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Why we should pay attention to how we describe our feelings


“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

What does it mean if the vastness of human emotion and experience

can only be expressed as mad, sad or happy”.

Ludwig Wittgenstein in Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart

If you take a moment to stop and think about how you are feeling you will often come up with one of three words happy, sad, or angry.  This is the average number of emotions named by over 7 thousand people in Brown’s research.  Surprised? I was. It made me wonder about all the other emotions, frightened, joyful, disappointed frustrated, bored … where were they. 

In her brilliant book, Atlas of the Heart, Brown identifies 87 emotions and is emphatically clear that this is not an exhaustive list.  So why do people, on average, identify just three? Brown suggests that we use these three emotions, happy, sad, and angry to categorise our experiences very broadly.  And this makes sense to me, often when I feel frustrated, I will label this as angry.  Or when I feel disappointed about something, I will label this as sad.

A natural reaction to this information is so what! Why does it matter what you call it, you still feel what you are feeling.  But it does matter.  The more specific we can be in our emotional language the better we are at regulating what we are feeling.  And this really matters. Regulating our emotions is a superpower and allows us to live our lives mostly (not always) outside the realm of overwhelm.  

Brown uses the term ‘emotional granularity’ to describe this ability and defines it as “the ability to get very specific about what we are feeling”.

So, what does this look like in practice.  The last few years have been difficult and I am sure that many of you have experienced periods of intense demand on your time and your resources.  I know I have.  This doesn’t feel comfortable but how we label it has a significant impact on how well we are able to manage it.  When we say that we are “stressed” it is normally because we are experiencing a lot of pressure, BUT vitally, when we are “stressed” we can handle whatever is happening.  We know what we need to do and we can carry out those actions.  It doesn’t feel good but we are able to keep all of our plates spinning.  Overwhelm on the other hand, which we experience in a similar physiological way to stress, means that we are unable to keep the plates up in the air and we no longer feel able to take any kind of action. 

Brown defines the difference between stress and overwhelm, we can function in one (stress) and we cannot function in the other (overwhelm).  Taking the time to accurately label what we experience has a powerful impact on our capacity to find a way through.  When we are experiencing stress, we know we have the capacity to keep moving forward, while overwhelm means we need to temporarily stop and have a period of doing nothing. 

What about anger, an emotion we are all familiar with.   It is now well established that anger is a primary emotion but we also know that anger is often the emotion we express when we feel a multitude of other very different emotions – annoyance, frustration, shame, embarrassment.  When we identify our response as anger without pausing to consider these alternatives, sometimes we will be right but many times we will be wrong.  If we are experiencing shame but label this as anger several things happen.  Firstly, we can’t accurately identify a helpful response because we have mislabelled what we are feeling in the first place and secondly our response is not going to feel soothing because it’s not going to fit! 

You know that lovely feeling we get when someone really understands us, the feeling of being seen and understood.  Being specific about our emotions is one way we can start to really see ourselves and give ourselves that feeling of safety and belonging. When we don’t have access to the specific language this can leave us feeling alone in our feelings, making meaningful connection to both ourselves and others much more difficult.  Brene Brown writes “our connection with others can only be as deep as our connection with ourselves… every single day our feeling and experiences show up in our bodies… understanding these emotions and experiences is our life’s work.”

Language changes how we feel both about ourselves and the about the people we meet.  Pausing and paying attention to the granularity of what is showing up is both powerful and fundamental to the health and wellbeing of every single one of us. 

Atlas of the Heart – Mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. Brene Brown    

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