You Can't Change a Feeling You Can't Name

Have you ever known that you felt bad, but couldn't explain exactly what you were feeling? This difficulty identifying and describing emotions is known as alexithymia, and research has linked it to higher levels of anxiety, depression, and stress.

In this episode, you'll learn why avoiding emotions keeps them vague and overwhelming, how self-criticism blocks emotional awareness, and a practical technique for uncovering what you're really feeling.

We'll explore:

• Why emotions can be difficult to identif
• How self-judgment blocks emotional awareness
• A stream-of-consciousness technique for understanding emotions
• Why naming emotions often reduces their intensity
• How emotional awareness connects to emotion regulation

⏱️ Timestamps

0:52 — The Skill That Can Reduce Anxiety and Stress
3:25 — Why You Don't Know What You're Feeling
6:23 — Go from Avoiding to Approaching
8:47 — The Nonjudgmental Listener Technique
12:37 — How Emotional Awareness Hurts But Helps
17:20 — The First Step Toward Emotional Freedom

For full shownotes, including resources mentioned, go to: https://www.calmyourcaveman.com/episodes/you-cant-change-a-feeling-you-cant-name

🌐 https://www.calmyourcaveman.com

Transcript

If you have trouble identifying and describing your feelings you're probably gonna have a lot more trouble with depression, anxiety, and stress. So I wanna talk to you today about how you can go about learning to be able to identify and describe your emotions better. It's not fun in a way but it will actually paradoxically make you feel better. It'll help switch you out of threat and into challenge, away from feeling like "This is way too much for me" toward feeling like "Okay maybe I've got what it takes to deal with this even though it is unpleasant." 

Hi everybody Welcome back to the podcast. Last week we talked about emotion regulation. We talked about how we often think we only have two choices when we have a strong emotion. We can either suppress it or we can express it or act it out. And we talked about how suppressing it can be really bad for your health, how expressing it can be bad for other reasons You can end up ruining relationships, et cetera. And we talked about how it's really important to remember there's a third option which is to regulate your emotion to be able to actually change the emotion that you're feeling which will then change the way that you feel motivated, which will change your action tendencies. And we've talked about three steps involved in regulating your emotions: how you have to be able to first of all recognize that it was your brain that created this emotion, not your situation. And then second of all to be able to give a different meaning to the situation than the one your brain assigned to it. And third to be able to identify what's gonna be most important to you in the long term so that you can know how best to change this meaning. But I wanted t to talk today about a really important prerequisite to those three steps. This is something that if you don't do this first, you're not gonna be able to even start on emotion regulation. And unfortunately this is a problem a lot of people with anxiety have. So this is the step of being able to identify and describe the emotion that you're currently having. It sounds basic but it is it is actually a condition, It is a problem that a lot of people have. There is actually a name for it in psychology. It's called alexithymia. It's this difficulty in identifying and describing your feelings. And it is really significantly correlated with depression and with anxiety and stress symptoms. So if you have trouble identifying and describing your feelings you're probably gonna have a lot more trouble with depression, anxiety, and stress. I have gotten a lot better at this through practice but I used to be really bad at it. And I still find myself on some days just feeling really vaguely bad and not able to describe any, in any more detail than that initially, how I'm feeling, until I make myself sit down and do something about it. So I wanna talk to you today about how you can go about learning to be able to identify and describe your emotions better. 

But first I wanna talk about why this happens that it's so hard for us to identify and describe our emotions. So we've talked before many times about how there is more than one response to stress. We have a tendency to think that stress is always bad but that's not the case .That's not what recent research has taught us. It's that there is a good kind of stress and a bad kind of stress, or in other words a a healthy kind and an unhealthy kind. There is a kind of stress that will actually help your performance and help you to perform better than you would otherwise if you weren't stressed. And there is a kind of stress that will harm your performance and make you perform worse than you would and also make you feel like avoiding the stressor, concentrate the blood flow in the core areas of your body and away from your brain so you can't think very well. Produce a whole lot more cortisol in your body which can be really unhealthy when that's sustained over a long period of time. So there are a lot of situations where we end up in a threat response where it would be better for us to have a challenge response which is the other response to stress, where your brain decides that you actually have the resources to meet the demands that you're facing and it will help produce different hormones and autonomic reactions in your body that will help you to feel like approaching the stressor and feel like meeting it. And it will also increase your cardiac efficiency and help the blood flow to your brain and that's how it helps you to perform better. The problem is, as we mentioned last week, a lot of times, maybe the majority of times even, our brains go through an emotion generation process that is automatic and unconscious and really quick and we don't even know that it's happened. And those times when your brain goes through an emotion generation process, makes an appraisal about your situation and decides that the stressor that you're up against is too much for your resources and puts you in a threat response before you even know anything has happened. The problem with being in that threat response is as we mentioned a second ago, threat responses motivate you to avoid the stressor. And when you're in that avoidance mode, one of the things that you end up avoiding is actually avoiding the unpleasant and painful emotions that you're feeling. And so you end up not really even being very conscious of what they are. If somebody were to ask you how you're feeling you might say, "Well I'm feeling bad," But you wouldn't really know why or how to describe it in any more detail than that. And if you can't identify and describe the emotion that you're feeling there's no way you can regulate it, because you don't even know what the emotion is. You don't know where you are. You don't know what your appraisal is right now. So how can you go about changing it? So in order to regulate it's really crucial first to be able to identify and describe the emotion that you're in right now.

