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Key points
- Research shows that merely identifying your emotions helps defuse them.
- When feeling strong emotions, identifying at least two will help you notice a fuller range of those that are less dominant.
- Investing in your capacity to identify your full range of human emotions can benefit your psychological health, relationships, and productivity.
Accurately identifying which specific emotions you are feeling is the foundation of all other emotion regulation skills.
Here are three ways to improve your emotion identification (including a fun one!)
1. Emotions bingo.
Make yourself a bingo card with as many emotion words as you can think of—for example, angry, sad, disappointed, bored, excited, joy, or awe.
Include plenty of synonyms that express different grades and types of an emotion, like furious and annoyed.
You can Google lists of emotions to get you started, but I recommend using these to make your own personalized bingo card.
Ensure you cover all the major emotions in some way. Include a good mix of "positive" and "negative" emotions.
How to use: As you notice yourself feeling a particular emotion, cross that off your bingo card until there aren't any left.
This game will help you learn to notice and accurately label your less dominant, more nuanced emotions. It'll also help you learn which emotions you experience most often.
2. Make it a habit to identify at least two emotions whenever you feel strong emotions.
When we feel strong emotions, we're usually experiencing more than one emotion.
Whenever you identify your emotions, identify at least two different emotions you're feeling, like "I feel nervous and excited." Aim to identify qualitatively different emotions rather than just variations on the same emotion. Variations or grades of the same basic emotion would be, for example, irritated and annoyed.
Like the bingo game, identifying at least two emotions, you're feeling will help you notice a fuller range of your less dominant emotions. One emotion often underlies another, like when you feel angry about something that makes you anxious.
If self-compassion is difficult for you, just doing this is a good shortcut. The widely accepted definition of self-compassion includes "mindfulness," which, in the context of self-compassion, refers to being aware of what you're feeling.
Research shows that merely identifying your emotions helps defuse them. It'll help immediately, and you can layer the other aspects of self-compassion onto your emotional granularity skills once you improve them.
3. Teach emotion identification to your children.
Teaching is a great way to improve any skill. For parents of young kids, your children can be your captive audience on this! Ideas for how to do this:
- What emotions are characters in a story experiencing?
- I have conversations with my six-year-old like, "What type of situation might simultaneously make someone scared and excited?" It surprised me she could answer this type of open-ended question at her developmental level.
Have conversations about emotions that help you identify where your child is developmentally and notice what they're currently good at and less good at, so you can fill the gaps. Often kids' emotional development is spiky–they'll surprise you by being both more skilled and less skilled than you expected, in different respects.
- Play "rose, thorn, seed" as a family. This refers to sharing a high point of the day, a low point, and something they're looking forward to. This information can lead to exploring which specific emotions they felt about their experiences. It also encourages open talk about both pleasant and unpleasant emotions.
If your kids aren't keen on this, let them observe you doing it with your spouse, and they'll learn from hearing you both. If you do this, take care not to expose them to anything too adult. Keep it relatable to them. For example, you could let them hear you talk about how a low point was doing a work project with someone who wanted only to do it all their own way (since this is an experience both adults and kids have when working in teams). But, you wouldn't talk about low points that would potentially make them anxious about adult topics.
Keep your chats about emotions low-key. Gauge your child's interest in it, and approach it in a way that interests them most. My spouse and I homeschool and treat learning about emotions as part of the school day, as part of science education (e.g., the evolutionary basis of emotions) and stories (comprehension and creative writing). There's no one-size-fits-all approach. You have to know and shepherd your child based on their needs and interests.
Investing in your capacity to identify your full range of human emotions can greatly benefit your psychological health, relationships, and productivity (since it'll help you still engage with your goals, even when you're feeling strong emotions). Give it a try, using the method that most appeals to you.
