Why does naming a feeling help?
· Source: Lieberman et al., Psychological Science, 2007
Some evenings you come home with a heavy, buzzing feeling and no idea what it is. Something happened today. Maybe several things. The feeling sits in your chest, colours the evening, and when someone asks how you are, the honest answer is “I don’t know. Bad.”
It turns out that the small act of finding a word for that feeling does something measurable. Psychologists have looked at it from several sides, and the picture they found is surprisingly practical.
What happened in the lab
In 2007, Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues at UCLA put people in a brain scanner and showed them photos of faces. The faces were angry, scared, upset: expressions that usually make us react a little ourselves.
People did different things with the same photos. In some trials they chose a word for the emotion they saw, such as “angry” or “afraid”. In other trials they did a different task with the photo that didn’t involve naming the feeling.
The researchers watched the amygdala, a small part of the brain that reacts quickly to anything that looks like a threat. When people put the feeling into a word, the amygdala responded less than when they did the other task.
That is the whole finding, and it is worth reading it carefully. Nobody fixed a bad day here. People looked at strangers’ faces in a lab for a short time. Still, it points at something simple: turning a feeling into a word changed how strongly the threat system reacted.
“Bad” is not a feeling yet
A second line of research asks a related question. If naming helps, does the precision of the name matter?
Todd Kashdan, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Patrick McKnight reviewed studies on what psychologists call emotion differentiation. Some people, when they feel bad, can tell apart several unpleasant feelings: anger, hurt, shame, disappointment, anxiety. Others mostly feel “bad” or “stressed”.
Across the studies they reviewed, people who tell their unpleasant feelings apart cope with them better. That makes intuitive sense. “I feel bad” leaves you with nothing to do. “I feel embarrassed” points at a moment. “I feel hurt” points at a person. Each word carries a small hint about what happened and what might help.
A vague word leaves you with nothing to do. A precise word points somewhere.
Naming is not the same as pushing it down
You might wonder whether the goal is to make the feeling go away. It isn’t, and here the research is clear about what does not work well.
James Gross and Oliver John studied two habits people use with their emotions. Some people mostly suppress: they keep their face still and hold the feeling in. Others mostly reappraise: they look at the situation again and ask how else it could be seen.
On average, people who habitually suppress their feelings were doing worse in their lives, and people who habitually reappraise were doing better. This is a correlation across people, not proof that one habit causes the other. But it fits the same pattern. Holding a feeling in place without looking at it is different from looking at it and calling it what it is.
And it is not the same as letting it all out
The opposite of suppressing isn’t shouting either. In a 2002 experiment, Brad Bushman made people angry and then asked some of them to hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who annoyed them. They ended up angrier and more aggressive than people who simply did nothing for a few minutes.
So there are two extremes that don’t help much: holding everything in and blowing off steam. Naming sits in between. You don’t hide the feeling and you don’t feed it. You notice it and say what it is.
Why a word, and not a whole story
When we feel bad, we tend to jump straight to the story: who said what, what we should have answered, what it all means. Stories are useful, but they come with arguments, replays and verdicts.
A single word is smaller. It doesn’t need to be fair or complete. “Tired.” “Jealous.” “Relieved.” Often it is the first honest thing you can say about your day, and the story becomes easier to tell once that word is out.
It also helps to accept that two words can be true at once. You can be proud and exhausted after a long week. You can be relieved that something ended and sad that it is over. Precision includes mixed feelings.
When the word won’t come
Some evenings the honest answer really is “I don’t know”. That’s a fine place to start. Here are a few ways to get from there to a word. They’re suggestions from us, not results from the studies above.
Start wide and then narrow down. Is it closer to angry, sad, scared or ashamed? Once you’ve picked one, ask what kind. Angry can be irritated, resentful or furious. Sad can be lonely, disappointed or homesick. You don’t need a long list in front of you. Two or three candidates are usually enough to see which one fits.
Go back to the moment it started. Sometimes the feeling is still there hours after whatever set it off. Ask yourself when, today, you first noticed it. Was it after the call with your mother, in the queue at the shop, or when you read that message? The moment can suggest the word.
Then try a word and check it. Say “I feel left out” and notice whether it fits. If it’s close but not right, try a neighbour, like “overlooked” or “unappreciated”. The checking is part of the work.
Here is an invented example. Tom gets home and says “bad”. He narrows it to angry, then to irritated. Going back over the day, he sees it began when a colleague presented his idea in a meeting without mentioning him. “Irritated” isn’t quite it. “Passed over” is closer, with some embarrassment underneath. Now he has something to work with: a short talk with that colleague tomorrow, or at least a clear sentence about what bothered him.
What this does not promise
A word won’t solve the situation that caused the feeling. If a conversation went badly, it still went badly. Naming a feeling is a first step that makes the next one easier, whether that next step is a talk, a decision or just a calmer evening.
And if feelings often knock you flat, or the words stay out of reach for weeks at a time, a therapist is the right person to see. Naming things in a diary helps you notice patterns. It’s no substitute for that conversation.
Try it tonight
- Tonight, before you tell anyone about your day, find one word for how you feel. Not “bad” or “fine”.
- If one word isn’t enough, take two or three. Mixed is allowed: relieved and sad, proud and tired.
- Then say what happened, in a few sentences. The word first, the story second.
Say the word and the story out loud in Halflight. It writes them down under today’s date, so next week you can see which words keep coming back.