There's a moment between feeling and naming that can change our choices for what we do with our feelings.
In a previous article (“AI can’t smell the rain”), I talked about the multisensory layers..
the tingle of sweat tracing down your back,
the flutter in your belly, the warmth on your skin,
the thousand interoceptive signals AI cannot reach.
That richness is yours, and tuning into it sharpens your experience of life.
The next move towards higher levels of intentional self-regulation: putting a felt thing into a word.
It turns out to be an incredibly powerful act of nervous system regulation.
But before we get to what happens in the brain, there's a piece of research worth knowing.
For decades, alexithymia- the difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotions - was treated mostly as a vocabulary problem. A missing-word bank.
Newer research reframes it. Alexithymia is now widely understood as a general deficit of interoception: a difficulty reading the body's internal signals at the source (Brewer, Cook & Bird, 2016).
If you can't feel the signal clearly, you can't name it clearly.
The richness of what you can say is downstream of the richness of what you can feel.
This is why becoming truly present and feeling ourselves in our body is so important:
You can't translate the nervous system’s language if you can't sense or feel it.
The translation itself - once we do become aware of how we feel - does something powerful inside the brain.
In a highly cited study about affect-labeling, researchers found that simply putting a feeling into a word ,"I feel anxious," or "I feel a quiet dread," "I feel disappointed" ... increased activity in right ventrolateral and medial prefrontal systems while dampening reactivity in the amygdala (Lieberman et al., 2007).
The right ventrolateral region is related to brain machinery for the symbolic processing of emotional information ..
Why this matters:
First, naming is doing real work in the brain.
Specific functional networks come online to translate body into word. There is a neural signature to the act of translation.
Second, the act of translating regulates us.
Move a sensation out of the felt realm and into the spoken one, and the alarm systems quiet on their own. You don't have to make the feeling go away. You have to give it a name.
This is the neuroscience underneath the simple phrase from Dan Siegel "name it to tame it". (inspired by Mr. Rogers' idea about anything that is mentionable becomes more manageable)
With respect for the vastness of your feelings, and our human experimentations of trying to translate them... (what an incredible feat!)
Stefanie
In the next 2 articles, we’ll explore this further…
Next article: why precision matters , and why "fine" is not a feeling.
Inside Teach the Nervous System, this is the heart of Module 5 — Name It to Tame It. A precise look at what happens in the brain's functional networks when we translate body into word, and how to do it in a way that actually regulates the system — rather than bypassing the body or amplifying the story.
Explore Teach the Nervous System →
References
Brewer, R., Cook, R., & Bird, G. (2016). Alexithymia: A general deficit of interoception. Royal Society Open Science, 3(10), 150664. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150664
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
