How are you feeling right now? How sure are you that you’re feeling that way? How many emotions do you think you can accurately name as you’re feeling them?
If you’re like most people, you probably think that you have a pretty good grasp on the way you feel. Maybe you ballparked around 10 or 15 emotions—or maybe even more? And this makes sense, because our lives are crowded with things that bring up emotion.
But if you’re like most people, you’re probably overshooting. According to emotion researcher Brené Brown, the vast majority of us can actually only accurately identify three emotions: happy, sad, and pissed off.
We tend to use these words as umbrella terms. We say we’re happy when we enjoy the movie we’re watching, when we get a promotion at work, when we spend time with a loved one, when that deadline we were stressing about is finally over, when we reminisce on a positive memory, when we’re packing for a vacation… the possibilities are truly endless. In other words, we feel lots of different emotions, but we tend to clump them all together under just a few labels.
If that’s surprising, try this: How would you describe feeling stressed and feeling overwhelmed? How are they different?
My previous blog posts have highlighted that how we respond to our emotions is often more important for our well-being than the emotions themselves. But the first step to effective emotion regulation is almost always to understand what exactly it is that we’re feeling.
But why is this so important?
First, by labelling our emotions accurately, we can learn more about how they affect us and plan what we’ll do next. We can enhance pleasant emotions—like gratitude, joy, and curiosity—by allowing ourselves to fully lean into them. By recognizing uncomfortable emotions—like grief, worry, and resentment—we can learn about the intricate human-ness of unpleasant feelings and start to manage them better. Trying to regulate an emotion without knowing how we’re feeling is kind of like studying for a test without knowing what to review: we take guesses and hope for the best.
Second, mislabelling an emotion can have dire consequences. To illustrate how, let’s revisit stress and overwhelm.
Stress is when we evaluate situational demands as being beyond our ability to successfully cope. We might feel stressed during a busy day at work, when we’re not sure if we’ll meet a deadline, or when we’re running late and stuck in traffic.
Overwhelm, on the other hand, is extreme stress to the point where we feel like we’re unable to function or cope at all. We might feel overwhelmed when it’s been several days—or weeks—of busy work days, when it seems like there’s no chance we’ll meet that deadline, or when we’re already late, our car breaks down, and now we have to figure out where on earth we’ll find the time or money to deal with that.
When we inaccurately label an emotion, this can change how we feel. For example, when we’re actually stressed, telling a friend that “I’m so overwhelmed!” can make us feel just that. So now, instead of trying to cope, we feel like there’s nothing we can do to cope.
However, understanding exactly how we feel can be as confusing as it is important, partly because there are seemingly countless feelings and most of us are only familiar with a select handful. Indeed, in her book Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown identified 87 distinct emotions that make up the human experience.
If you find yourself defaulting to the same few emotion words, using this list to build up your emotion vocabulary is a meaningful first step. As you read it over, ask yourself whether you can describe what each emotion feels like to you.
When was the last time you felt each emotion? What did it feel like in your body?
As we keep living our lives, we can make an effort to use our understanding of different emotions to more accurately name how we’re feeling. Instead of saying we’re happy, we might say we’re entertained when we enjoy the movie we’re watching, proud when we get a promotion at work, connected when we spend time with a loved one, relief when that deadline we were stressing about is finally over, nostalgic when we reminisce on a positive memory, and excited when we’re packing for a vacation.
There are so many layers to how it feels to be human and so many ways we can navigate our lives. Wouldn’t you want to experience them all?
So, let me ask again… how are you feeling right now, really?
Image by Duckleap Free Resources from Pixabay
