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.

Time Required

Naming Your Emotions is a very brief practice that you can use as needed when unpleasant feelings arise. 

How to Do It

Simply naming how you feel is one way to cope with unpleasant emotions. Whenever you experience a surge of negative emotions, do your best to complete the following steps:

1. Respond. Without hurting yourself or others, let yourself respond naturally to the situation. Allow yourself to feel any emotions and remember that there is no “right” or “wrong” way to feel. Welcome any thoughts or judgments about the distressing situation. Without hurting yourself or others, allow your body to react how it wants to react. Try not to “hold in” or “push down” your feelings, thoughts, or bodily responses.
2. Observe. Notice how your body and mind respond to the situation. Do your best to keep your awareness on the present moment. What expression is your face making? What parts of your body are tense or hurting? What thoughts and urges do you have? You might notice that you have tears in your eyes, a “pit” in your stomach, or an urge to yell at someone.
3. Brainstorm. Come up with one or more feeling words that best match your emotional response to the situation. It’s OK if you don’t find the right words right away, as this step can take a few seconds or even several minutes. Use your observations to help you figure out the emotion(s) you are feeling. For example, if you notice that you have clenched fists and a fast heart rate, you might describe yourself as “enraged.”
   
   As you brainstorm, try to avoid making judgments about the situation or other people. For example, the words “bullied” or “targeted” can be an assumption about what other people did. Instead, you might choose the words “hurt” or “angry” to describe what you’re actually feeling.
   
   For reference, below are some examples of emotion words that you might choose to describe how you feel. This list is not exhaustive, and you might find other words that best suit your feelings.
4. Label. Aloud or in your head—whatever works best for you—say: “I feel_______.”

Evidence It That 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.

Why to Try It

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.