"How are you?"
"I'm fine."
Such a common phrase we here... it’s also a reflection of an untapped potential we have to regulating ourselves more intentionally.
Because "fine" is a stand-in word .. the one we reach for when we haven't yet checked in with what we actually feel, or a word someone uses when they don’t have access to other ways for describing what’s going on for them internally.
There is a ‘neural signature of naming’ : putting a feeling into a word brings specific brain systems online and quiets down others.
The act of naming itself regulates.
But there’s another layer to this: nuance of naming matters.
Research on emotional granularity* shows that people with more differentiated emotional vocabularies regulate more effectively, reach less often for maladaptive coping, and ask more precisely for what they need (Kashdan, Barrett & McKnight, 2015).
*emotional granularity is the ability to make fine-grained distinctions between similar feelings
"I feel bad" leaves you in a space that’s not specific enough to know what to do with it.
“Feeling better” is always relative.. If we’re overstimulated, we may be seeking calm. If we are foggy, lethargic, unmotivated, we might be seeking more energy. Calling an emotion bad or something vague, doesn't help us get in touch with what we might need to adjust it.
Moreover, it makes it hard for others to support us.
"I feel restless, dread, that seems to soften when I move my body and seems to increase after I check my phone"... tells you a lot about your patterns, and what might be possible for you to experiment with.
The first answer flattens an entire inner landscape into one beige word.
The second one maps it.
The more nuance we can access for what we feel, the wider our repertoire can become about how to adjust.
For coaches, therapists, educators, and leaders, this is a quiet engine underneath so much dysregulation and maladaptive behaviors.
The people you guide can better access the regulation available to them when they have a more nuanced vocabulary. When you can name what you feel with a mindset of experimenting with a wider range of words, you give others a model for doing the same.
Inside Teach the Nervous System, this is the heart of Module 5: Name It to Tame It. How to build the kind of emotional granularity that gives you — and the people you guide — a wider, more accurate repertoire for navigating any internal state.
Explore Teach the Nervous System →
Next time: where AI fits into all of this.. and where it can't.
Reference
Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414550708
Barrett, L. F., Gross, J., Christensen, T. C., & Benvenuto, M. (2001). Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion, 15(6), 713–724.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930143000239