But the other thing is that the very act of approaching your negative feelings, your painful emotions, and trying to understand and become conscious of them that helps you to switch out of threat and into challenge. Cause we talked about how the the threat response to stress motivates you to avoid the stressor, and how the challenge response to stress is where you approach the stressor. So if you are consciously trying to approach this stressor, part of which is this vague bad feeling that you're having, and get closer to it and become more conscious of it, then you are already working on your brain's appraisal, and helping get out of that threat response and into challenge. It's really hard though if you're already in a threat response, if you're already having that threat response to stress, to be able to start thinking verbally about how you feel. Because as we said when you're in a threat response to stress, the blood flow to your brain is reduced. So you can't think. It's really hard to think about your feelings. So it can be hard first of all to just at least even identify, Wow I'm in a threat response ,cause your brain goes so much into the avoidance mode that you won't even think about how you're feeling .You won't even think about your emotions. You're just feeling bad. But you're not even really totally aware of it. I find that this happens to me a lot of times. I'm just going and going and going, and I'm tense and I'm anxious, but I and I feel this vague bad feeling, but I'm not thinking about it I'm just trying to solve all the problems without taking stock of how I'm feeling. But I'm having trouble solving the problems because I'm in a threat response and the blood flow to my brain is reduced. So when I am feeling really bad and I start to notice, Wow I'm feeling bad, that's when I know it's time for me to identify and describe the emotions that I'm feeling. I have to start there.

But it's not easy. As I said when you are in the threat response and the blood flow to your brain is already reduced, it's hard to think about your feelings. But also you know you you just, you're feeling bad. Someone asks you how you, why and describe it in more detail and you just have no idea. I I don't know why I'm feeling so bad. I don't know why I'm feeling so anxious and upset. But I wanted to tell you about one little technique that I use that helps me to get past this initial barrier. And that is to imagine someone, a totally nonjudgmental person who cares about me, who wants to listen to how I'm feeling. A lot of times I find that the reason why I'm not able to identify how I'm feeling is because there's a part of me that feels critical of how I'm feeling. So the part of me that's afraid knows that another part of me is gonna think that that's ridiculous that you're feeling afraid about that, or that's so stupid that you're feeling angry about, You you shouldn't feel angry about that. Or even criticizing sad feelings that I have. Oh you shouldn't be feeling sad. You should be feeling grateful. So all of these different critical parts of my brain pop up as soon as I start to express how I'm feeling, and so my feelings just won't come out. They don't wanna show their heads because there's judgment there to meet them whenever they do come out. But I had a therapist many years ago who was this nonjudgmental caring presence. And I would rush around trying to get to my appointments with her and f be feeling vaguely bad as I did a lot of the time and I would finally get to the appointment and get comfortable and she would ask me how I'm feeling, and all of a sudden everything would just pour out of me, and I would hear myself s talking about how I was frustrated with this and worried about this and felt terrible about this, and sad about that and angry about this, and soon I was weeping, I was crying, I was shaking, and I had no idea that all those emotions were in there. But they just came out because as soon as I was around her I felt that she was just delighted to know how I was feeling. She was not gonna think that I was g silly for being afraid, or she was gonna not gonna judge me for feeling angry about this or that. Her objective was simply to know how I was feeling. It really didn't matter didn't matter what those feelings were. And so somehow just being in that environment with her and having her, feeling that objective from her of total nonjudgmental interest in what I was feeling, somehow this just this just helped my feelings to all spill over, and they just started coming out, and, and I had no I had no idea the intensity of them until I started speaking them. I don't see this therapist anymore. She was really great for me but now I feel like I can do this for myself. And so I a lot of times will sit down with myself now and just imagine this nonjudgmental caring type figure interested in the way that I'm feeling and start to speak to them. Sometimes I write it down in a notebook. Sometimes I say it to myself, trying to describe how it is that I'm feeling. But the most important thing is just to be nonjudgmental and then start speaking stream of consciousness about my emotions. So I just start writing down stream of consciousness everything that comes to my head in relation to how I'm feeling right now. And it doesn't matter what it is, if it seems way off track, if it seems to have nothing to do with g what's going on, if it seems ridiculous or really childish. I just let it all come out. Stream of consciousness, no criticism, no judgment. And pretty soon I start to realize many of the different elements in how I'm feeling. Somehow this nonjudgmental invitation and reception of my feelings, and then just speaking them stream of consciousness helps them to start to spill out and then I can see them.

