and it's all sort of tangled up and like swimming in the same water and sea together. And mostly when it comes to emotion work, we use a top-down approach in mainstream culture. So this is where thinking about the emotion comes out, this is where analyzing the emotions come out, this is the journaling that you're doing about your thoughts, this is the talk therapy that you're doing. And all of these things, like, don't get me wrong, they're amazing. Even like a meditation practice that doesn't really weave in parts of the body can fall into this top-down approach. We're really getting into the psyche on this one. And it's it's useful. Like, I don't want to discount in any way how important it is to have self-understanding around your emotions, to be able to acknowledge them, to be able to think about them, to be able to gain information from them and self-understanding from them, and to learn how to communicate your emotions. Like, obviously, super important. And it's also really true that sometimes that is the long route to freedom when it comes to your emotions. That process, that cognitive processing of emotion takes time. And sometimes we do it a little too much or way too much. And we do it in a way that does not actually allow us to feel the feelings. And embodiment practice, somatic yoga, somatic work in general, things that help you acknowledge the way the emotions feel in your body are more of a bottom-up approach. So it's noticing, like, okay, I'm feeling this feeling, and I can feel it in my body as maybe a tightness in my throat, or I can feel it in my body as warmth and spaciousness, or I can feel it almost like a clamp around my rib cage, or I can feel it as this whoosh of energy down into my pelvic region. So the somatic, the sensory, the ability to tune into the felt sense of the body is also a really important way to acknowledge your emotions and how your body is responding to them. And if we bring your nervous system into that, then your nervous system is this beautiful operating system inside of you that's based on past experiences and it sort of like wires up these software, these algorithms of response. Algorithms probably a shitty word, but like these pathways of response that have worked for you in the past. And so if we talk about emotions, like all of these different systems are involved, the different parts of the brain, the amygdala, right, versus the prefrontal cortex, the different like felt senses in your body, those places where you have the stress markers. I ask women for for two decades now, like where do you hold stress in your body? And it's oftentimes like shoulders and neck or hips or in my chest or in my belly or in my throat or in my jaw, right? These common places where we feel stress. And so what I want to say about this is that emotions are bottom line, information. They are data. And according to the yoga philosophy, emotions are just like thoughts. They're waves of energy, they're waves of sensation through the body. And from the yogic perspective, the yogic philosophy is always reminding you that you are a soul experiencing this human reality. So you are the observer of the emotions, you are not the emotions, and that's an important distinction. And it also gives you permission to actually feel emotion, name emotion, acknowledge emotion, express emotion. Because ultimately, that's kind of what's missing in this over-intellectualization of emotion is the expression, like actually feeling the emotion and expressing the emotion. But that part, that's the part that maybe you're not doing. So, and you can do this in a lot of different ways, and we're gonna talk about it just a little bit, and that might be like a whole other podcast episode for us. Signs that you are overintellectualizing. You may keep talking about the exact same thing over and over again. You may feel stuck, but have a clear understanding of the pattern or emotion that you say, see in yourself. You may be asking yourself why over and over again. You might almost be like throwing darts at the wall. It's just like, well, what if I try this? What if I try that? What if I shift my mindset? What if I change my perspective about this? Like, what if I do oh, oh, oh. And you might find that your body still feels really tight and activated, or you're getting that like strong emotional response in your body every time you think about these emotions. So I've talked to you a little bit about this bottom-up and top-down approach, and I've given you a lot of tools to recognize the pattern and some yoga philosophy to understand how we work with it just a little bit. But I'd love to leave you with some very specific things that you can do in order to actually feel and express your emotion instead of just analyze and overthink. If you are the woman who analyzes and overthink and you feel really seen by this episode, please do not do any of these practices from a place of self-judgment. You are simply building new skills within yourself, you are creating new possibilities, you are bridging gaps in your healing and growth and evolution that are you're simply ready for now, and you have the information for now, and there's no judgment around it. And I also want to share that it takes practice and it takes time, and doing some of these can feel really unnatural at first. So, one of the quickest, easiest tools that you could do, and this is not necessarily like a formal yoga practice, is to acknowledge an emotion that you're feeling, to think of a song intuitively that kind of matches that emotion, or like, ooh, feels like it will give you a chance to express it, and then to do what one of my teachers, Adriana Rizzolo, taught me to do, and it's called a daily dance practice. So you find the song that expresses the emotion, and then you shake ass for a good three and a half minutes, and you're just gonna move in whatever way you want to move during that song. And the idea is that you're moving with the feeling, you're not saying, okay, feeling you're in the timeout chair. You're saying, all right, I'm gonna like, oof, I'm gonna feel that feeling, and I'm gonna move while I'm doing it, and I'm gonna listen to this music that really helps me tap into it, and then just go for it. And another thing that you could do, and this is a little more like formal and quiet and contemplative, is to break out that journal of yours, if that works for you, write about an emotion for a few like a moment or two, or maybe three minutes, and then close the journal and tune into your body, put a hand over your heart center, put a hand over your belly, close your eyes, take some slow breaths, and notice where you feel that emotion in your body, and then breathe and just be with that, whatever that sensation is in your body, and then you might ask your body, how do you want to express this? And it could be that your body wants a hug, it could be that your body wants like a oh, like a really big stretch, it could be that you want to do a little bit of shaking, it could be that your body wants a glass of water, it could be that you want to go grab a pillow and you want to scream into that pillow. It could be any number of things, but you're letting the emotion actually move through you. You're saying, I'm not just gonna analyze it, I'm gonna actually feel it in my body, and then I'm gonna get curious about what this emotion, how it wants to be expressed. And if you cry, that's okay. If you feel frustrated as hell and you're like, oh, this is hard, that's totally okay, you will get better at this over time, and I know it because I have seen it thousands of times, and I believe it can absolutely work for you. If this episode resonated with you, please let me know. And if you want some direct guidance from me on how to apply bridging this gap, how to move from just thinking about emotions to actually processing and expressing, join me inside of the Nourished Woman Sanctuary. You get two candlelight restorative yoga practices with me live every month on Zoom. You get my full body of work, 160 different practices that are made for busy women that only have 15 to 30 minutes at a time. They really bridge all these things together the emotion work, the body connection, the soul connection, the nervous system work, all in these very short, potent somatic yoga practices. And you can access them anytime, day or night. Reach out, let me know if this stood out for you, and I'll see you in the next episode.