How many emotions can you name and define? Do you regularly ask yourself what you’re feeling? How much attention do you pay to your emotions in an attempt to understand them?
Everyone experiences a wide variety of emotions on a daily basis, but many people don’t have a comprehensive emotional vocabulary, meaning they can only name and define a small number of emotions. The majority of people are able to confidently recognise and describe just three – anger, sadness, and happiness. This can create challenges because without understanding what emotions exist and how they feel so you can label what you’re experiencing, you’ll often misidentify your emotions.
Those with a large emotional vocabulary, however, often have more insight into their emotions and are therefore less reactive because the ability to accurately identify emotions helps you understand what you’re feeling, what is driving your reaction, and how you can use this information to guide your response.
Fortunately, anyone is capable of developing an emotional vocabulary. It requires learning about the different emotions and building the habit of asking yourself what you’re feeling in different circumstances. This isn’t always easy, but it’s incredibly useful.
Understanding an emotional vocabulary
How often do you recognise what you’re feeling and understand how it impacts your response? Do you sometimes have reactions to emotions that are out or proportion to what caused them? What types of things do you usually say to yourself when you’re feeling upset?
If you would like to build an emotional vocabulary, it’s useful to understand the benefits you can gain and the common consequences of lacking one. If you rarely pay much attention to your emotions, it’s easy to be unaware of the roles they play in your life – positive and negative – so you can believe it’s not important to learn about emotions and how to listen to them. But emotions affect a great deal of what you experience and how it impacts you, even if you don’t recognise their role.
If you understand how different emotions feel and the reactions they can cause, you can recognise when you’re becoming emotional more quickly and easily and then use your emotional vocabulary to determine what you’re feeling, consider how accurate these thoughts are, and decide how you would like to respond.
The most common benefits of developing an emotional vocabulary include:
1) A better understanding of the role emotions have in your life
Those who can recognise what they’re feeling and have the language to label their emotions gain valuable awareness so they can be more objective yet insightful than those who lack this ability.
Even if you think you aren’t greatly affected by your emotions, your emotional reactions impact you on a regular basis. There could be opportunities to experience pleasant emotions you miss out on, and painful experiences can be more powerful and last longer than they need to because you’re unaware of the distressing messages you’re sending yourself and doing very little to process them.
You can also benefit from developing an emotional vocabulary if you often feel like your emotions are affecting you too strongly. You could have inaccurate and unhealthy beliefs about emotions, difficulties not responding in ways you know are unnecessary, and struggle to learn from your emotional reactions.
Having the vocabulary to label your emotions acts like a short cut to understanding what you’re feeling; instead of using vague words like sad or angry to describe your emotions or struggling to verbalise how you feel, you can instead mentally review the different emotions you’re familiar with and ask yourself which best applies to what you’re feeling.
This is useful, and often a relief, because it provides insight into what you’re feeling and why, as well as potentially changing the experience. Disappointment and betrayal can feel similar, but what caused them and your role are often quite different so recognising this can shift the way it makes you feel. If you realise that you’re feeling guilty because of something you did, rather than sad, this realisation can motivate you to find a way to make amends, which has the potential to alleviate the emotion and even make you feel better afterwards.
People who frequently experience shame can especially benefit from being able to label their emotions. Shame is a particularly dangerous and deceptive emotion because it can make you believe you’re responsible for your mistakes and challenges, not because of your actions or decisions but because you’re fundamentally flawed as a person. Since this is such a painful message, it can be difficult to pay attention to and learn from shame. But you’re much less likely to accept what shame tells you if you’ve built the habit of reflecting on your emotions. When you can recognise shame, you can reconsider your thoughts about your situation and your role in it. You can accept that you made a mistake or did something you’re not proud of, but that doesn’t make you a terrible person. Instead of telling yourself “I can’t believe I did that, I’m so stupid” you can think “I can’t believe I did that, that was so stupid”, which can significantly change how you feel.
When you have language for your emotions, you can make meaning from them by understanding what they reveal, have stronger connections with yourself and others, learn from the experience, and be more self-aware. Otherwise, understanding and processing your emotions is much more difficult, if not impossible.
2) Being less judgemental of the emotions you feel
Some people think that emotions are either good or bad, but this isn’t true. Emotions can be enjoyable or uncomfortable, but they’re just responses to experiences and information from your environment. You can have unhealthy reactions – lashing out in anger or shutting down when you’re hurt – and experience emotions in ways that aren’t good for you – usually magnifying them or feeling them for longer than is necessary or helpful – but emotions themselves are just reflections of how you’re being affected by what’s happening around you.
Believing that some emotions are bad and shouldn’t be experienced is common in people with limited emotional vocabularies because they’re more likely to have never been taught the nature of emotions and/or were given unhealthy messages about what emotions are acceptable when they were growing up. Girls can be told never to get angry and many boys were taught not to react when they’re sad so they repress these emotions. These lessons often persist into adulthood and cause people to ignore and suppress what they’re feeling.
