Labelling Feelings 101

alexithymic, which you may recall from Chapter One is a condition in which people do not know how to identify and describe their feelings.

Learning to label emotions with a more nuanced vocabulary can be absolutely transformative. People who can identify the full spectrum of emotion – who realize how, for

Affective labeling is literally “putting feelings into words.” As you do this, vague anxieties crystallize into a clear set of solid emotions.

Because your mind and body are so tightly connected, one of the most effective ways to understand your emotions as they are happening is to learn how to spot the physical changes that accompany your emotions.

These new experiments revealed something that had never been documented before: everyone we tested used the same emotion words like “angry,” “sad,” and “afraid” to communicate their feelings but not necessarily to mean the same thing. Some test subjects made fine distinctions with their word use: for example, they experienced sadness and fear as qu