The Simple Shift that Increases Emotional Regulation

Your mind can spin a thousand explanations in seconds, but your body just wants one clear answer: what are you feeling right now? In this mini No Shrinking Violets conversation, I share a deceptively simple technique that can reduce emotional pain and emotional confusion by changing the words you use when you’re upset.

We dig into affect labeling, a research-backed concept from UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman. When you stop narrating the whole situation (“I’m failing” or “everything is falling apart”) and instead name the emotion (“I feel lonely” “I feel frightened”), you give your brain a clearer signal. That clarity helps de-escalate the amygdala, your internal smoke detector, and brings your prefrontal cortex online, the part that supports language, perspective, and emotion regulation. The goal isn’t to talk yourself out of feelings; it’s to understand them well enough to respond instead of react.

I also talk about why “mad, sad, happy” isn’t enough, and how a richer emotional vocabulary can be empowering. We touch on Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart and the difference between sadness, grief, hopelessness, and despair, because intensity and nuance matter when you’re trying to care for yourself well. Plus, I share a quick out-loud practice you can use the next time anxiety feels vague or overwhelming.

Register for my book launch party at https://maryrothwell.net/launchparty

Mentioned in this episode: Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown

Transcript

Welcome And Launch Party Invite

Mary 0:00

Hi, and welcome to a mini episode of No Shrinking Violets. So today I'm going to talk about how to reduce emotional confusion, emotional pain. But before I do that, I want to quickly tell you that as of the day this drops, which is Monday of this week, Monday, the 27th of April, my launch party for my book is only 15 days away. And if you are in the central Pennsylvania area, I think you should consider coming and celebrating this with me because honestly, we are putting together something that I think is going to be such a fun evening. So refreshments, there's going to be a swag bag, which if you are a plant lover, you're going to love this extra because you're going to get a free plant and there's going to be other things. I have a local garden center that's going to give a coupon. There's going to be prizes, which will include gift cards. I may even be giving away a free coaching session. So a lot of cool stuff. And I just think it's going to be fun. There's going to be an interview with me. You can ask me anything. There's going to be a photo booth. So find a friend, sign up because space is limited. Go to maryrothwell.net forward slash launchparty, all one word. You can sign up there. There's a link in the show notes. I would so love to see you and meet you. And I know there's many, many of you that are not local, but I know there's a lot who are. So I just wanted to put a little plug in for that. Okay. So today I'm going to talk about how to reduce emotional pain. And I have recently found one of my new favorite pages on Instagram. Gonna put it right out there. I don't love social media, but this takes psychological concepts and research, and it sort of reduces it down to the main parts of it. And the Instagram site is Soul Mind Hub, all one word. And it's so interesting because I often will be reading through the panels, you know, on the post, and it's like, oh yeah, I already knew that. I use it with my clients, but I didn't necessarily know who the researcher was, or maybe I didn't know all the details of it. So I love this one that I'm going to talk about because I used this especially with my elementary and my high school students. And I would say that any of us can benefit from this. So it's all about affect labeling. So affect meaning emotion. And the research is from Matthew Lieberman, who is a neuroscientist at UCLA. And he actually used brain scanners, images, all of that. But the most interesting part is he had people talk about what they were feeling when they saw certain images. And you've probably heard me talk about the amygdala. The amygdala is really sort of the central part of how we process emotion through our limbic system. It's much more complicated than that. But I've talked about the amygdala as sort of being the smoke detector. So it takes measure of what's happening. So our amygdala would be the thing that learned what we need to be afraid of. And so it tends to overreact. If it sees a pattern that looks similar to maybe something we experienced when we were a kid, or something that hurt us, it will probably sound an alarm. So affect labeling is when we think about a situation or we think about something we're feeling, and we actually use the words to describe the emotion. So I think a lot of us say things like, I feel like I'm failing at life, or I feel like everything's falling apart, or nobody understands me. And those are all valid, but what that's doing is it's telling the amygdala, we're not okay. And instead, what we want to do is actually name the emotion. Instead of describing the situation, we want to name the emotion. Because, and without getting too kind of scientific, there's a part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex. And that is more the higher functioning brain. So when you can actually name a feeling, you're activating that prefrontal cortex because, of course, the amygdala is functioning at a much baser level. It's functioning on, well, emotion, it's functioning on what's happening in the environment and what do we have to do to stay safe. There's not a whole lot of language that goes with that. And so if you tend to feel just general anxiety and you're like, I don't know where this is coming from, I don't know what it's about. When we start to tease it apart or be curious about it and name it, we are then bringing online that prefrontal cortex. And it helps de-escalate the amygdala because the amygdala no longer has to hold that or has to figure out what to do with it. So, for instance, um, let's think about what can we say instead? So it might be um when we think about nobody understands me, what is the feeling behind that? Well, typically loneliness. So instead of saying the situation, I feel like nobody understands me, change that to I feel lonely. Or everything's falling apart. Well, typically that's fear. We might feel frightened. And once we can start to name the emotion, again, we are saying to the amygdala, okay, got it. We feel it, but now we're gonna name it, and then we know what we're working with. And I would use this even with my five-year-olds when I worked in an elementary school. And I actually had this huge poster of these comical faces, and they were all labeled with different emotions. And I loved that because typically, what do we think of when we think of the emotions? We think of mad, sad, happy. But there's so much more nuance to emotion. And so one of the things I would challenge you to do is when you're upset, don't just say, okay, I'm upset or I'm I'm mad. Start to tease apart a little more what you're feeling more exactly. And so one of the resources I love, there's a book that Brene Brown um wrote. And I don't know, I'm gonna say three, five years ago. It's called Atlas of the Heart. And in it, she talks about different situations in life, kind of what we're talking about, but then she names emotions that are connected to those situations and helps us to find ways to process the emotion. So, for instance, she calls it places, places we go when we're hurting. And that it would be anguish, hopelessness, despair, sadness, grief. So those are all flavors of the same thing, right? So grief is sadness, but grief is a very particular form of sadness. Despair, I mean, that's you just say that word despair, and it's so uh graphic, it's such a more graphic way than just saying, oh, I feel blue today. I mean, there's another one. Blue is sort of that general malaise, right? So the more you can pinpoint not only generally the emotion you're feeling, but the, I'll say, like the level of the emotion, the intensity of the emotion, you're starting to help your brain get a grasp on it. And once you know what you're feeling, then you're taking it out of your body, you're taking it out of this um amygdala response where you just feel, well, triggered or worked up or shaky or anxious, and you're really starting to think about what is the emotion behind that? And it's very, very empowering. So that's my thought for today. Um, try to name the emotion you're feeling and even say it out loud. Keep it very succinct. I feel lonely, I feel frightened, I feel despair. And then you can start to work with it. So thanks for listening. And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant, violet that you are.