Subsnack #22: How can loving words help you feel better?

Today we're exploring how the words you use can directly impact the things you feel

“Language shows us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.” — Brené Brown

Do you ever have that feeling that something is just off? You can’t quite grasp what’s making you wobble. You’re unsettled and confused. You’re lost. You have an awareness of something just out of reach, but you can’t quite give voice, or language, to what that is.

Often that amorphous blob is an emotion, or a cluster of emotions. And when you are able to bring words to it, that thing will take shape. You’ll be better able to see why it’s showing up, what it’s telling you, and how you can best move through or past it. You’ll know what you’re dealing with.

Our emotional experiences are inextricably linked to language; words articulate and give form to feelings. As Susie Dent says in An Emotional Dictionary (which has some beautiful feeling words like confelicity): 

“You are what you feel, as long as you can describe it.’

Connecting the words you use (or don’t) with your emotional life can help you see where you are stuck (and what in) and release emotions when they are trapped in your body (like that tightness across your chest). You’ll learn how to trust yourself more as you build the language of your emotions.

But how to do this? Try these strategies:

Name it to feel it: 

Learn how to label your emotions, by developing “emotional granularity”, which Brené Brown says leads to “greater emotional regulation and psychosocial well-being.” Start to expand your emotional vocabulary by capturing feeling words wherever you go. Also break down emotions: anger to frustration or humiliation for instance. Learn how to pinpoint with words more precisely what you are feeling: is it disrespected or hostile, joyful or optimistic?

I’ve written about this before here, but there is a direct link between how we feel emotions and how we name them, with recent research indicating that this is key to feeling better across all areas of our lives.

Know that emotions are not your identity:

Often we fear labelling our emotions because we’re worried that they’ll flood us. But you are not your emotions, and the words you use to convey them can actually create some distance that might help you feel safer in your experience of them.

So rather than ‘I am anxious’ you might say ‘I feel anxious’. Instead of ‘I am overwhelmed’, you might say ‘I’m feeling overwhelmed.’ It’ll give you some space to figure out what to do.

We’re not speaking the same language: 

When you talk about an emotion, like fear, that might mean something very different to someone else. We assume we have the same expectations and experiences of our emotional states, but in her recent book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett writes about how emotions are actually social constructions. We make them and experience them together.

Try to get clear about what your experience of an emotion is, and try not to project that assumption onto someone else. Get curious about what an emotion means to them. This will also bring more understanding, and nuance, to your relationships.

Reclaim ‘I’: 

We can naturally disassociate from our emotions without realizing it. Have you ever caught yourself saying: “when you’re feeling dejected when a friend doesn’t call”, rather than “I was feeling dejection when my friend didn’t call” .

Or “when you’re on holiday but you’re not feeling the joy that you expected”, instead of “I expected to feel joy but that wasn’t my experience of the holiday.”

When you bring back I, you connect more with your experience.

So I invite you to explore. Try to see what happens when you pay attention to the words you use around emotions. You might find that you’ll build a healthier relationship with them and also access the meaning that they ultimately hold for you. Let me know how you get on.

See you next soon,