This is a deep meta question; not the response you give others. When you ask yourself, “how do I feel,” is that answer you synthesize, the answer you draw from the edge of your conscious and unconscious self; is this answer a reference to the immediately preceding past of your inner experience, or is the answer from some self aware inner entity that exists in the ever changing experience of right now?
The only rational answer here is “how many fucking caps did you eat, man?”
All of the above. In order to get a more accurate answer, I think it’s beneficial to compare superficial ego observation with what you have access to of your Self.
Reading How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barret and A Liberated Mind by Steven Hayes will answer your question. More broadly, emotion construction theory and relational frame theory will answer your question.
Self awareness is just a set of relational frames. It is a building, a palace if you will, made out of blocks of thoughts and relational frames. Feelings are that too. You can use self-awareness to examine feelings (e.g. “I am sad that I failed”). However, you can also create emotions based on your sense of self (“I failed, and therefore I am sad”).
How do I feel?
Usually with my fingers :)
But more seriously, there are depths to how I feel. An easy example of this is how I feel in a moment vs how I feel about my life in general. There are also aspect of my life that I may be deeply unhappy about whilst feeling generally good about my life as a whole.
Especially over recent years, as relationships in my life have grown more complex, I’ve really started to appreciate how I can have two feelings about the same thing at the same time.
My answer is “nope.”
