Module 23: Identifying and Naming Emotions

Understanding our emotions is essential to our mental fitness.

The practice of putting words to what you’re feeling is central to your well-being and contextualizing your emotions within your own larger narrative.

Identifying and naming emotions can assuage fears by breaking down larger experiences into core emotional components.

Also called “affect labeling” this is an effective means of emotional regulation as it engages our cognitive brain with our emotional mind.

Emotions give us information. By unraveling our emotions we can understand ourselves better and have more clarity around what our emotions are telling us we need.

Using tools such as the “feelings wheel” in this module along with other activities that enhance emotional expression encourage, specify and help demystify our emotions.

We can then seek to identify the causes of our emotions, and better understand what actions, if any, need to be taken.

As the modern world often encourages feeling numb, distracted and emotionally distant, working on our emotional fluency helps build a better relationship with ourselves and the people around us.

Overall, the more effort we put towards identifying our emotions, the more prepared we are to deal with them and the lessons that they offer. Sitting with and identifying our emotions is often challenging, but is always worth the effort and becomes easier over time.