Name It to Tame It

Why putting a feeling into words takes some of the heat out of it, why the precise word matters, and how to find it, for yourself or for a child

Written by Ivana, psychologist and psychotherapist

10 minute read  ·  2,164 words

It’s been one of those afternoons. You’ve snapped at someone who didn’t deserve it, you can’t settle to anything, and when a friend asks what’s wrong, the only answer you can find is that you’re stressed. Later, on the walk home, the real word arrives. It wasn’t stress. It was disappointment, about something you’d been looking forward to that fell through.

Something often shifts at that point. The feeling doesn’t disappear, but it gets easier to hold. It has a shape now, and a name, and a reason. If you’ve ever felt that small click of relief, you already know what this article is about.

The psychiatrist Daniel SiegelDaniel SiegelAmerican psychiatrist and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, known for his writing on the developing mind and on parenting, and for the phrase name it to tame it. has a phrase for this, from a book he wrote with Tina Payne Bryson on helping children through big feelings: name it to tame it. It’s a slogan, and his explanation of why it works is his own. But researchers have since tested the simplest part of it, putting a feeling into a word, in adults as well as children, and some of what they found is surprising.

Psychologists call it affect labeling

Picture yourself saying it, out loud or just in your head: “I’m really anxious about tomorrow.” Nothing about tomorrow has changed. So can a word do anything at all?

In research, putting a feeling into words is called affect labeling, where affect just means feeling or emotion. The idea that it helps is old. What’s newer is measuring what it does.

In one of the first brain-scan studies of this, researchers asked people to look at pictures of faces showing strong emotions while their brains were scanned. Sometimes they picked the word that named the emotion on the face. Other times they did a different task with the same faces.

When people named the emotion, the amygdala, a part of the brain closely involved in detecting threat and reacting to it, responded less strongly. At the same time, an area at the front of the brain linked to regulating emotion became more active. Putting a word to it seemed to turn the brain’s alarm down a notch.

That was one study, and a brain scan on its own can’t tell us how someone feels. But the finding has been followed up in several ways since. A later review of hundreds of brain-scan studies found the same pattern: when emotion words were part of the task, the amygdala was less often active.

It helps more than people expect

Here’s the part I find most fascinating. In a later set of studies, the same research group asked people how upset they felt while looking at unpleasant pictures. When they put the feeling into a word, they felt less upset than when they just looked, and about as much better as when they deliberately reframed the picture or took their mind off it.

Then the researchers asked people to predict what naming would do. Before you read on, have a guess yourself.

On average, people expected naming to make them feel worse. Even right after it had helped them, they still predicted it would make things worse next time. So if naming a feeling sounds a bit pointless to you, the people in these studies thought so too, and it may still be worth a try!

That’s part of why researchers describe affect labeling as a quiet, almost automatic way of calming a feeling. They call it implicit, because it doesn’t feel like you’re trying to change anything. You’re only describing it. The effect happens anyway, often without you noticing.

It softens good feelings too

The same studies found something on the other side, too. When people named their response to pleasant pictures, they enjoyed them less as well. Naming seems to turn the volume down on feelings in general, not only on the painful ones.

That’s useful when a feeling is too loud. My own take is that it may also be a reason not to narrate every lovely moment while it’s still happening.

It works outside the laboratory too

Looking at pictures in a scanner is a long way from real fear. So the same research group tested the idea somewhere much closer to therapy. People who were afraid of spiders were brought close to a live spider again and again, a version of the exposureexposureIn therapy for fears and anxiety, facing the thing you fear gradually and repeatedly, in a safe and planned way, so that the fear response has a chance to ease. therapists use for fears. Some put their feelings into words as they did it. Others were asked to reframe the situation, to distract themselves, or to do nothing extra.

A week later, faced with a different spider in a different room, the people who’d put their feelings into words had a smaller physical fear response than every other group, measured by how much their skin sweated. They didn’t say they felt any less afraid, though. And the more fear words people used, the more their fear response came down.

