Emotion Naming

To better understand your emotions, it helps to be able to name them as you experience them. This is known as emotion naming.

Once you know what we're feeling, you can start to examine how the emotion is influencing you.

Joy can motivate you to join in or share with others.

Fear can motivate you to move away.

Sadness can motivate you to withdraw.

Anger can motivate you to attack or stand up for yourself.

Guilt can motivate you to fix what you've done.

Shame can motivate you to hide what you've done.

Compassion can motivate you to offer comfort.

Once you're able to name the emotion(s) you're feeling, it’s useful to examine how and where you experience them physically and how intense the emotions feel. This will help you feel more in control of your emotions and learn to better manage them.

For example, when you're angry, you may clench your fists and notice your heart pounding. Alternatively, sadness may cause fatigue and feel like a heaviness throughout the body.

Once you identify an emotion and its impact on you, it can also be helpful to determine the intensity of the emotion. A scale of 1 to 10 is helpful for this, where 1 is not feeling the emotion at all, and 10 is feeling the emotion very intensely.

If you find you are experiencing your emotions very intensely, you can use grounding skills or breathing exercises to calm yourself before reacting.

Try the following exercise at least once this week. Using a journal for this exercise can be helpful.

Give the emotion you're feeling a name.

How is this emotion serving a purpose?

Reflect on its physical impact and intensity on a scale of 1 to 10.