How to Understand Your Emotions

You are fine one minute, and the next you are snapping at someone you love over a cup left on the counter. Or you wake up with a heaviness you can’t explain. Or a friend’s good news, which you are genuinely happy about, leaves you strangely flat for the rest of the day.

Most of us were never taught what to do with moments like these. We were taught to read, to count, to be polite. Feelings were something you either had under control or didn’t. So when an emotion arrives that doesn’t make sense, we tend to do one of two things: we push it away, or it pushes us around.

There is a third option, and it is much simpler than it sounds. You can get to know your emotions the way you would get to know a new colleague: what they are like, what they usually want, and how to work with them. That is what this guide, and everything on this site, is about.

What an emotion actually is

An emotion is your mind and body reacting to something that matters to you. It usually has three parts that arrive together:

• A change in the body. A tight chest, a hot face, a lump in the throat, a heavy feeling in the limbs.
• A meaning. A quick, often unspoken judgment about what is happening: this is unfair, this is dangerous, I’ve lost something, I’m not good enough.
• An urge. A pull toward doing something: shout, run, hide, cry, reach out, celebrate.

The whole package can arrive in less than a second, which is why emotions feel like they happen to us rather than something we take part in. We look at where they come from, and why evolution gave them to us in the first place, in What Are Emotions and Why Do We Have Them?

The important thing to take from this is that an emotion is information. It is your system’s best guess about what is going on and what you should do about it. Sometimes the guess is spot on. Sometimes it is out of date, exaggerated, or responding to something other than what is in front of you. Understanding your emotions means learning to read the message without automatically obeying it.

Why understanding your feelings makes a difference

It is tempting to think that understanding an emotion is a luxury, something nice to do once the feeling has passed. But research suggests that the understanding itself changes the feeling.

In a well-known brain imaging study led by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA, people looked at photos of angry or frightened faces. When they were asked to put a word to the emotion in the picture, activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in alarm, went down compared with simply looking. Psychologists call this affect labeling, and it has been repeated in many forms since. Putting feelings into words seems to take a little of the heat out of them.

The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett and others have studied something related, called emotional granularity: how precisely a person can tell their feelings apart. Someone with low granularity feels “bad”. Someone with high granularity can tell whether they are disappointed, lonely, embarrassed or resentful. Studies reviewed by Todd Kashdan, Barrett and colleagues found that people who make these finer distinctions tend to cope better with stress and are less likely to turn to things like heavy drinking or lashing out when they are upset.

The reason is practical. “Bad” doesn’t tell you what to do. “Lonely” points toward connection. “Resentful” points toward a boundary or a conversation you have been avoiding. “Tired” points toward bed.

Four steps to understand any emotion

When a feeling arrives that is strong, confusing or unwelcome, you can slow it down into four steps. With practice, they take less than a minute.

1. Notice it in your body

Emotions show up in the body before they show up in words. Before you try to work out what you feel, notice where you feel it. Is your jaw tight? Your stomach knotted? Your shoulders up near your ears? Are you breathing fast and high in the chest?

This step matters because many people only recognize an emotion once it has already turned into action: the sharp reply has been sent, the door has been slammed. The body gives you an earlier warning, if you learn to listen.

2. Name it as exactly as you can

Now look for a word. Not “fine”, “bad” or “stressed”, which are blankets thrown over a dozen different feelings, but the most specific word you can find. Frustrated or disappointed? Anxious or excited? Hurt or angry? Often it is more than one thing at once, and that is normal.

If words don’t come easily, a feelings chart can help a lot. We explain how to use one in The Emotion Wheel: How to Name What You Feel.

3. Ask what it is responding to

Every emotion is about something. Ask yourself two questions: what just happened, and what does this feeling seem to want?

Fear wants you to be safe. Anger wants something to stop or to change. Sadness wants you to slow down and take in a loss. Guilt wants you to repair something. Envy points at something you want for yourself.

