The touch of the senses brings cold and heat, pleasure and pain. They come and they go; they do not last. Bear them patiently.
मात्रास्पर्शास्तु कौन्तेय शीतोष्णसुखदुःखदाः। आगमापायिनोऽनित्यास्तांस्तितिक्षस्व भारत॥
mātrāsparśās tu kaunteya śītoṣṇasukhaduḥkhadāḥ · āgamāpāyino ’nityās tāṃs titikṣasva bhārata
Key insights
- Emotions carry information about what we value, need or fear.
- Putting feelings into words can soften them. In a brain-imaging study, naming the emotion in a picture was linked with lower activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional responses.
- How we regulate emotion matters. Psychologist James Gross distinguishes strategies such as reappraisal, changing how we think about a situation, from suppression, hiding what we feel.
- Reappraisal is not pretending. It is looking for a more accurate or more helpful way to see what happened.
Try this
Three-word check-in
Three times today, pause and name what you feel in no more than three words. Be specific: “disappointed and tired”, rather than just “bad”.
Reflection
Which emotion do you find hardest to name, and what might it be trying to tell you?
References
- 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.
- Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299.