Naming what you feel isn’t weakness; it’s one of the most powerful things you can do for your mental health.
I want to start with something honest: I grew up in a family that didn’t have enough capacity to talk about emotions. So, as anyone can imagine, I used to struggle with labelling emotions.
Not terrible in the way people assume, I wasn’t dismissing emotions or telling people to just “push through.” I was genuinely limited in my own vocabulary for feelings. I’d sit with myself at the end of a long day, and reach for words like “stressed” or “fine” or “overwhelmed”, and then wonder why those labels didn’t seem to do much. Why didn’t naming it seem to help?
Then, during my university studies in Psychology, I read many books dedicated to understanding emotions, people’s emotional language, and communication. Reading, in addition to exhilarating discussions and debates at school, made me more skilled at understanding my own emotions.
My latest readings on that matter are Dealing with Feelings and Permission to Feel by Dr. Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and something genuinely shifted for me. Not just professionally but also personally.
What Brackett reminded me again, and what I now bring into my work at Mindfulness Therapy Services, is that naming and labelling emotions is incredibly important for our growth, relationships and mental health. The problem is not that we don’t name them, but we don’t name them precisely enough.
The Science Behind “Name It to Tame It”
You may have heard the phrase “name it to tame it,” a concept popularized by neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel and echoed throughout the mindfulness and therapy world. But what does it actually mean in practice?
When we experience an emotion and put a precise word to it, research shows that activity in the amygdala — the brain’s threat-detection centre — actually decreases. We move from reactive to reflective. We shift from being overwhelmed by a feeling to having a relationship with it.
Marc Brackett calls this skill emotional granularity, the ability to distinguish among feelings with nuance and precision. In Permission to Feel, he writes about how many of us grow up with an impoverished feelings vocabulary, cycling through just a handful of words: happy, sad, angry, anxious, fine. But our inner lives are so much richer — and more specific — than that.
“Emotions are information. They tell us about ourselves and our relationship to our environment, helping us navigate through life.” -Dr. Marc Brackett.
Think about the difference between feeling disappointed and feeling betrayed. Both might register as “hurt,” but they call for very different responses from yourself and from others. Disappointment might need comfort. Betrayal might need a boundary. If you’re only working with “hurt,” you’re navigating with a blurry map.
Brackett’s RULER Framework: Emotional Intelligence in Action
One of the most practical frameworks Dr. Brackett introduces is RULER, an approach to emotional intelligence profoundly applicable to adult life and therapy work. RULER stands for:
The RULER -Dr. Marc Brackett
Notice that labelling sits right in the middle. It’s not an afterthought; it’s the hinge of the whole process. You can’t regulate what you haven’t labelled. You can’t express what you haven’t understood. And you can’t understand what you haven’t first recognized and named.
In my therapy practice, I often use what Brackett calls the Mood Meter, a simple tool that maps feelings along two axes: energy level (low to high) and pleasantness (unpleasant to pleasant). It helps clients see that “anxious” and “excited” can feel physically similar — both are high energy — but are interpreted very differently depending on how we label them. That insight alone can be transformative.
The mood meter -Dr. Marc Brackett
Brené Brown and the Courage It Takes to Name Hard Feelings
If Marc Brackett gave me the science of emotion labelling, Brené Brown gave me the permission.
Brown’s research on vulnerability, shame, and wholehearted living runs in beautiful parallel with Brackett’s work. In her book Atlas of the Heart, she maps 87 distinct human emotions. And makes the case that without the language for our feelings, we can’t meaningfully connect with each other or with ourselves.
“Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, and the full spectrum of what it means to be human.” -Brené Brown.
What Brown adds to this conversation is the emotional layer beneath the cognitive one. Because here’s what I’ve seen time and again in therapy: people know they should name their feelings. They’ve read the articles. They’ve heard the advice. And yet something stops them.
Often, that something is shame. The belief that certain emotions are unacceptable; that feeling jealous makes you petty, that feeling angry makes you dangerous, that feeling sad makes you weak. Brown’s work reminds us that emotions are not character flaws. They are human experiences. THAT is what makes us humans. Emotions can be messy! And suppressing or mislabelling them doesn’t make them disappear, it just sends them underground, where they tend to cause more trouble.
I think about a session with my therapist a long time ago, in which I came to her describing myself as “always anxious.” We spent time really sitting with that word. Was it anxiety? Or was some of it anticipatory grief about the imminent death of a loved one I feared was getting closer? Some of it was anger I hadn’t felt safe expressing? Some of it loneliness dressed up as worry?
