How Emotionally Literate Are You?
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
~ Viktor Frankl
One thing we control freaks need to finally learn is that we can't control or change the world around us. The only thing we really have responsibility for is how we chose to respond, how we chose to feel. Because our feelings influence our actions, our behaviour, and ultimately our results.
Emotional literacy is a crucial aspect of our emotional intelligence. The more accurately we can pinpoint our emotions, the easier it becomes to choose how to respond to them. Researchers are finding that a better emotional vocabulary — all by itself — can make you more able to identify, work with, and regulate your emotions. A rich vocabulary helps you understand yourself and the world around you, and it helps you understand what you’re feeling when an emotion arises.
Emotions and Feelings
Emotion is a noun, and feeling is a verb. An emotion is a physiological experience that gives you information about the world, and a feeling is your conscious awareness of the emotion itself.
This might sound obvious, but many people are honestly unaware that they’re having an emotion. For them, the emotion and the consciousness of it are not strongly connected, and they don’t even realise that they’re fearful, or angry, or depressed. Their emotional state has to become so persistent that it drags them into a severe mood (or is pointed out by someone else), and then they can realise, “Oh, I guess I’ve been really sad about my mum, or afraid about money, or angry about work.” They have the emotion, but they don’t know about it. The emotion is certainly there, and their behaviour displays the emotion (to others at least), but they aren’t feeling it fully.
We aren’t aware of our emotions because we’ve been trained since birth to repress, suppress, ignore, demonise, and avoid them. We are told that some emotions are good, and some are bad. So, we try to chase some emotions and avoid others. The bad news is that by suppressing some emotions, we actually start to dull all emotions. This training isn’t helping anyone. It makes us emotionally unaware and emotionally chaotic — because an unfelt emotion can bounce around inside you like a hyperactive pinball. Luckily, if you can feel your emotions, you can become more aware and more intelligent about them. And contrary to the rotten training we get about emotions, feeling and knowing your emotions can actually help you relieve them. Research now suggests that if you can simply name a troubling emotion, you can calm yourself and your brain down.
Describing your emotional experiences can help you identify the sources of your feelings and determine how to make positive changes. Having a wide vocabulary of emotion words is a great start. Knowing a range of words that express varying levels of a particular feeling can also be useful in separating serious problems from not-so-serious problems. Because our thoughts impact the way we feel, the words we choose to label our experiences can impact the intensity of our feelings. For example, try saying to yourself, “I’m terrified about the meeting”. Now try, “I’m worried about the meeting”. Feel the difference? Having a large emotional vocabulary at your disposal helps you respond appropriately to events.
The emotional vocabulary we’ve learnt is usually pretty basic: happy, sad, angry, fearful (basically the characters from Disney's Inside Out). There’s little nuance in the language and even less education relating those concepts to the vibrational, visceral experience of those emotions [for more on this, I recommend How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett or check out some of her articles]. Our emotions have strong physiological connections - the feeling of butterflies in your stomach, for example, before a big speech - but are you nervous or excited? Is it anticipation? Take the difference between ecstatic and happy and joyous. Do you know how those feel different? Have you studied how those feel different in your body? The invitation here is to develop mastery. Can we go into really understanding those differences, how we experience them differently, and then how we create them differently?
This isn’t semantics for the sake of it. This is about witnessing and connecting to your experience. Because if you don’t acknowledge your own experience, you cannot take responsibility for and you lose the power to change it.
How Are You Feeling?
So, let’s play. There is a collection of little exercises to incorporate into your day. Experiment with them all - if you notice resistance to a particular exercise, that is a sure sign it’s one you should try! We’re not trying to understand, blame, change or do anything else with our emotions this week other than name them. Everything you are feeling is absolutely allowed, even the things you “shouldn’t” be feeling. You don’t have to share your observations with anyone, although you may find it easier to do some of these exercises out loud with someone. Get curious.
Choose at least one time each day when you can be quiet for a few moments. Ask yourself how you’re feeling? Notice the physical sensation of the emotion in your body - where do you feel it, what colour is it, what temperature, does it have a sound? Play around with different words [a thesaurus or the Wheel of Emotions can help] - until you find the word that fits best. Try to be as specific as you can
Check-in when you feel particularly activated or upset or after you’ve had a difficult encounter, as well as in times that feel less emotionally activating. Push yourself to use descriptive and nuanced emotions, increasing your awareness of what you’re feeling in the present moment.
Choose one emotion each day and try to notice where you run into it throughout the day. Maybe in a news story, or a book you're reading. Maybe someone talks about it on a podcast or you hear a story from a colleague at work. You might see it in a TV episode. Focus on noticing the places that emotion shows up for a day.
Choose one emotion at random and do a five-minute free write about where and when it has been present in your life. Think about the circumstances, players and resolution. Notice what physical sensations arise when focusing attention on this particular emotion. Notice if other emotions travel alongside the emotion you picked.
With someone you trust, randomly select an emotion from the list and tell a story about that emotion without naming the emotion itself. Have the other person guess what you're describing. This practice helps you develop more effective empathetic communication.
Imagine the emotion as a living being and draw it. Give it a body and face and use colour if helpful. Notice if it's hairy or feathered, winged or legged. Most importantly, ask it what it wants most and how it might try to help you. Jot notes as needed to deepen your learning.
Keep one of the lists handy while you watch TV at night and during the commercial breaks try to guess what the main character is feeling using words from this list. If you're watching with loved ones you can each choose a character to guess emotions for. This is a great way to help children improve their emotional vocabulary.
Let me know how this resonates for you and if you have any questions.