#7 Understanding Our Brains' Foreign Language (Part 2)
Tools for Learning the Language of Emotions and Feelings
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Welcome back for Part 2 of Understanding Our Brains’ Foreign Language in which we’ll discuss some tools for building our emotional literacy. If you missed Part 1 that introduces emotional literacy and the benefits of learning our brains’ foreign language of emotions and feelings, you can find it HERE.
The following tools are not the only ways to learn how to name and communicate our emotions, though I do find these to be helpful. Whether you use these tools or others, the key is to take at least a few seconds or minutes each day to pause and consider our physical sensations or emotions. We often claim that we are too busy to do so, but would that excuse work for never listening to someone you care about? So, is it a valid excuse for ignoring your brain? You tell me.
A common mistake we can make is thinking that because nothing in our lives bothers us that much right now, we don’t need to work on our emotional skill set. This is a mistake because if we wait until we need the skills, we won’t have the skills when we need them. And it’s inevitable that we’ll need these skills if we want the best for ourselves and others and care about how our actions affect us and others.
Without the skills when we need them, we might behave in a way we later regret, fall into depression, be overwhelmed by anxiety, run away from something we want, affect someone in a way we didn’t intend, or experience some other undesirable result. We might still face these issues even with the skills, but isn’t there a difference between trying and not? Why wouldn’t we want to make the effort? Maybe because we feel scared of what we might find if we dig beneath our surface, and what it will mean for us?
Our friends need us to be able to recognize and sit with that fear, as well as all our other uncomfortable emotions, so that we can recognize and sit with them in theirs.
Our romantic partners need us to learn the emotional skills to navigate conflict so our relationships can grow stronger with each one.
Our families need us to develop our ability for empathy so we can appreciate and honor each other’s differences.
The younger generations, including our children, need us to value our emotional literacy so we can teach them the skills that will set them up for life.
Society needs us to understand our emotions so we can discover our passions and share our unique personal projects with others.
Let’s not take any more time then and dive into some tools for building our emotional literacy, starting with the emotions wheel that we introduced in Part 1.
The Emotions Wheel
Building our emotional literacy begins with familiarizing ourselves with the words at our disposal for describing our emotions. It's like playing the game Scattergories® in which players must list words beginning with a certain letter for a number of different categories within a set time period. We’re unlikely to come up with a word we are unfamiliar with. Likewise, if we are unfamiliar with the word that describes the emotion we’re feeling, we’ll be unlikely to have that word come to mind when trying to describe that emotion.
Familiarizing ourselves with these words can be as simple as reading the words on the emotions wheel below and thinking about them. I personally bought a small, metal emotions wheel and hung it on a wall in my room where I would see it daily. I didn’t study it every day, but I certainly looked at it more than I had before. Familiarity comes from repeated exposure; we just have to find what method of that works for us.
Connecting a word (i.e., emotion) to a physical feeling or set of feelings is the more challenging part; however, the emotions wheel can be helpful here as well. When we feel an emotion that we just don't have the words to describe, we can consult the emotions wheel and decide which basic emotion we’re feeling by process of elimination. If we're not feeling joy, if we're not feeling angry, and we're not feeling sad, surprised, or disgusted, then we're feeling fear. And for my fellow men out there, yes, that's okay. We have permission to feel that if we give ourselves permission, no matter what women, other men, or society puts across.
After deciding on the basic emotion, we move to the second level to see if any of those words resonate. If so, we can do the same for the third level. We can’t use process of elimination for the second and third level emotions, however, which makes pinpointing them much more difficult, but that level of specificity might be overkill anyway. Sometimes, it might be enough to know that we feel sad. Other times, identifying specific emotions helps us and others understand what we’re feeling. During those times, a mental health professional can help us reach that specificity if we can't get there ourselves.
My experience with the emotions wheel was initially helpful for self-growth but lost its utility over time. It served its purpose though by making me aware of how unfamiliar I was with describing what I was feeling. Deciding my basic emotion by process of elimination was also a simple, concrete way to get started. I recognized early on, however, that I often felt one of a small selection of emotions, so I didn’t need the wheel as much. We don't often have such a variety of experiences during our days and weeks that our emotions fly all over the wheel, so you may have a similar experience. Try it and see how it helps you.
Emotion Heat Maps
Another tool we can use is emotion heat maps. With the emotions wheel approach, we first choose a word that fits our overall feeling and then associate that emotion with the physical sensations we feel. We can do the opposite with emotion heat maps, which are based on research that suggests each of our emotions is associated with specific regions of the body being activated or deactivated. By describing the physical sensations we feel, we can then pick the emotion(s) that is(are) associated with those physical sensations from the below heat maps.
In these heat maps, the warm colors show activated bodily sensations, like there is extra energy in those regions, such as warmth, tightness, or lightness. The cool colors show bodily heaviness, like sensations are dampened in those regions. The scale at the bottom right shows the sensation or dampening intensity, and the black regions represent a lack of any noticeable sensation.
