Labelling Feelings 101

The short version is that you definitely have emotions…and not understanding them makes it very hard to understand your own behaviour.

You’re allowed to figure out what emotions you’re feeling in broadly the same way you would with anyone else, which is by paying attention to what you’re actually doing. If you’re behaving in an angry way, maybe you’re actually angry.

feelings are basically anything non-verbal you can access through introspection. A lot of this corresponds to actually physical sensations in your body….

the core skill of emotional literacy is paying attention to feelings in order to determine what emotions you are currently experiencing.

This may seem like a dumb question, but have you ever thought about how it is that people can feel their emotions? The answer is that they pay attention to their body. Experiencing an emotion is primarily noticeable based on bodily sensations. People don’t always consciously notice that this is what they’re doing because it’s become so automatic, b... See more

What you are trying to do in learning emotional literacy is to begin to understand this mapping of physical sensations in your body to predispositions towards particular classes of behaviour.

Just get good at paying attention to bodily sensations. It might help to actually try saying things out loud, or writing them down, just going through a list of everything you notice about how your body feels right now. What you will tend to notice over time is that there are certain characteristic familiar patterns of how you are feeling.

Emotions, in contrast, are words which label behaviours. Anger is an emotion because behaving angrily is a thing. People behave like they’re in love, or are afraid, or any one of other emotional labels. It’s useful to think of emotions as being like colours. Behaviour is infinitely complex, but we have a set of descriptive words applying discrete l... See more