If you believe that certain emotions are unacceptable, you’re likely to judge yourself for having them and distance yourself from what you’re experiencing. This is unhealthy for a variety of reasons. Ignored and suppressed emotions don’t disappear; they emerge in ways that harm your physical health, including high blood pressure, feeling stressed, anxiety, as well as external consequences, such as yelling at a friend or crying for no apparent reason at work.
But when you think of emotions as temporary and neutral sensations, you can be more comfortable and willing to experience them, learn what you can, and then let them go without judging yourself.
3) You can distinguish between different emotions and their intensity
Emotions exist on a range that isn’t readily apparent with a limited emotional vocabulary. When you lack accurate language to describe your emotions, they can easily feel overwhelming or overcome you without you realising.
When feeling strong emotions – and many emotions have the potential to be felt strongly – you’re more likely to experience powerlessness, negativity bias, rumination, resentment, and frustration. This can cause anxiety, depression and/or physical symptoms. But when you don’t think of your emotions and/or the situation that caused them as being drastic, you can feel less compelled to have a powerful reaction.
If anything that causes you to hesitate is considered fear, whatever gets your blood up is anger, and all unhappy feelings are sadness, you can easily and often overestimate how you feel. You can also fail to recognise enjoyable emotions; happiness can be obvious, but other pleasant emotions can be more subtle, as well as interlaced with other emotions, such as being nervous yet excited.
Distinguishing between the different intensities of emotions can help you to feel them less strongly and be more realistic about what caused them so you can be calmer and more moderate in how you think about what you’re feeling and in your response.
4) You’re less likely to be overly-critical with yourself and others
Without being able to listen to your emotions and determine what you’re feeling and why, you’re more vulnerable to a harsh inner critic and abusive self-talk when you’re feeling challenged, make mistakes, and act in ways you’re not proud of. Some people largely reserve these types of thoughts for themselves, while others can be highly critical of others when they’re upset as well.
If you don’t understand the nature of emotions and/or you often don’t recognise what you’re feeling, it’s easier to be controlled by them. Being controlled by your emotions includes believing the often harsh and overexaggerated messages they sometimes send you, so you can easily and automatically engage in self-criticism and tell yourself painful things like you’re to blame for your situation, you should doubt yourself, of that your challenges are much worse than they actually are.
But naming what you’re feeling can give you valuable subjectivity. Instead of thinking that painful emotions mean you must have done something wrong so you should be hard on yourself, you can consider what happened, your role, and the most useful lessons to learn. Even if you did something you regret and aren’t proud of, abusing yourself and believing you’re terrible and worthless is almost never helpful or a pathway to change.
5) You can use your emotions to learn how to improve your situation
Emotions exist to get your attention so you’ll notice things in your environment. This is usually a potential danger source you would benefit from addressing, a problem you could try to fix, or something enjoyable you discovered so you should pay attention and find out how to get it again. This could be feeling anxious about a presentation you’re not certain you’re prepared for, having a difficult but necessary conversation with your partner, or recognising that you feel good about yourself after exercising and committing to doing it more often.
Even when there’s nothing direct you can do to address the cause of an emotion, which is common for experiences that happened in the past, there are still ways you can feel better. You could ask yourself if you want to talk to the person who upset you, share how you’re feeling with someone else, or reflect on what happened and how it’s making you feel to possibly gain a new perspective and be less affected.
If you refuse to listen to these messages or don’t understand them, you can miss opportunities to experience enjoyable emotions and fail to discover what you could do to potentially resolve painful or uncomfortable emotions.
6) You can more easily regulate your emotions
When you better understand your emotions, are able to reflect on what you’re telling yourself, and have clarity into your situation and what caused your reaction, you can practice emotional regulation through healthy coping strategies.
Emotional regulation is the ability to moderate your emotional experiences. This is valuable as it can help you feel less overwhelmed and reactive, improves self-confidence, and builds resilience.
You don’t aim to control or change what you’re feeling, only limit the extent your responses – internal and external – so you can choose a healthy reaction. Instead of catastrophising and/or blaming yourself or someone else, you might: go for a walk, watch a favourite movie, talk to a friend, write down what you’re feeling and why, or anything else that helps you feel better without causing consequences for yourself or someone else.
Feeling unable to manage your emotions is known as experiencing emotional dysregulation. When someone is emotionally dysregulated, they have little control over their thoughts or reactions while feeling incapable of regaining self-control in a healthy way, so they’re likely to turn to unhealthy comping strategies. These are often only effective short-term and can cause shame and regret soon after, leading to more negative emotions so you to resort to more unhealthy coping mechanisms, which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
The most common include numbing (suppressing your emotions with a substance or distraction such as food, alcohol, sex, video games, work, or anything else that distracts you from your emotions), rage, recklessness, violence, and withdrawal. They don’t do anything to address the cause of your painful emotions and are likely to have consequences for yourself and/or others.
Practicing emotional regulation is easier when you have an emotional vocabulary because you can more accurately identify what emotion you’re feeling and be less reactive when you’re emotional.
