Stressed Is Not a Feeling

Someone asks how you are. You say stressed. They ask what kind of stressed, and you are not sure what they mean. Stressed is stressed.

Except it covers a lot of ground. The dread before a conversation you have been avoiding. The irritation of being interrupted for the fourth time. The low hum of having said yes to too many things. The disappointment of a week where nothing went the way you hoped. All of it gets filed under the same word.

That filing system seems harmless. It turns out to matter more than it looks.

The Word Is Doing Work

The psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls this capacity emotional granularity: how finely a person distinguishes between their own emotional states. Some people experience their feelings in broad strokes. Good or bad, fine or not fine. Others can tell apart disappointed, resentful, lonely and ashamed, and feel each one as its own thing.

This is not a personality type, and it is not the same as being emotional. It is closer to a skill. A sommelier and a casual drinker taste the same wine and receive very different amounts of information from it.

In Barrett's account of emotion, the brain is constantly receiving signals from the body: heart rate, breath, muscle tension, the gut. On their own, those signals are vague. A tight chest and a quickened pulse could be fear, excitement, anger or too much coffee. The brain resolves the ambiguity using the emotional concepts it has available. The fewer concepts it has, the coarser the result.

What Precision Changes

In a 2001 study, Barrett and colleagues asked people to record their emotions several times a day over a couple of weeks. Those who drew finer distinctions between their negative feelings reported using more strategies to regulate them, particularly when distress ran high. They had more options, because the feeling arrived with a clearer sense of what it was about.

Later work has linked low differentiation of negative emotion with a range of difficulties, including depression, social anxiety, binge drinking and aggression under provocation. Todd Kashdan, Barrett and Patrick McKnight reviewed this research in 2015. The pattern is an association rather than proof of cause, but it is consistent. When everything registers as bad, the responses available tend to be blunt ones.

What Naming Does in the Brain

There is a second mechanism, and it works in the moment rather than over years.

In 2007, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA showed people photographs of emotional faces while scanning their brains. When participants chose a word for the emotion on the face, rather than matching it to another face, activity in the amygdala dropped. Activity rose in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in regulating emotion. They called it affect labelling.

A later study led by Katharina Kircanski took this out of the scanner. People with a fear of spiders were repeatedly brought close to a live tarantula. Those who described their feelings as they went, in plain words such as "I feel anxious and frightened", showed lower physiological arousal a week later than those who tried to reason their way to seeing the spider as harmless.

The finding surprises people. Describing the fear did more than arguing with it.

Why the Vocabulary Shrinks

Few people choose a narrow emotional vocabulary. It is usually learned.

• Growing up somewhere feelings were not discussed, or were discussed only as problems
• Being rewarded for being easy, which makes the less convenient feelings hard to notice
• Long stretches of stress, which push the nervous system toward broad threat categories and away from nuance
• Workplaces where fine and busy are the only acceptable answers

At the far end of this range sits alexithymia, a marked difficulty identifying and describing your own emotions. Most people are nowhere near that end. They simply never had much reason to look closely, and so they did not.

What Actually Helps

Granularity can be built, and the method is unglamorous. It is mostly practice at noticing.

• Go one layer down. When you notice stressed or bad, ask what kind. Anxious about something specific, or irritable because you are depleted
• Start with the body. Where is it, how warm or heavy is it, is it moving or still. The sensation often arrives before the word does
• Allow two feelings at once. Relieved and sad. Proud and resentful. Mixed states are common, and naming both is more accurate than picking one
• Borrow words. Novels, poetry and other languages hold emotional distinctions that everyday English leaves out. A larger vocabulary is not pretension. It is more resolution
• Notice the pleasant range too. Content, amused, moved and absorbed are different states, and telling them apart helps them register
• Keep it brief. A word or two, a few times a day, does more than one long reflection at night

A Realistic Expectation

A better vocabulary will not stop difficult feelings arriving. That is not what it is for.

What tends to change is what happens after they arrive. A little more space between the feeling and the reaction, and a clearer sense of what the feeling is asking for. People often describe it as the difference between being inside the weather and being able to say what kind of weather it is.

None of this is a diagnosis, and it is not a substitute for individual assessment. If your feelings are hard to name, or everything seems to arrive as the same undifferentiated pressure, that is something counselling can help with. Stabilise is available in Carlton, Melbourne and online.