The Negative Impulse to Label Your Emotions

Learning to Label Your Emotions can change the way you manage and deal with them. You may not know how to manage your feelings, or what to do with them, when your emotions become overwhelming. Emotions are a powerful tool, especially when you understand their power. However, managing your emotions can also be a burden, because you're not sure how to effectively learn to manage them.


Let's look at an example: A person feels very sad about something. They then label their sadness as "being sad" and "being lonely". They then move onto the next emotion and another, and soon they feel like a broken record. Label your feelings! What do you think will happen? Hopefully, it will get better.

When you start to experience overwhelming emotions like sadness, anger, fear, stress, etc... You need to take some time and really think about what your feelings are about. When you're labeling your feelings, this process is much easier. Simply put, when you label your emotions with a word, you tend to become less emotional reactive. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge and identify your own emotions, but you also want to acknowledge and recognize others' emotions.

There are times when people react very strongly to their own emotional triggers. For example, if you have a boss who constantly makes you feel anxious or depressed, or if you have physical feelings of pain. People who experience these kinds of strong reactions have often labeled their emotions incorrectly. They didn't really feel their emotions as "anxiety" or "depression". They correctly identified that they were feeling those emotions. In fact, they may have even been experiencing physical feelings of anxiety or depression, but misidentified them as "anxiety" or "depression".

This all boils down to having the right emotional vocabulary. This can be difficult for some people because we typically use words like "anger" and "disgust". On the surface, these sound like negative labels, however, if you take the time to reflect on your own feelings and thoughts, they hold many clues about your true feelings. You simply need to re-frame those feelings and ask yourself what they really mean. Once you have this information in your hands, it will be much easier for you to change your behavior.

Also, if you have a tendency to get angry very easily, labeling your emotion of anger might not be a bad idea. Anger is actually a positive emotion. It helps us deal with difficult situations by boosting our motivation. Unfortunately, most of us don't learn how to effectively handle our own anger issues. By falsely labeling your negative emotions as "anger", you may keep yourself stuck in a never ending cycle of negative thinking and be unable to let go of your negative emotions. While you may feel better when you are angry, this only keeps you in your bad mood for another time.

An emotional kryptonite is the sadness. Sadness can feel like a physical pain. It can also feel like a loss of control. For example, if you lose your job or find that you are having marital problems, you may experience sadness. Although sadness is a wonderful emotion, it can also keep you stuck in a cycle of negative emotions. If you are not familiar with how to properly express your sadness, taking a class can help you work through your feelings so that you will eventually shed your sadness and move on.

Finally, if you have difficulty switching between the strong happy emotions of happiness and sadness, label them separately. Instead of labeling sadness as being "not good enough", you could instead choose to label it as "not me." By doing this, it becomes easier to experience both feelings at once rather than feeling overwhelmed by them all at once. Once you have identified your personal "emotion kryptonite" it becomes easier to work through them and finally label them so that you are in control.