Naming Your Emotions

Why You Should Try It

Shock, sadness, fear, disgust, contempt, anger—negative emotions such as these are usually unpleasant to experience. As we face particularly distressing situations, however, our emotional response can sometimes be too much to bear. Although we can’t always change how we feel, Naming Your Emotions allows us to make our emotional experience less unpleasant by simply putting our feelings into words.

Since this practice is designed to be used when you are in the middle of a distressing situation, it only takes a few moments and can be done silently or aloud. While you might assume that labeling your emotions will worsen your distress, research suggests that this emotional regulation practice can reduce negative emotions as you experience them.

Why It Works

Humans have a biological alarm system that evolved to keep us safe from threat. Whenever we experience a surge of strong negative emotions, the stress center of our brain can signal our body to go into survival mode and trigger our “fight, flight, freeze” response. This is why we might make a rash decision out of anger, avoid tasks due to anxiety, or “shut down” when our feelings are too overwhelming. Naming Your Emotions dampens the alarm signal and allows our brain to curb our impulses, therefore reducing the severity of our emotional response as it happens. As a result, distressing situations feel, well, less distressing.

Naming Your Emotions is relatively straightforward, but determining your emotions is not always easy during overwhelming moments. Like any other practice, it can take time to master. As you test this practice out, do your best to be patient and permit yourself to trust the process.

Evidence That It Works

Burklund, L. J., Creswell, J. D., Irwin, M. R., & Lieberman, M. D. (2014). The common and distinct neural bases of affect labeling and reappraisal in healthy adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 10.

A mostly female group of healthy, English-speaking adults from Los Angeles, California, each viewed an image of a scene that evoked negative emotions while an fMRI machine scanned their brain activity. The adults were asked to simply observe the image or name their emotional response as sad, anxious, disgusted, or other, and then rate how unpleasant they felt as they were viewing the image. Compared to adults who only observed the image, adults who named their emotional response reported lower levels of unpleasantness, and showed less activation in their brain’s stress center and more activation in their brain’s emotional regulation areas while viewing the image. In other words, naming their emotions helped the adults feel less unpleasant during a distressing experience by dampening their brains’ emotional response.

Who has tried the practice?

Additional studies explore how Naming Your Emotions benefits certain groups.

Japanese adults viewed a mix of negative and neutral images and were instructed to either label their emotions and then try to change their perspective to reduce their emotional response, try to change their perspective without labeling emotions, or passively observe the images. Brain imaging revealed that, out of all the groups, adults who labeled their emotions and tried to change their perspectives showed reduced activity in their brains’ stress centers and stronger activity in their brains’ emotion regulation centers. Even if all those benefits aren’t from Naming Your Emotions, the practice may support us in using other emotion regulation strategies. 

Naming Your Emotions has also been found to reduce stress responses to specific fears:

• Australians with flying phobia imagined themselves in airplane-related situations, and those who named their emotional response to the imagery experienced larger improvements in flying anxiety and sense of control compared to those who did not name their emotions.
• Asian/Pacific Islander, white, Latino/Hispanic, African American, and biracial undergraduate students with a significant fear of spiders practiced exposure therapy, where they started by standing five feet away from a tarantula and built up to touching a tarantula across two consecutive days. Students who verbally named their emotions during each step were able to get closer to the tarantula than students who used reappraisal, distraction, or no emotion regulation methods. The more a student verbalized fear- and anxiety-related words, the more their biological fear responses decreased.

More research is needed to explore whether, and how, the impact of this practice extends to other groups and cultures.

Keep in Mind

This practice is intended for negative emotions rather than positive ones, and it may not be as helpful for less strong emotions. In one study, Israeli adults were presented with a series of unpleasant images, each of which they viewed twice: once to passively observe the image, and a separate time to name their emotional response to the image. Compared to passively observing the image, naming their emotional response to high-intensity pictures decreased distress, but naming their emotional response to low-intensity pictures actually increased distress.

Additionally, it is possible that “less is more” when it comes to choosing labels for your emotions. In one study, Caucasian, Asian, African American, and Hispanic/Latino undergraduate students imagined themselves as the main character in an emotional story, and students who used as few words as possible to name their emotions seemed to be better prepared to regulate their emotions.

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