Author: Axel Hacke
Reading time: 17 minutes
Synopsis
This book, Wie fühlst du dich (2025), looks at the rich inner world of human feelings. You will learn why emotions are very important today. But you will also find out why the fast pace of modern life sometimes makes our feelings quite confused.
What You Will Learn: A Simple Guide to Feelings and Mental Health.
Today, it is becoming more normal to talk about feelings. But this does not mean we know how to handle them. Also, pressure to do well, not enough time, and too much news often make us feel too much emotion and get tired. This is why I want to take a short break and ask you: “How do I really feel right now?”
This summary will take you on a trip inside yourself. We will learn how feelings begin. We will also learn how they work with your body. And you will find out how you can find calm and balance again, even with a busy daily life and inner confusion.
Does this sound interesting? Then let’s start now.
Blink 1 – I Feel, Therefore I Am – The Age of Feeling
“I feel, therefore I am” – this could be the motto for our time. For hundreds of years, the opposite was true: “I think, therefore I am.” The French thinker René Descartes made this saying. He made reason the most important thing. People saw feelings as a problem. If you cried, you were weak. If you felt too much, you were not thinking clearly. People believed you made choices with your head, not your heart.
Today we know: We cannot think at all without feelings. The brain scientist António Damásio showed this clearly. In his studies, he watched people whose frontal brain was damaged. This part of the brain handles emotions. One man was a successful lawyer and a loving father before. After surgery, he could think logically. But he felt nothing anymore. No joy, no fear, no pity. This made him unable to make decisions. He lost his job, family, and sense of direction. He could not find his way without emotions. Damásio showed that feelings are like an inner compass. They guide us long before our mind knows where to go.
That thinking and feeling work together sounds simple. But we cannot say it often enough: The mind does not live only in the head. It lives in the whole body. When our heart beats fast, we get goosebumps, or our stomach feels strange, our body’s inner wisdom reacts. It sends us feelings based on our thoughts. If we feel fear, it tells us to be careful. If there is danger, it makes us feel disgust. But it also sends good signals. When we feel very safe and secure with someone, we get a warm, tingly feeling all over. Feelings are not the opposite of reason. They help us, guide us, and show us the way.
Still, we live in a culture that is only slowly changing from ignoring feelings. People who grew up in the 1950s or 1960s often learned: Do not show your feelings. You just had to do your job. People did not talk about fear or sadness. They just dealt with them or pushed them away. Today it is different. We talk about emotions, sometimes almost too much. Whole businesses are built on them. Ads, social media, politics – feelings are used everywhere. They are created, sold, and changed. We live in a “feeling society” where emotions have become like money.
This brings a strange danger. On one hand, we are finding the meaning of feelings again. On the other hand, we lose track of which feelings are really ours. We wonder which feelings are put into us from outside, for example, by adverts, a well-managed Instagram account, or a moving film. The question “How do you feel?” asks us to stop for a moment and check: Which feeling is truly mine? And which one comes from all the voices, pictures, and moods that come to me every day? Maybe freedom starts right there: when we know what we feel and why.
Blink 2 – How Feelings Begin
Feelings do not just appear; they are made. They are a careful teamwork between your body and brain. Imagine your brain as a control center. It sits dark and safe inside your head. It takes in sounds, images, smells, and what your body feels. Then it must decide very quickly what all this means. To do this, it uses past experiences. From these, it builds ideas and ways to solve problems. These ideas are the plan for our emotions. But because we all have different experiences, the same thing can cause very different feelings in us. One person might pull back in fear from a buzzing sound at the door because they were once stung by a wasp. Another person thinks of the Bee Maja stories from their childhood and feels a sudden joy. This means the world does not give us ready-made feelings. Instead, we create them ourselves.
If feelings are made, they can also be shaped. We can learn to understand and explain our emotional reactions. If we make it a habit to check in with ourselves often, we can learn to tell the difference. Is that pulling feeling in our stomach fear or nervousness? Or is it just some extra energy our body gives us because an important task is coming? This ability to tell the difference starts with a simple self-check: What exactly do I feel? Where in my body? How strong is it? And what does it remind me of? The more exactly we can name our feelings, the freer we become. If someone changes “I am scared” to “I am tense because this is important to me,” it opens up completely different ways to act.
Feelings take energy. Your brain manages your body’s energy. Every time it uses this energy, you must put it back into your “energy account.” You do this with sleep, exercise, healthy food, and enough rest. If you always have too little energy, you will feel heavy and sad. So, looking after yourself is not about escaping. It is necessary to keep your emotions healthy.
If we understand this deeply, feelings will no longer hit us like a force of nature. Instead, we can ride them like a wave. We can even gently guide them in the direction we want. Then we are not just watching our actions. We are guiding them.
Blink 3 – Tiredness – A Modern Feeling
We all know those times when we want to answer the question, “How do you feel?” with simply: “Tired, dead tired.” Sometimes for weeks, we feel nothing but a heavy, numbing tiredness. It lies like a dark blanket over our numb spirit.
Tiredness is more than an empty battery sign in your head. It is the constant hum of a time that always promises a better tomorrow. But it also gives us new expectations, updates, and demands. Your phone vibrates, 47 unread emails need answers, three message apps pop up, and in the news, one bad report follows another. Your body says: Sleep, sleep, just sleep. But the clock says: Keep going, keep going, don’t lose time. This conflict makes you tired and unsure what to do. It is not because you are weak. It is because a culture of speed pushes you.