Sometimes the answer is obvious. Sometimes the feeling is about something older or bigger than the moment: the cup on the counter is not really about the cup. If you find yourself reacting strongly and often, Why Am I So Emotional? looks at the most common reasons, from tiredness to stress that has been building for weeks.

4. Choose a response

Only now do you decide what to do. You might act on the urge, because it is a good one: you were treated unfairly, and saying so is right. You might do the opposite of the urge, because acting on it would make things worse: you are anxious about a call, and avoiding it would only feed the anxiety. Or you might simply let the feeling be there for a while without doing anything at all.

The goal is not to feel less. It is to have a moment of choice between the feeling and what you do with it.

Three habits that make emotions harder

Pushing feelings away

When a feeling is uncomfortable, the instinct is to shut it down: distract yourself, put on a brave face, tell yourself it’s silly. In the short term this works. Over time it tends to backfire.

Research by James Gross and Oliver John found that people who habitually suppress the outward signs of their emotions report more negative feelings, fewer positive ones and weaker relationships than people who tend to rethink the situation instead. Bottled-up feelings don’t disappear. They leak out sideways, in irritability, tension or a sudden overreaction to something small. A gentler approach is to let the feeling be there, name it, and say it out loud to someone you trust or write it down. You don’t have to act on a feeling to stop hiding it.

Going round in circles

The opposite trap is rumination: going over the same feeling and the same events again and again, hoping to reach an answer. The researcher Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent much of her career showing that this kind of repetitive brooding makes low mood and anxiety worse, not better. Understanding a feeling is a few honest questions. Rumination is the same question asked a hundred times.

Judging the feeling

“I shouldn’t feel this way.” It is one of the most common thoughts people have about their emotions, and one of the least helpful. Feeling jealous doesn’t make you a bad person. Feeling sad when life looks good on paper doesn’t make you ungrateful. Judging the emotion adds a second layer of feeling, usually guilt or shame, on top of the first. It is easier to deal with one feeling than two.

When you feel nothing at all

Understanding emotions isn’t only about strong feelings. For some people, the problem is the opposite: a flatness, a sense of being behind glass, where good and bad things both land with a dull thud. This is often a sign of exhaustion, long-term stress or low mood, and it deserves attention just as much as anxiety or anger does. We explain what tends to cause it, and when to get help, in Emotional Numbness: Why Do I Feel Nothing?

The main families of emotion

There are many ways to group emotions, and researchers still argue about the best one. For everyday purposes, it helps to think in families. Each has its own guide on this site:

• Fear, anxiety and stress: what to do when your mind won’t stop scanning for danger. See How to Manage Anxiety.
• Anger, frustration and resentment: the feelings that push for change. See How to Deal With Anger.
• Sadness, grief and loneliness: the feelings that come with loss and disconnection. See How to Deal With Sadness.
• Guilt, shame and embarrassment: the feelings about ourselves and how we look to others. See How to Deal With Guilt and Shame.
• Jealousy and envy: the feelings that come from comparing. See How to Deal With Jealousy.
• Joy, calm and gratitude: the feelings worth noticing and growing. See How to Be Happy.
• Hope, pride, awe, curiosity and kindness: the quieter positive feelings. See Positive Emotions.

When to get help

Everyone has days when their feelings are hard to manage. It is worth talking to a doctor or a mental health professional if a feeling is very intense or lasts for weeks, if it is getting in the way of work, sleep or relationships, or if you notice you are relying on alcohol, food or other things to cope. If you ever have thoughts of harming yourself, contact a crisis line straight away. In the United States you can call or text 988.

Asking for help with your emotions is not a failure to understand them. It is often the clearest sign that you do.

A small practice

Three times a day for the next week, at times you choose in advance, stop for thirty seconds and ask yourself: what am I feeling right now, in one or two exact words, and where do I feel it in my body? Write the answer down. At the end of the week, read the list.

Most people are surprised by two things: how many different feelings they had, and how few of them they noticed at the time.