Gain control over your emotions by putting your feelings into words
You are sitting at your laptop, reading the latest email from your CEO about your company's new strategy and how according to her, this new strategy will solve all the issues and will be the magic pill everyone has been waiting for. You feel some burning in your stomach region, tension in your shoulders, a cramp in your jar, and a tingling in your fingertips; ready to send a reply, asking her whether this is just a belated April Fool's joke or whether she is actually serious.
Your colleague sees you sitting there with your red head full of tension and asks what is going on. The usual, you answer. The new CEO has it in her mind to come up with a simplified solution and dares to sell it to us like the wonder we all have been waiting for. This just makes me so helpless and frustrated, I can't help it. And just like that, the urge to type a probably less than professional response is lowered and instead you just push away your laptop and take a deep breath.
The only thing that actually happened here is the fact that you named the emotional reactions you had with regards to the incoming email. It's kind of a typical (grand-)motherly advice to talk about your feelings so that you might feel better after all. But as it is so often the case, there is certainly some truth in this old saying. For decades now, therapists have advised their clients to name their emotions to tame them. If you have ever sat down with a good colleague or friend to talk about a certain issue or problem that is troubling you, you will know about the positive effects of talking about your feelings. They kind of feel less raw, more clear and somehow easier to manage.
Before diving deeper into how that specifically works, let's have a closer look at what emotions actually are and why we experience them. Emotions are energy in motion = e + motion. Their single most important purpose is to help us survive. Not a small task I would say. This also makes the fighting of negative emotions so useless. Instead of going to war with your emotions, you can better befriend them and stay curious about what they want to protect you from.
Emotions consist of 3 parts:
1 - subjective experiences
→ This is the trigger or the stimuli that produces the emotion. This can be anything from seeing a certain colour, observing a certain behaviour, meeting a certain person or, in our case, reading an upsetting email from your CEO. These trigger moments are subjective as the same experience can produce different emotional responses in different people.
2 - physiological responses
→ This is the response from our autonomic nervous system to the emotion we are feeling, the tension in your shoulder, the burning in the stomach region and the cramping of the jar. Our autonomic nervous system controls our bodily responses to emotions and thus also our fight or flight response.
3 - behavioural responses
→ This is the actual expression of the emotion. This can be anything from smiling, laughing, sighing, shouting or writing an unprofessional response back to your CEO. Some emotional responses are universal - like a smile - whereas others are based in the respective culture and differ quite a bit.
Very often we use the word emotion interchangeably with other concepts like mood or feeling. Just to be sure that we are all on the same page, here are some short definitions of those three concepts:
Emotion = intense feeling caused by an event which is accompanied by a physical response
Feeling = this is basically synonymous with emotion but focuses more on the subjective experience
Mood = less intense state which can last longer but doesn't need a specific trigger
Emotional psychologists argue about how many basic emotions there are. In the 1980s, psychologist Robert Plutchik identified 8 basic emotions which form the foundation for all others. Those 8 emotions are joy - sadness, acceptance - disgust, fear - anger, and surprise - anticipation. They are grouped into polar opposites. Adding up primary emotions will produce new emotions like joy + trust = love.
Knowing what emotions you are feeling is key in the process of talking about them. In psychology we call the 'talking about your emotions' affect labelling. The word affect is defined as any experience of feeling or emotion, positive or negative. It's thus plainly the labelling of your emotional experiences. Talk therapists have applied some form of this affect labelling for decades and various shapes and forms and more recently studies have shown that not just talking but also writing about your feelings positively manages negative emotional experiences. If you are in the habit of keeping a journal, you probably know what those scientists are talking about.
One can simplify the effects of affect labelling in the brain as follows:
When having an emotional response, i.e. feeling happy or sad, the brain's emotional centres are triggered which can go into overdrive, making you feel all the feelings and leaving very little space for the reasoning and thinking centres of the brain. This leaves you kind of powerless at the mercy of your emotions.
The act of affect labelling, talking about these emotional experiences, decreases the brain's activity in the emotional centres, giving the reasoning and thinking centres more space to deal with the problem at hand. This leaves you with more control and matter-of-fact thinking, dampening the overwhelming emotional triggers.
The crux of the matter is timing. Of course it is already helpful to label your emotions at some time after the triggering event, i.e. when talking to a friend, colleague or therapist. The sooner however you are able to name your emotions, the sooner you will be able to give your reasoning and thinking brain the possibility to manage the big emotions and in turn manage your emotional response. This is of course easier said than done, as anybody who has the experience of being in the grasp of one's own emotions can testify to. There is one thing that helps us to put some distance between the emotional trigger event and the emotional response: mindfulness.
Many people have many different understandings of mindfulness, but in the end mindfulness is simply our ability to be present and to be aware of what is going on inside and around us so that we can choose our reactions instead of being overwhelmed. There are various mindfulness techniques and practices to choose from, ranging from meditation, yoga, breathing exercises, nature walks or simple deliberate pauses during our busy days. What they all have in common is to train that muscle that detects emotional triggers and holds our reactions long enough at bay for us to be mindful of how we want to perceive this trigger, name our emotions, and how we want to react to them.
But what if you actually don't know what kind of emotions you are feeling? How to name something if you don't actually know the name? It is not uncommon for people to only be able to name around 8-10 emotions. Those often include joy, sadness, fear and anger. Would you be surprised to know that there are more than 34.000 emotions we can experience? From my coaching practice of working with clients on exactly that issue I can recommend downloading the app Universe of Emotions. This app is designed to build your emotional intelligence by giving you the vocabulary to name the emotions, log them and thus increase your emotional awareness.
So the next time you read an upsetting email from your CEO and feeling the negative affect, the experience of negative emotions, take a literal or imaginary step back, breathe, tune into your body for what your physiological responses are, reflect on the emotions you are feeling and name them. This simple act of affect labelling manages your emotional experiences by lowering the brain activity of your emotional centres and thus gives space for your thinking brain centres to look at the issue at hand with more logic and reasoning.
In order to practically reflect on your emotions related to i.e. a goal you have difficulties achieving, a decision you need to make but have a hard time with, or if you are dealing with some stuff and need clarification on how you feel about this issue, sign up for our free monthly reflection cards (digital/printable) and let us guide you through your emotional uncertainties with this month’s edition on emotions.
