Putting your feelings into words can take the sting out of them.
DID YOU KNOW?
Why This Works
When we feel bad, we often try to push the feeling away or simply wait for it to pass. What if one of the most effective tools for managing emotions is something we use all day long: words? Research suggests that naming what you feel, as precisely as you can, changes how your brain processes the feeling. People who describe their emotions in fine detail tend to cope better with stress. Finding the right word for a feeling may help you understand it, and make it easier to manage.
What You Can Do
Name the feeling
When you notice a strong feeling, pause and try to name it as specifically as you can. Rather than settling for “bad” or “stressed,” ask yourself: Am I disappointed? Frustrated? Lonely? Nervous?
What You Can Do
Explore what it means
Ask what the feeling is telling you about your situation, and what you might do about it.
What You Can Do
Expand your vocabulary
Build your emotional vocabulary over time by learning new emotion words, including words from other languages, and noticing when they fit your experience. See whether finding the right word changes how the feeling affects you!
The Science Behind It
How Words Shape Our Emotions
We often assume that words simply describe emotions that already exist, the way the word “air” names the gas we breathe or “water” names the substance H2O. But a growing body of research suggests that emotion words do more than label emotions after the fact. They help the brain make sense of what we are feeling in the first place. Our bodies constantly send signals like a racing heart, a knot in the stomach, or a rush of heat to the face. On their own, these sensations are ambiguous: is that pounding heart fear, anger, or excitement? Emotion words help the brain answer that question. Once a feeling has a name, we know better what caused it and what to do about it.
What Happens in the Brain
To test this idea, we combined the results of 386 brain imaging studies involving more than 7,000 participants (Brooks et al., 2017). When emotion words such as “anger” or “fear” were part of an experiment, people showed more frequent activity in brain regions involved in meaning and language. When emotion words were absent, people showed more frequent activity in the amygdala, a region that responds strongly to uncertainty and to things that feel important or threatening. General words like “pleasant” or “unpleasant” did not have the same effect, which suggests that specific emotion words matter most. These findings are consistent with earlier research showing that labeling feelings can dampen emotional reactions (e.g., Lieberman et al., 2007). They also help explain why labeling feelings is central to many forms of psychotherapy.
Why Being Specific Matters
People also differ in how precisely they experience and describe their emotions, an ability psychologists call emotional granularity. Some people lump their bad feelings together. Others distinguish between feeling “anxious,” “irritated,” “embarrassed,” or “overwhelmed.” In one study, we measured how precisely people described their negative emotions in everyday life. We then brought them into the lab to give an impromptu speech and do mental math in front of stern evaluators (Bonar et al., 2023). Those who described their everyday emotions with more precision reported less intense distress during the stressful task, even though their bodies showed heightened arousal. They also tended to blame themselves less for how the task went. More precise emotional experience may help people meet stressful situations as challenges rather than threats. Our research has also found that people who differentiate their emotions more finely are less likely to relapse after treatment for substance use (Anand et al., 2017).
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