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Why Do I Feel? is a series that examines human emotions by talking to people about their life experiences. If this sounds like every other mental health podcast ever made, trust me when I tell you it is not. This isn’t an interview series in which a celebrity unloads their emotional struggles in order to signpost their realness as a human being; nor is it a podcast featuring a self-styled wellness expert sharing tips to help listeners live their best lives. If you detect a hint of scepticism here, it’s because podcasting is awash with shows that grandly claim to break taboos around mental health, while drawing on the same topics and formats as the scores of other pod series professing to do the same.
Why Do I Feel? is clear in its aims — to understand why we feel emotions and how we manage them — and revealing in its in-depth execution. Each episode looks at a particular feeling such as anger, guilt and envy while sharing stories and bringing in analysis from experts. It is presented by Nathan Filer, an author and mental health nurse who has shades of the writer and journalist Jon Ronson in his thoughtful, engaging and slightly bumbling interviewing style.
Filer blithely offers himself up as a case study in the episode “The Green-Eyed Monster”, during which he talks to a psychotherapist about his feelings of envy towards fellow authors, an emotion that goes hand in hand with shame. It’s with a note of wryness that, on seeing writers doing better than him, he says: “I feel like I’m disappearing from the face of the Earth.”
In an episode on guilt, Filer talks to Maryann Jacobi Gray, who tells of the devastating day in 1977 when an eight-year-old boy ran into the road in front of her while she was driving in Ohio. He died later in hospital. She subsequently moved across the country and kept what had happened a secret until 2003 when a widely reported accident, in which a man lost control of his car and killed 10 people, prompted her to talk about it once more.
It is to Filer’s credit that he manages to counterbalance some seriously bleak stories with moments of levity, usually through jokes at his own expense. For much of the time, Why Do I Feel? is like having a heart-to-heart with a slightly anxious but emotionally articulate friend. Crucially, it digs deep into the complexity of feelings without offering neat solutions in overcoming them.
The Hello Happiness podcast, from the Wellcome Collection, has similar preoccupations to Why Do I Feel? in getting to grips with emotions, though the focus is purely on cheerful feelings. Presented by broadcaster and journalist Bidisha, the opening episode looks at the concept of hope and, with the help of neuroscientists, artists and activists, expertly connects the dots between art, science, medicine and real life.
