These are the questions that help us make meaning of our lives.

in order to recognize, name, and make sense of our feelings and experiences, we have to: Understand how they show up in our bodies and why (biology) Get curious about how our families and communities shape our beliefs about the connection between our feelings, thoughts, and behavior (biography) Examine our go-to (behaviors), and Recognize the

Where am I? How did I get here from there? How do I get there from here?

Our ability to accurately recognize and label emotions is often referred to as emotional granularity.

But newer research shows that when our access to emotional language is blocked, our ability to interpret incoming emotional information is significantly diminished.

Language shows us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.

This is not that different from what can happen to us when we are unable to articulate our emotions. We feel hopeless or we feel a destructive level of anger.

Over the course of five years, we collected these surveys from more than seven thousand people. The average number of emotions named across the surveys was three. The emotions were happy, sad, and angry.

Without understanding how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors work together, it’s almost impossible to find our way back to ourselves and each other. When we don’t understand how our emotions shape our thoughts and decisions, we become disembodied from our own experiences and disconnected from each other.