An earlier study by the same group found a similar lasting effect with pictures: images seen alongside an emotion word got a smaller physical reaction a week later than images seen without one.

Bad isn’t a feeling you can do much with

Think of two versions of the same evening. In one, you get home and all you know is that you feel bad. In the other, you know you feel left out, because your friends made plans without you. The second one hurts just as much, but it tells you something.

Psychologists call this emotional granularity: how finely you can tell one feeling from another. Some people describe a hard day as just bad or stressed. Others can tell apart being disappointed, embarrassed, resentful, lonely or overwhelmed.

Researchers who reviewed this work describe people with more finely grained emotions as less likely to turn to binge drinking, aggression or self-harm when they’re very distressed, and as having less severe anxiety and depression. A study that followed teenagers found that those who were less able to tell their negative emotions apart were more affected by stressful events: for them, stress was more closely tied to low mood day to day, and to rises in depression later on.

These are links, and they don’t prove that learning more emotion words will protect anyone on its own. Across many studies, the link is real but modest. Still, it makes sense. A precise word tends to point somewhere. Disappointment says something mattered to you. Resentment says something felt unfair. Loneliness says you need people. Bad, on its own, points nowhere in particular.

That may be why it helps. In two studies that followed people through their everyday lives, people who named their feelings loosely didn’t choose worse ways of coping than anyone else. But the ways they chose tended to work less well for them.

Find the most accurate word you can

So what does this look like on an ordinary Tuesday? When you notice a strong feeling, pause long enough to ask what it is. Start broad if you need to, with something like upset or on edge, then see if there’s a more exact word underneath. Is it anxious, or is it dread about one particular thing? Is it anger, or is it hurt that has come out as anger? You don’t need the perfect word. A slightly more precise word is usually more useful than a vague one.

If the words don’t come easily, that’s normal, and it can be learned. In one small study, people who spent time learning about emotions got better at telling their negative feelings apart. A list of feeling words helps, and so do our Feelings Map and the word finder below.

Keep it short

In these studies, people usually used a single word or a short sentence. The label was a description, not a story. “I feel embarrassed” is enough. You can say it quietly to yourself, write it down, or say it to someone you trust.

If you do say it to someone, keep it just as short. “I don’t think I’m angry, I think I’m hurt” can change a whole conversation. So can “I’m feeling a bit left out tonight”, said before it turns into an argument about the dishes.

Name it, then let it be

It’s tempting to treat a name as the start of an investigation: why do I feel this, what does it say about me, what should I have done differently? That’s a different process, and it can turn into going over the same ground again and again. Name it to tame it works best as a light touch. You notice the feeling, you call it what it is, and you carry on, a little steadier than before. You don’t always have to fix a feeling to make it smaller. If your body is still racing, a few slow breaths out can finish the job.

Naming has a limit, though. In two studies, people who named their emotions before trying to reframe what they were looking at, or to simply accept their feelings, ended up feeling worse than people who reframed or accepted without naming first. The researchers think naming may make a feeling more fixed, and harder to change afterward. So naming is one tool among several. If you already know you want to look at a situation differently, you don’t have to name the feeling first.

It helps with children too

Siegel and Bryson’s original advice was for parents. When a child is swept up in a big feeling, naming it for them, calmly and without trying to argue them out of it, can help: “You’re really disappointed that the park is closed.” It gives them a word for what’s happening in their body, and tells them the feeling can be seen and talked about. Later, once things are calm, they suggest helping the child tell the story of what happened. In their book, that retelling is the heart of name it to tame it.

It isn’t only their view. In a trial of a parenting program that helped parents tune in to their children’s feelings and talk about them, parents used more feeling words, children understood emotions better, and both parents and teachers reported fewer behavior problems. When a child is upset about how something went, the same order works: the feeling first, the lesson later.

Teenagers often find this harder than younger children do. Telling feelings apart seems to dip in the teenage years before it rises again in adulthood. So with a teenager, a gentle guess may work better than a question they have to answer: “Sounds more like embarrassed than angry?”