A shared universe › Blog › Naming what you feel · Español
When you don’t know what is wrong, looking for the exact word for what you feel (sadness, fear, anger, tiredness) helps: in the laboratory, naming an emotion lowered the brain’s alarm response, and telling your feelings apart clearly is linked to handling them better. Sometimes the worst thing is not feeling bad, but not knowing what you feel. There is a shapeless unease that takes up everything. Finding the exact word does not take it away, but it makes it smaller.
The neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman and his team, at the University of California, Los Angeles, showed thirty adults photographs of faces with different emotions while scanning their brains. Under each face there were two words. Sometimes they were emotions, such as “angry” and “fearful”, and they had to choose the one that matched. At other times they were two people’s names, and they had to choose the one that fitted the face.
When they had to name the emotion, activity went down in the amygdala, an area that reacts to what threatens us, and went up in an area at the front of the brain that helps to regulate emotions. Choosing a person’s name did not have that effect. They reported it in a 2007 paper, and their university explained it in a plain-language note. Naming an emotion seems to calm the alarm response.
It is worth reading calmly. It was a small group, in a laboratory, looking at other people’s faces rather than living through a problem of their own. It does not show that naming what you feel will take your sorrow away. What it suggests is more modest, and still valuable: that finding the word is already a way of beginning to put in order what is going on inside.
“I feel bad” says little. Feeling sadness is not the same as feeling disappointment, nor fear the same as feeling overwhelmed, nor anger the same as pain over something that has been done to you. The more precise the word, the easier it is to know what is needed: comfort, rest, a conversation, a boundary.
The psychologists Todd Kashdan, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Patrick McKnight reviewed in 2015 what is known about this ability, which they call emotion differentiation or emotional granularity. People who tell their feelings apart more finely turn less often, at moments of great distress, to harmful ways out such as heavy drinking, aggression or self-harm, and have fewer severe symptoms of anxiety and depression. The authors add that it is an ability that develops over time, and suggest studying whether helping people improve it reduces distress.
Writing makes you go more slowly than thought does. What was a knot in your head becomes a sentence with a beginning and an end, and that sentence can be read, corrected or shared. Often, on reading it again, what was really weighing on you appears beneath what seemed to be.
If what comes out when you name it is a sadness that turns into tears, you may find it useful to read why crying sometimes brings relief and sometimes doesn’t.
Naming helps, but it doesn’t solve everything. If that shapeless unease lasts for weeks, if you are finding it hard to sleep or get on with your life, or if you can’t work out what is wrong and that distresses you, mention it to your GP or to a psychologist. Naming what you feel is also something you can work on with a professional.
Lighting a star in A shared universe makes you do this exercise without meaning to: saying in a few lines what you are carrying inside. Often, by the time you finish writing it, you can already breathe a little more easily.
You have 280 characters, with no names and nothing that says who you are. You choose whether it is something that weighs on you, something you hope for or something you are grateful for, and other people keep it company with a touch or a few words.