When I finally said the word “lonely” out loud, I cried. Not because it was worse than anxious, but because it was true. And truth, even when it’s hard, gives us something to work with.
The Emotions We Reach For. And the Ones We Avoid
Brackett observes that most of us become “emotion scientists” for some feelings and “emotion avoiders” for others. We get very good at describing the feelings that feel safe. Such as joy, gratitude, or even mild stress. And we develop elaborate ways of not naming the ones that feel too big or too threatening.
Some of the most commonly mislabelled or avoided emotions I see in practice:
These aren’t “bad” or “wrong” emotions. They’re just uncomfortable ones, the kind that tend to get mislabeled as “stress” or collapsed into a vague sense of “not doing well.” And yet each one, when identified precisely, carries specific information about what we need.
Resentment, for instance, almost always points to an unmet need or a boundary that was crossed. Hopelessness often signals that our current strategies aren’t working and something needs to change. Even contempt, one of the most uncomfortable emotions to acknowledge in couples and relationships therapy, is telling us something important about a relationship dynamic that may need attention.
What This Looks Like in Mindfulness-Based and Emotion-Focused Approach in Therapy
In mindfulness-based therapy, we often talk about observing our feelings and body expressions without judgment. Which means noticing what arises without immediately trying to fix it, push it away, or make it mean something about our worth as a person. Emotion labelling fits naturally within this practice.
When we allow a feeling to stay as is in mindfulness and give it a precise name, we’re doing two things at once: we’re creating a little bit of distance from the experience, which invites us to shift from reactive to reflective, and we’re also honouring it. We’re saying: this emotion is real, it belongs here, it has something to tell me. Sometimes the story attached to an emotion goes back to our childhood and early attachments.
Brackett’s research aligns beautifully with this. He emphasizes that the goal of emotional intelligence isn’t to feel good all the time. It’s to understand what we feel, why we feel it, and what to do with it. That’s a deeply mindful orientation toward our inner lives.
Some practical ways to start building your emotion-labelling practice:
Small Steps to Gain Emotional Literacy
- Start a brief daily emotion check-in — morning and evening, just name what you notice.
- Use a feelings wheel or Brackett’s Mood Meter to expand your vocabulary.
- When you catch yourself saying “fine” or “stressed,” pause and get curious — what’s more specific?
- Notice which emotions you avoid naming, and gently get curious about why
- Practice naming emotions in conversation: “I notice I’m feeling disappointed about this” instead of “this is frustrating.”
My Biggest Takeaways. And, Why This Work Matters
Reading Brackett’s work and sitting alongside Brené Brown’s left me with a few convictions that have shaped how I practice and how it helps me to live well.
Emotions are not problems to solve. They’re messengers. When we rush to regulate or manage a feeling before we’ve really heard what it’s saying, we miss the information it carries. Precise labelling is how we listen.
Vocabulary is a form of emotional freedom. The more words we have for our inner experience, the more agency we have over it. A person who can distinguish between grief and despair, between frustration and rage, between contentment and joy; that person has more choices available to them.
This is a skill, not a talent. Nobody is born an emotional linguist. Brackett is clear about this: emotional intelligence can be taught, practiced, and developed at any age. Which means it’s never too late to start. And perhaps most personally: giving yourself permission to feel is not self-indulgence. It’s self-knowledge. As Brackett titles his book, it truly is Permission to Feel, and for so many of us, that permission is the hardest and most important thing to grant ourselves.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean to name your emotions?
Naming emotions means identifying and labelling what you are feeling with accuracy and specificity, rather than using vague terms like “stressed” or “upset”.
Why is naming emotions important?
Research suggests that naming emotions can reduce emotional reactivity, improve emotional regulation, and support better mental health.
What is emotional granularity?
Emotional granularity is the ability to distinguish between similar emotions, such as disappointment, frustration, grief, and anger.
Can therapy help me understand my emotions?
Yes. Therapy can help expand emotional vocabulary, increase emotional awareness, and improve emotional regulation.
Ready to Deepen Your Emotional Intelligence?
We offer individual therapy that weaves together evidence-based approaches, mindfulness practices, and emotional intelligence work — all in a warm, non-judgmental space.
We provide in-person psychotherapy in Burlington, and virtual therapy throughout Ontario, including Burlington, Oakville, Hamilton
Contact