Imagine you overslept this morning after a restless night and woke to a late night email alerting you to an early morning meeting. In an effort to get there on time, you get pulled over for speeding and served a costly ticket. How are you feeling?
- Bad
- Overwhelmed
- Annoyed
New research posits that if you answered C, you’ll have an easier time managing the stress of the morning than if you answered A. This is known as the skill of “emotional granularity,” coined by Lisa Barrett Feldman, the author of How Emotions Are Made.
Google defines Emotional granularity as “the ability to put feelings into words with a high degree of specificity and precision. Low negative emotional granularity has been associated with stronger reactivity to negative affect and higher vulnerability to poor mental health.”
Dr. Feldman says having a robust emotional vocabulary helps you identify emotional states in a more precise way which, in turn, makes you better at regulating your emotions.
It seems that a limited emotional vocabulary translates to having limited resources to respond or resolve stressful situations. Not only that, a tendency to repeatedly use the same few emotion words to describe one’s internal landscape (e.g. mad, sad, scared) is observed more frequently in those with major depressive disorder and social anxiety disorder.
If you can’t define a problem, it’s going to be much harder to solve it.
Getting better at describing your feelings has some hefty advantages. Here’s some of benefits found in those with high levels of linguistic precision:
- Less emotional reactivity
- More resilience in the face of rejection and failures
- Lower risk of substance use
- Less doctor visits
- Fewer bouts of anxiety and depression.
- Less prone to self-sabotaging
- Less incidents of violence or aggression
- Improved treatment for phobias
- Less likely to feel overwhelmed in challenging situations
Apparently when we can identify how we feel with specificity we’re better able to get authority over it by reframing it to help us deal with it more constructively.
Using the example above, if you identify feeling annoyance with our boss for sending an after-hours meeting time for first thing the next morning, you’re more likely to channel it into a better understanding of how to respond to the situation that if you use overwhelmed to describe your state, which is more likely keep you in an unhelpful cognitive loop.
you can check out her website here.
