You Don't Have Enough Words for How You Feel

“No, no no!!!” my toddler shouts as she dumps her plate of pasta onto the floor.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“I’m mad!” she says. “The water made me mad.”

Her water cup is sitting there on the table untouched. I’m about to ask her what she’s talking about until I notice the wet sleeve of her shirt. “Oh, you have water on your sleeve. Does that feel uncomfortable, you don’t like that feeling?”

I slip my fingers between her wet pajamas and skin and roll up her sleeve. She settles immediately because she wasn’t mad… she was uncomfortable. Her three-year-old brain couldn’t make sense of the sensation of a cold wet patch on her arm, so she reached for one of the few emotion words she knows. “Mad.” I swear, half the work of raising a small person is just narrating their internal and external life until they can do it themselves.

According to emotion researcher Marc Brackett, the average adult knows only a handful of emotion words — sad, angry, happy, excited. Which means a lot of what I do as a therapist is the same thing I’m doing on the kitchen floor, just with willing, paying adults. There’s a reason therapists always ask “How do you feel?” and have drawings of feeling wheels on posters and pillows. Knowing the precise word for how you feel gives the feeling a container. Instead of a formless blob washing over you, it becomes one specific thing you can point at and maybe do something about.

You’d think this would be a solved problem by now. In the age of self-help, everyone sounds fluent — we’ve got language for our attachment styles and our nervous systems and whatever’s dysregulating us this week. But having the words isn’t the same as being able to tell which emotion you actually feel or what’s happening in your body. The fluency is mostly borrowed. Underneath it, a lot of us are reaching for the same few blunt words my toddler used, just dressed up in better language.

I want you to think about emotions as if they were colors. If you’re painting and you have only a few colors, it limits the amount of detail you can get into the picture, no matter how much is in front of you. A lot of colors, you start to catch the difference between a bright yellow and a paler one, and the painting gets depth. This is emotional granularity — the number of colors you’ve got for your own mind. Research shows that the higher your emotional granularity, the better you can regulate your emotions and take care of yourself.

If you know only the word “angry” and not “annoyed,” you’ll reach for the word “angry” more often, because you can’t see the whole spectrum between “irritated” and “enraged” to find the most precise word.

But where can you start if you aren’t even sure how you feel? Or if you know plenty of emotion words but haven’t related them to how your body feels?

Don’t begin with finding the word, or even doing a body scan. Instead, it can be helpful to start with whether you feel generally pleasant or unpleasant, and high- or low-energy. These two axes are hardwired into us; a baby is born with the ability to show you whether he’s having a good time and how tired he is.

From those two questions you can start narrowing down and noticing how the different emotions actually feel in your body. Unpleasant and high-energy is where anger lives, along with anxiety and that wired, enraged feeling. Drop the energy down but stay unpleasant and you’re somewhere among sad, lonely, and despondent. The pleasant side works the same way. If you’re high-energy, you’re excited or ecstatic. If you’re low-energy, that’s calm or peaceful.

You can also expand your emotional vocabulary by looking into how other languages describe emotions. German has a word you may know — Schadenfreude, which means the joy of watching someone you dislike fail. Tagalog has gigil, the irresistible urge to squeeze something unbearably cute. My guess is you half-recognize these emotions even if you never had a word for them, which shows the feeling was always there, waiting for the word. I tell my clients that every new emotion word you pick up is like adding another color to your palette, giving you more vocabulary to both identify and describe how you feel.

My daughter will get there slowly, one word at a time. For now I’m still still playing detective — handing her words she doesn’t quite have yet, watching the tantrum lose a little of its power each time one of them clicks.