When naming emotions backfires

One benefit of growing mental health awareness is our ability to communicate, to ourselves and others, what we’re feeling with less social inhibition.

For someone who has rarely expressed these things, being able to say “I’m sad today” or “I’m feeling really anxious right now” is a leap forward. Suddenly, a bridge of understanding opens up, both for the individual and for those around them.

However, the same words that reveal our inner selves to others can ultimately limit us.

Anxiety is a pernicious example. It’s a simple word that points to a vast array of experiences, from full-blown panic to an edgey caffeine buzz, to a light sense of overwhelm at pending tasks.

Each of these experiences has different moving pieces. Some involve cognitive overload. Some have a more fearful edge. Some are felt as a tightness in the chest. Some include a racing mind.

Using one word to label these experiences collapses the full colour of our present-moment experience down into a grey symbol. And so, when we overuse these words, they actually make us smaller than we are.

Not only does this dampen feelings in the moment, but it creates a wider distortion: “This is just another version of x. And I always feel x.” And so we build self-images around these limited terms, condensing and compressing a rich, open-ended sensitivity into a few labels.

One solution is to increase our emotional granularity. Instead of just feeling happy or sad, we might have 50 shades of crappy, 50 shades of awesome. Now you have 100 different ways of being in the world, instead of 2.

This idea is one that Lisa Feldman-Barrett explores in her ground-breaking book How Emotions Are Made. According to Feldman-Barrett’s model, emotional granularity is not positive thinking, but a more accurate way of knowing ourselves because there are no discrete things called emotions arising inside of us. Efforts to find distinct biological signatures of each emotion have failed. Variability is the norm.

So the next time you notice yourself feeling anxious or sad, try and increase the granularity. Respect the novelty that is unfolding now. Is tiredness factoring in? Does the body feel heavy and dull or light and wispy? Is there a top-heavy restlessness or a sinking sensation? Where do you feel it most in your body? How can you honour the depth of what’s happening right now?

Reframing is another way of developing granularity. My TRE tutor, Steve Haines, asks clients: what if we were to rename anxiety to engaged anticipation? How does that change the sense of it?

In developing emotional granularity, we release ourselves from the narrow emotional containers that hold so much sway over our inner narratives.

Instead, we can live and feel in a way that represents the full colour and dynamism of experience, in its ever-shifting, never-seen-before movement.