Emotions come in many flavors and sizes. Sometimes we begin teaching children four basic emotions: mad, sad, glad, and hurt. On the other end of the spectrum, Live Bold & Bloom undertakes to list 400 “emotion words” – names of emotions, or adjectives describing the emotions. Some emotions are felt as positive or pleasant, others as negative or unpleasant. Some differ in their size, such as fear and terror, or annoyance and rage. Emotions that come in larger sizes, or more generous helpings, are usually harder to manage.
Managing our emotions appropriately is not an all-or-nothing ability that we learn at a single point in time. Emotion regulation (the term used for managing our emotions) is a developmental process. As Madhuleena Roy Chowdhury points out in What is Emotion Regulation? + 6 Emotional Skills and Strategies, “We all manage to regulate our emotions in some circumstances and fail to manage them in others.” Most of us reach a point where we can manage most of our emotions in most situations. We might successfully regulate our emotions at the workplace, for example, and fail to do so in a similar situation at home.
We won’t fully explore emotion regulation at this point, but it is useful to know that learning to accurately identify our emotions is one of the first steps in being able to regulate them. We can also identify what triggers various emotions and be able to put a crucial pause between feeling the emotion and how we express it or act on it. Un-regulated, overwhelming emotions often result in inappropriate and hard-to-manage behaviors. Identifying emotions also makes it possible to describe them to other people.
Identifying and understanding emotions, and where they come from, and how to regulate the resulting behaviors is a fundamental and infinitely useful life skill. Hopefully, we learned a great deal of emotion regulation as children. Whether or not that’s the case, it’s not too late to start, and most of us have plenty of room for improvement.
Take time to reflect on emotions from the previous hour, day, or week and try to identify them. How many words can you come up with to describe them? Do you know the event or thought that triggered them in the first place? What was your response to the emotion? Do you usually respond in a certain way? Using an emotion journal to write down your answers to these questions may help you track what you are learning.
Emotion Lists and Resources:
Why Labeling an Emotion Correctly is Important
Wikipedia Emotion Classification
Teach Your Children to Identify, Label, and Express Their Emotions