This tiredness has a history. Around 1900, during the time of big factories, people called it “neurasthenia.” This was a nervous tiredness that happened when people breathed to the rhythm of machines. They did not listen to their own bodies. Today, the machines are invisible. Computer programs drain our attention. Tweets and feeds make us angry and upset. This happens until no clear thought can get through. We react with irritation, inner restlessness, and a strong wish to simply stop. And since we were taught as children that tiredness means weakness, we see our exhaustion as a personal failure. But in truth, it is a sign of a broken time. On your sofa, you are dealing with the problems of an age that demands more speed than is good for people.
What helps is simple and works well: Make time feel real again. Instead of trying to stop the flood, build dams. Keep clear end-of-work times. Make sure you have real breaks between your tasks, ten minutes without a screen, so you can process what has happened. Manage your information: have a set time for news instead of constant checking. Move subscriptions out of your feeds and into a folder that you open on purpose. And allow yourself micro-sleeps and micro-nothings: two minutes with your eyes closed, three quiet breaths on a park bench, a walk around the block without a podcast. This is not escaping; it is maintenance. Maybe the age after tiredness begins with a simple question we ask ourselves more often: How do I feel – really? Not: What do I need to do even more? But: What do I need to keep a human pace? When this question becomes a habit, your inner drive will lose its power. So breathe out deeply and remember: You can deal with any crisis better when you are rested.
Blink 4 – Fear and Worry – A Constant Part of Being Human
There is a feeling as old as humankind itself: its name is fear. It is not a mistake in our system. It is a basic hum of our being. It can make us unable to move, like when we stare at a blank paper with sweaty hands during an exam. But it can also make us active and push us to do our best, for example, if we are chased and have to run away. Sometimes fear has no clear reason. It just makes the whole world seem hostile and dark. This vague, heavy feeling that makes it hard to breathe is very unpleasant. It only goes away if we do not push it down, but face it carefully and kindly.
Worry is fear’s little sister. But unlike fear, it does not come as a silent body feeling. It comes as endless inner talk. It takes us on a merry-go-round of thoughts, full of “what if” and “but.” This merry-go-round turns faster at night than during the day. If we stay in this state for too long, a general anxiety appears. It sees danger everywhere and slowly, but surely, takes away our sleep. For others, this tiring process often stays hidden. People who seem to work well and have everything under control are often fighting very loud storms inside. The answer is not to be heroically tough. It is a simple choice: I will no longer run from myself. I will not fight my fear like an enemy anymore. Instead, I will see it as a stubborn visitor. This visitor stays longer if you ignore him. He calms down if you notice him and ask: “What do you want to tell me?” And if the fog does not clear even then, get help: through therapy, doctors, or social support.
The big question remains: What if not only people, but a whole society has become fearful? What if life in constant speed and the many crisis reports make our basic feeling of fear stronger? Then the answer is also: slow down and listen. If we make decisions together that have a human pace, and do not follow the rhythm of anger waves. And if we also manage to see fear not as an enemy, but as a guide. Then we will stay able to act, despite all challenges. We will never get rid of fear. But we can learn to live with it, without letting it control us.
Blink 5 – Solving Emotional Chaos with Language, Silence, and Being Present
Sometimes we have low feelings; this is part of life. We learned this in this summary. But what should we do when fear, worry, or tiredness block our view? A letter exchange from 1916 between the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, might give an answer.
At that time, a dark shadow was over Rilke’s sensitive poet’s soul. Like many young men, he had to do military service. He was then made an archivist in the Vienna War Archives. The war experience had deeply shocked him mentally. It almost completely stopped his creative work. He wrote to Freud and poured out his heart. He said he was “in daily immeasurable states.” He complained, “The worst is the rubble over my spirit, more and more each day.” This painted a clear picture: A person buried by the ruins of his own inner life.
Freud answered very directly. He wrote: “Perhaps you keep your inner life too closed off from the outside world. Now the flood waters want to rise over your walls.” This clever insight still holds the key to helping ourselves today. If we lock up feelings for too long, they will find a way out. This can be as fear, unease, and sleeplessness. Or it can be as physical problems like headaches or an illness with no clear cause. Rilke still refused therapy. He feared that analysis could destroy what made him special: his creativity. He wrote to a friend that he did not want a “cleaned-up soul,” “corrected in red, like a page in a school book.” His own therapy was writing. With words and poems, he fought his inner darkness.
For those who cannot put their sorrow into beautiful poems, there is another way: talk about your inner feelings. Anyone who has tried to keep their feelings silent knows how loud they become. And if you dare to speak about them to a trusted person, you will notice they become smaller, easier to handle, and more human. It takes less energy to open up than to always stay closed off.
Besides the healing power of language, silence can also help. For example, meditation. Just sit, breathe, and watch your thoughts as they appear and disappear. The art of meditating is simply the art of just being. It is about not wanting anything or chasing desires that are not met. To meditate means to say: “This is me. And this is how I feel right now.”
Conclusion
This was our summary of Wie fühlst du dich? by Axel Hacke. We hope you used the time to breathe and feel inside yourself a little. You may have heard many of the tips mentioned before. For example, it is good to pause sometimes and put your feelings into words. But knowing and doing are two different things. So we invite you to ask yourself the question right here, right now: “How do you feel?” Write down the answer or share it with a loved one. We bet you will go through the day with more strength and calm afterwards.
We wish you all the best on your path to clearer emotions. And we look forward to you joining us next time!
Source: https://www.blinkist.com/https://www.blinkist.com/de/books/wie-fuhlst-du-dich-de