Now the downside of this is that when you approach your feelings and you become more conscious of them it is unpleasant. It is unpleasant to have to sit with the emotion of fear, with sadness, with frustration, with anger, It's unpleasant to have to get closer to them. But this approaching of the unpleasant emotions is absolutely essential. As long as we're avoiding them we won't even know what they are, And we can't start the process of working on them if they're not adaptive for us. So I let them spill out. I become conscious of them and I just try and accept them saying to myself, " You know, this is hard and you hate it. It's okay There are hard parts. Real life and real relationships includes temporary bad feelings. Just feel all the feelings. It's okay. You can be present right now with these uncomfortable feelings because it's temporary and you're gonna feel different soon." These are different things that I tell myself as I am approaching these unpleasant feelings and feeling the difficulty of getting closer to negative feelings. And the paradox is that as you start to name your feelings, even though it does feel unpleasant to approach these feelings and become more conscious of them, and for that reason have to feel them more consciously, it also takes the intensity down a notch. And we've talked about this before about how just being able to name your feelings and describe them in detail reduces their intensity almost instantaneously. I'm gonna link other episodes that we've done in the past in the show notes, uh that have talked about learning to describe your emotions, learning to be able to be objective about your emotions and look at them and and describe what they are, and how important this is to be conscious of how you're feeling including mixed feelings. But the important thing here is learning to approach these painful emotions and be unafraid of getting closer to them. That as you are able to get closer to them then you can see what they are. Then you are acting out a challenge response rather than a threat response because you're approaching them rather than avoiding them. And then you almost immediately within a question of seconds can help reduce the intens intensity of those negative feelings because you're not resisting and avoiding them anymore. So it's kind of a doubleedged sword. You have to f be more conscious of them if you're gonna approach them and describe them and that can make you feel more unpleasant. But on the other hand the intensity of the bad feelings will be taken down by you being able to describe them. And it can help you switch out of that s threat response into challenge pretty quickly. It's still a stressor. You still have to deal with this stress, but it doesn't, you know, it doesn't feel so overwhelming to your brain and it doesn't feel undefined. It doesn't feel like something with no boundaries. All of a sudden it's something that has a name, that has a label, that you can be conscious of and understand. And then you can go about working on the next three steps of emotion regulation which which we talked about last week, which is first of all, you know after I have described the emotions that I'm having, now I can get down to what we talked about last week where you are able to say, Well this emotion that I have is not caused by the situation that I'm in. It's caused by my brain viewing my situation in a certain way. Identifying that your appraisal caused that emotion, and then being able to learning to assign a different meaning to this situation than the one that your brain gave to it, and learning to identify what's gonna be most important to you in the long term to understand what type of meaning to assign to it. But if you're just avoiding those unpleasant painful feelings in the first place you cannot even start the process of emotion regulation. So it's not fun in a way to be able to identify and describe your emotions but it will actually paradoxically make you feel better. It'll make you feel less intensely bad. It'll help switch you out of threat and into challenge, away from feeling like "This is way too much for me" toward feeling like " Okay maybe I've got what it takes to deal with this even though it is unpleasant."

So try it next time you're just feeling vaguely bad and you're not able to identify any more than the fact that you're feeling bad, just anxious, icky. Start picturing some type of person from your life who could be a nonjudgmental caring presence for you, ready to just hear all of the ridiculous things that your brain can come up with when you start speaking stream of consciousness about how you're feeling right now. And it doesn't matter if everything that comes out seems incredibly childish, and embarrassing, socially embarrassing. It doesn't matter if there's all kinds of things that could be criticized about it. The important thing is getting it out so that you can understand what your emotions are right now and understand what the appraisals are that your brain has made right now, cause that's the only way you're gonna be able to switch from being able to feel like "this situation is making me feel terrible" toward "my brain's view of the situation is making me feel terrible and maybe I can give a different meaning to what I'm seeing and maybe that will help me to generate an emotion that will be more adaptive for me right now." so I realized that I left that important prerequisite off last week which is why I wanted to give it to you this week. But that's my tip for you today. This was episode number 99. Next week we have episode 100 which I'm sad to announce is gonna be the very last of our weekly episodes. I've been doing weekly episodes since August of 2024 and next week is gonna be episode 100, which is a big deal. I'm gonna be moving on to doing other things. And so next week is gonna be our last episode. But don't miss it. And I'll just say make sure you stay subscribed to the channel to the YouTube channel, to your favorite podcast platform, so that you get notified when I do post additional episodes, because I will be posting occasional additional episodes after this. It's just I won't be doing them every week anymore. But please do stay subscribed so that you can get those extra episodes. Thanks everybody for listening today and we'll see you next week.