To try the heat map approach, pause and mentally scan your body. Focus on each part one at a time: your left leg, your left foot, your right leg, right foot, pelvic region, stomach region, chest, right arm, right hand, left arm, left hand, neck, and then head. Note any physical sensations in each, like tightness in your chest, queasiness in your stomach, tingling in your legs, clenching in your neck, heaviness in your arms, warmth throughout your body, or lightness in your head. Or note if you felt no physical sensation in a part.
Recognizing any physical sensations in certain bodily regions already provides you with useful information that you are feeling something. You’re aware that your brain is trying to communicate with you, and you’ve given it your attention. To go further, consult the emotion heat maps and try to match your physical sensations with an emotion. For example, uncomfortable tightness in your chest, neck, and head, but nothing noticeable anywhere else, might mean you’re feeling fear, while heaviness in your legs and possibly your arms along with a sensation in your chest might mean you’re feeling sad.
Not all bodily sensations are tied to an emotion, however, so it’s okay if you find it difficult to pick out a map, or none of them seem to match. Sometimes a sharp pain in your shoulder is just a sharp pain in your shoulder from throwing a football for the first time in 12 months without warming up.
Other times, what feels like muscle pain might in fact be muscle pain, but as a result of emotion-induced tension rather than twisting funny, which has been the case for me. After many physical therapy sessions, weekly massages, a few chiropractor visits, ergonomic adjustments at work, and a battery of tests including a cortisone shot in the shoulder, an electromyography (EMG) of my forearms, and two nerve blocking injections into the back of my head, and none of it working, it finally made sense that the pain in my shoulder, neck, back of the head, and forearms was due to the underlying tension I carried around from living in a near constant fear state that I wasn’t “enough”, not from working a desk job.
I’m grateful I found the culprit after all those years of trial and error but save yourself time and money by being open to the possibility that your physical pain or discomfort might be emotionally based, because it might take a while for anyone else to suggest it to you. For the physical sensations that confuse you, a mental health professional can help you figure out if they are tied to one or more emotions.
Notice What Media You Are Drawn Towards
Have those sad songs really been pulling at your heartstrings lately? Or maybe the TV shows with vindictive, cutthroat storylines have you energized? Do you watch a comedy and just don’t feel like laughing? Or do you find yourself seeking out social media posts with angry messaging?
Whatever media you are drawn towards might signal the emotion(s) you are feeling or have been feeling. If we’re feeling sad and lonely and a song is playing with lyrics of how happy the singer is, it might just feel wrong, but turn on the song about the singer’s pain and it might speak to our soul. Paying attention to these reactions can help us realize that we’re feeling sad and lonely.
Sometimes the media we consume can even indirectly tell us about the emotions we feel. For example, psychologists have explained that if we rewatch the same TV show over and over that we’ve seen hundreds of times, it might be because the familiarity and predictability calm the anxious feelings we have throughout our day. Read this linked article out of many on the topic for more.
Talk With a Mental Health Professional
This can be as simple as scheduling an appointment with a mental health professional and telling them that you want to understand yourself better through your thoughts, emotions, and feelings. They can take it from there and help you explore various aspects of your life that might lead to greater understanding, as long as you’re open and curious through the process. You can also certainly focus your discussions with the mental health professional on specific thoughts, feelings, or emotions you don’t understand. It’s no different than hiring a personal trainer and telling them you want to get generally healthier or telling them you want to focus on strengthening your legs.
As with anything I write, if you try any of these tools for a few weeks or months and feel you’ve gotten what you needed or it’s not for you, then dump it and look for something new. The self-growth journey is about experimenting and finding what works for you because you want that for yourself. Always take what you learn and move forward.
I began this article with gentle motivation for using the above tools to build emotional literacy. Now, I’ll close with empathy. I can certainly understand from my own self-growth experience why many people give up or don't even bother trying to figure out what emotion they're feeling, let alone communicating it to another person. It's difficult, requires hard work and vulnerability, and can be downright confusing. When life is already busy, adding something challenging sounds like a burden, even if we recognize that we may benefit from it.
We also might not know where to begin, or even believe it will help us, because emotional literacy wasn't part of our educational systems or family structures and is only recently being accepted in society. That can make it all feel overwhelming or might make us feel dumb or embarrassed when we try to put into words what we’re feeling and can’t. And an overwhelming, confusing burden that might make us feel dumb or embarrassed is not something we rush to cross off our to-do list.
But the benefits of understanding our brain’s language is the foundation for so much growth and self-care that it is tantamount that we do so, no matter the timing, if we care about ourselves and our relationships. There is no doubt it’s difficult, but as with most skills that are difficult, we can get better at it over time if we keep at it, and now we have the above tools to get started. So, keep at it, and we’ll be fluent before we know it.
Take Care of Yourself,
Alex