7) Labelling emotions changes how your brain responds
Using detailed language to label your emotions even has effects at a neurological level. When you consciously consider and name your emotion, you’re engaging the prefrontal cortex of your brain. This area is responsible for many of the functions unique to humans, including logic, reasoning, and long-term thinking.
During emotional situations, the more instinctual areas of your brain are likely to be engaged. This can cause your body to go into survival mode so you’re incapable of being reasonable or thinking long term and are at risk of responding with fight, flight, or freeze, which almost never improve a situation and are much more likely to make it worse.
By re-engaging the prefrontal cortex through naming the emotion, you can be more logical about your emotions and consider how to respond in a way that is likely to have the best outcome. So the saying “If you can name it, you can tame it” is supported by neurology.
For the vast majority of people, life is easier when they can name their emotions and determine what caused them, rather than only believing they’re capable of feeling a small number of emotions and rarely reflecting on their responses. But developing an emotional vocabulary is a skill almost anyone can gain.
How to build an emotional vocabulary
Developing an emotional vocabulary can be challenging, especially if you’re starting with limited knowledge and/or you struggle to connect with your emotions so identifying them isn’t easy.
However, building an emotional vocabulary can be an effective place to start gaining emotional awareness since the first step – learning what emotions exist and what they feel like – is relatively straight-forward and a largely academic task.
To develop an emotional vocabulary, you first have to learn what emotions exist and how they feel. You can begin by exploring the list of emotions in the following link.
This list was compiled by the highly accomplished researcher Brené Brown and her team. The emotions were chosen because they’re the most common emotions people report feeling and they felt that they gained the most from being able to label these feelings.
However, there isn’t a consensus on how many emotions exist and what experiences should be considered emotions. There plenty of other well-researched and useful resources for learning about emotions, including ones that might not be listed.
Once you’re satisfied with how much you’ve learned – without using preparation as an excuse to avoid starting – begin trying to identify your emotions as you experience them.
Especially when you’re learning, choose two emotions that seem accurate and then explain – internally, in writing, or even to someone else – how your feelings align with the definition of each emotion. If neither seems to fit very well, repeat the process until one, or several, seems accurate.
Once you’re confident you understand what emotion you’re experiencing, accept it without trying to control it. The goal isn’t to stop yourself from having emotions you dislike or think are unacceptable, but to be able to recognise your emotions without feeling compelled to strongly react.
Acceptance doesn’t mean telling yourself that you’re enjoying your emotions or you’re not upset by what caused them, whether you or someone else was responsible. You simply acknowledge what you’re feeling without judging yourself or trying to change or stop the feeling.
Begin by not reacting for a few seconds at a time with minor inconveniences, and build up to applying this technique to greater challenges and staying calm for longer as you become more comfortable with and capable of accepting instead of fighting or trying to ‘fix’ emotions.
When you feel ready – you understand what you’re feeling and don’t feel compelled to react – you can then determine the best response. This is usually by trying to find a solution, self-soothing (especially if you can’t take action because you’re upset about something that took place in the past), or a combination of the two. Taking action involves considering a solution, while self-soothing is asking yourself what would make you feel better.
For more long-term solutions, you can also identify what often causes you to have strong emotional reactions. Some people struggle to stay calm when they receive what they perceive as criticism, shut down if they’re talking to someone who raises their voice, or get frustrated when they have to wait. Once you’re aware of what can cause you to quickly become upset, you can then make plans for how to limit your exposure as well as considering how you would ideally react and what you can say to yourself that will help you stay calm.
Learning about emotions and changing how you respond to them can be very challenging and potentially bring up painful beliefs and memories, so you may benefit from working with a mental health professional. Professionals can ask you questions and suggest new habits that help you gain insight and make progress, as well as acting as an accountability partner and being able to help you through any potential challenges.
Building an emotional vocabulary and applying it to yourself in emotional situations can be difficult and takes practice, but it’s a skill that can be built and it can benefit you in many different areas of your life, including how you relate to yourself and others, helping you stay calm in challenging situations, and being content with who you are.
When you have a rich understanding of the many different emotions that exist and what they feel like, you can have greater insight into how your emotions affect you and use this information to help regulate how you feel, identify what is causing your emotions, and choose healthy responses.
There’s almost always more to emotional fulfillment than an emotional vocabulary, but for many people, especially those who struggle the most to connect with their emotions, it’s an effective place to start while helping you begin making improvements.
Some people think that developing and applying an emotional vocabulary means being emotional more often and experiencing emotions more strongly than they’re comfortable with. But for the majority of people the opposite is true. When you can label your emotions, accept them without automatically reacting, and then determine the healthiest way to respond, you can be uncomfortably impacted by your emotions less often.
Understanding a wide range of emotions can reveal a whole new way of thinking about emotions. Instead of feeling unable to manage certain types of emotional experiences or believing that you must always be in control of how you feel, they can instead be thought of as information about how your environment is affecting you so you can learn from what you’re feeling.
Developing an emotional vocabulary isn’t complicated and it only requires a willingness to learn about yourself.
