The Love–Sorrow Oscillation
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
A live experiment Hudson uses to teach someone the somatic difference between two emotions they can name but not distinguish in the body. You anchor a memory that reliably produces love and a memory that reliably produces sorrow, feel each one physically rather than narrating it, alternate between them several times so the contrast becomes obvious, and finally hold both at once. The alternation is what does the work: a single emotion in isolation is hard to read, but a sensation that appears and eases repeatedly on cue is unmistakable. Holding both simultaneously tests whether love creates spaciousness around difficult feeling rather than replacing it — the practical point being that you don't have to resolve sorrow to be able to carry it.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Pick a reliable love memory
Choose a specific memory that immediately brings up love — Hudson suggests a dog, a brother, a younger sibling, a cousin. You don't have to share it with anyone; the content is irrelevant to the exercise.
Pro tip Pick something that works instantly. If you have to reason your way into it, pick another.
- 2
Feel it in the body and locate it
Hold the memory and notice what happens physically rather than describing what it means. Name the location precisely — above or below the navel, in the chest, spreading or contracting. Stop as soon as you have it; this is not a meditation.
- 3
Pick a sorrow memory and watch for the flinch
Now find a memory of loss. Watch what your body does at the moment of choosing. Ali's chin lifted involuntarily and he reported a distinct 'I don't want to go there' before consciously overriding it. That flinch is information: someone or something taught you this emotion wasn't safe.
Pro tip Say the resistance out loud before proceeding — it usually loosens it.
Watch out If you notice yourself narrating the story instead of feeling it, you've drifted back into the head. Come back to the body.
- 4
Alternate between the two, several times
Go back to love. Then back to sorrow. Then love again, then sorrow again, with a pause on each. The repetition is what makes the somatic signature readable — you're looking for what reliably changes on the switch, not for a dramatic experience.
- 5
Hold both at the same time
Finally, hold both sensations simultaneously. Ali found the squeeziness was still present but accompanied by an in-breath and a kind of lightness. The test is whether the love produces spaciousness around the difficult feeling rather than cancelling it out.
Pro tip Ask afterwards whether the relief was specific to the constricted spot or general across the whole system.
In the wild
Alternating on Hudson's cue, Ali located sorrow as a squeezy feeling above the navel, toward the bottom of his left rib cage. He reported no distinct somatic signature for love at all — only that the squeeziness eased when he switched to it. Across repeated switches the pattern held: sorrow tightened, love released. Asked to hold both, he found the squeeze still present but paired with an in-breath and a lightness, and on reflection noticed an expansion outward from the lower ribs.
→ A man who couldn't answer 'how do you feel' produced a precise anatomical map of two emotions inside a few minutes.
Common mistakes
Overriding the flinch instead of noting it
Ali met the sorrow memory with an instant 'I don't want to go there', then talked himself past it with 'of course I want to go there.' The flinch is the most useful data in the exercise — it marks where you were taught the emotion wasn't safe. Note it before you push through.
Expecting both emotions to feel equally vivid
Ali felt nothing somatic for love and almost concluded the exercise had failed. The signal was there — it was the easing of the sorrow constriction. Absence of a positive sensation is not absence of the emotion; look for what changes rather than for what appears.
Treating the memory's story as the point
Hudson uses a story only to get someone into an emotional state and explicitly refuses to treat the story as true. If you spend the exercise re-litigating what happened and who was at fault, you reinforce a loop instead of learning the sensation.
From the transcript
“we're going to find a memory that brings up love for you, and then we're going to find a memory that brings up sorrow for…”
“And now I want you to hold both of them at the same time. Both of those two sensations simultaneously.”
“I don't really know if I felt anything somatically for the love thing. It did feel like that that feeling eased up a bit.”
From the episode
The Emotions Expert: Why Avoiding Your Feelings Is Dangerous