If you name it, you can tame it
It’s becoming widely researched and understood how important emotional intelligence is to people’s overall well-being, relational health, and achieving success. One resource I like that discusses the research is Dr. Marc Brackett’s Permission to Feel. He shares his teaching model, which uses the acronym RULER to describe the elements needed to improve emotional intelligence:
R - Recognize when you’re having an emotion, by noticing changes in your body, thinking patterns, content of thoughts, and behaviors
U - Understand why you’re having the emotion and its ‘message’
L - Label the feeling - give it a name!
E - Express your thoughts and feelings in a healthy way
R - Regulate to calm the nervous system and/or harness the energy in a productive way
In Atlas of the Heart, Dr. Brene Brown reiterates the research-backed concept that naming our feelings is key for ourselves and for empathetic connection to others. She shares that most Americans can name only 3 feelings in the moment, calling this knowledge gap “the mad-glad-sad triad.” Her book offers a remedy for the vocabulary deficit by defining and describing 89 human emotions and emotional experiences. Brown’s emotional reference book is a deep dive into the U(nderstand) and L(abel) of Brackett’s model.
But why? Why is finding the names of our feelings so helpful? Let’s break it down.
In the Moment
Shift from being in the feeling to observing the feeling. It’s cognitive work that requires taking a step back to look at your experience instead of being in your experience. By shifting perspective in that way, you’re already processing and distancing from the intensity of the emotional experience. It’s mindfulness (as long as your observations stay non-judgmental).
Activate your thinking brain. Our brain under the influence of feelings (sympathetic nervous system) works differently than our brain under the influence of calm (parasympathetic nervous system). Asking your brain to come up with “the right words” is a calm (logical) brain task. Another example of this might be counting down by 7s from 1000 (or whatever) or naming all of the state capitals. Cognitive tasks like these slow you down (at least, they’d slow me down!) and invite your thinking brain to activate.
Finding the “right word” for something can provide a dopamine hit. Ever experience that burst of satisfaction or relief when you pin down the word you’ve been searching for? Giving yourself a dopamine hit can take the edge off of whatever unpleasant feelings you’re having.
Practicing non-judgmental labeling of feelings can help manage meta-feelings. We are so complex that we can have feelings about our feelings! Common meta-feelings are fear and shame. When those come up, they add intensity and prolong the emotional experience. Remember when Dumbledore explained “Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself” (Rowling, 1999)? Keeping an emotional experience nameless keeps it uncertain and vague. Scary! Keeping feelings unnamed might keep them hidden in the dark. Shaming! Non-judgmental labeling and understanding allows us to face our fears, work against taboos, and remember that what we’re experiencing is human. Doing that can release those unpleasant meta-feelings and bring you back to the feelings of the moment. Much easier to handle! It’s empowering.
To Connect to Yourself
Feelings are part of your unique experience. If you seek to understand and trust yourself, naming your feelings is key. Let’s say two people ride a rollercoaster: Person A screams and feels her heart race. She names the feeling excitement. Person B rides, screams, and feels his heart race. He names it fear. Including the language of feelings adds depth and humanity to the story. Your story.
Labeling and understanding your feelings can become personalized (intuitive) guidance for you to know what you need and want. For example, if you identify you’re feeling resentment that you agreed to carpool with a colleague who regularly walks out their front door 15 minutes late, and you understand that we feel resentment if we’ve been pushed past our boundaries, it guides you to set some boundaries: “We can carpool if you’re ready at 8:30, but if it gets to be 8:35 with no contact, I’ll have to leave to get to work at a time that is ok for me.”
To Connect to Others
Back to your storytelling: if you’d like to share a deeper story of yourself to connect more deeply with someone else, adding feelings and meaning helps you get there. Imagine you were painting a self-portrait to show someone, but you could only use primary colors blue, yellow, red (like the sad-glad-mad triad). It could be cool, but it might leave out some important parts of you. If you could paint with 89 colors, we can get close to vivid realism!
It helps you connect and support others. In Atlas of the Heart, Brown defines empathy as, “the most powerful tool of compassion; an emotional skill that allows us to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding” (Brown, 2021, p.120). Language is quite a big part of how humans understand and communicate - the bigger vocabulary, the more specific and nuanced you can get, then the more parts of our experiences are available for connection.
If you realize you have low vocabulary for emotions, you might begin by finding your buy-in point from the list above. Which one of these benefits jumps out to you? Find a resource you like - a book mentioned here, a poster or image of an emotions chart, an app such as How We Feel, and dive in! You might learn a handful of emotions and their definitions per week, and be on the lookout for them. Note your individual body sensations, thoughts, or behaviors that come with the feeling, and express it - noting it for yourself, journaling, or sharing with a loved one.
References
Brackett, M. (2019). Permission to Feel. Celadon Books: New York.
Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the Heart. Random House: New York.
Rowling, J. K. (1999). Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Scholastic.
