How to Improve Emotional Awareness: Notice, Name and Understand What You Feel

About this tool

Emotional awareness is the ability to notice a feeling while it is happening, name it with some precision and understand what it is responding to. Improving it comes down to practicing those three steps on purpose, often enough that they start to run on their own. Most people who search for how to improve emotional awareness have noticed one of two things: that they go from fine to furious with nothing in between, or that when someone asks what they feel the honest answer is a blank. Both are common, both are workable, and the exercise on this page is built for them.

Emotional awareness is the first step of emotion regulation, not a substitute for it. In James Gross's process model, regulation is a set of strategies (changing the situation, shifting attention, reappraising, adjusting the response) applied to an emotion as it unfolds. You cannot choose a strategy for a feeling you have not registered. Dialectical behavior therapy teaches the same order: observe, then describe, then act. People who skip the noticing step tend to regulate by suppression, which works briefly and costs more over time. Awareness buys the few seconds in which a choice becomes possible.

Naming a feeling does something measurable. In a well-known study, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues showed people emotional faces and asked them either to label the emotion or to match the face to another; labeling reduced activity in the amygdala and increased activity in a prefrontal region linked to regulation. Later work by Torre and Lieberman framed this affect labeling as a form of implicit regulation: putting a feeling into words dampens it slightly without any attempt to change it. The honest caveats are that these are laboratory effects on brief reactions, the effect sizes are modest, and naming a feeling does not make it go away. It makes it more workable, which is a different and more useful claim.

Feelings show up in the body before they show up in words, so the second skill is interoception: the sense of what is happening inside you, including heart rate, breathing, gut, muscle tension and temperature. Anger is often a hot face and a clenched jaw before it is a thought. Anxiety is a tight chest or a churning stomach. Checking the body first gives you a signal that is earlier and less argued-with than the story in your head. Two cautions. Interoceptive accuracy, as measured by heartbeat-detection tasks, is a contested idea, and the practical goal is attention rather than precision. And if you have panic attacks or health anxiety, body focus can turn up the volume; keep it brief and pair it with the naming step rather than lingering on sensations.

At the low end of emotional awareness is alexithymia, a term coined by psychiatrist Peter Sifneos in the 1970s for difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing them to others and a tendency to think about external events rather than inner experience. It is a trait on a continuum, not a diagnosis. It is more common alongside autism, depression, post-traumatic stress and some chronic illnesses. The 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale is the standard measure. The exercise on this page is an unvalidated reflective practice that borrows the idea of noticing and naming; it is not a tested treatment for alexithymia, and if difficulty naming feelings is marked and persistent, a therapist is the right place to work on it.

The third skill is granularity, a term from psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett for how finely you distinguish between feelings. Someone with low granularity has a few big buckets: bad, fine, stressed. Someone with high granularity can tell disappointed from resentful from lonely, which matters because those three ask for different responses. Barrett's research links higher granularity with more flexible regulation and fewer unhelpful coping behaviors under stress. This is why a bigger feeling vocabulary is not a parlor trick. The word is the handle. If the only handle you have is stressed, the only thing you can do is try to be less stressed, which is not an action. The Feelings Wheel and the List of Emotions on this site exist to put more handles within reach.

The exercise follows the same order each time. Pause and locate the feeling in the body. Name the family it belongs to, then a more precise word, then rate the intensity. Identify what set it off and separate the thought from the feeling, because I feel like you don't care is a thought wearing a feeling's clothes. Ask what the feeling is about: a threat to something you value, a loss, a crossed boundary, an unmet need, uncertainty, an old memory. Then decide whether it needs anything from you right now. Done daily, in moments of mild feeling rather than crisis, the sequence may start to feel more automatic; how quickly, and how much, varies from person to person.

This suits almost anyone, and it is especially useful if you have been told you are hard to read, if you tend to discover your feelings through other people's reactions, or if you feel numb more often than you feel anything in particular. It is less suitable on its own if you have a trauma history in which attention to the body brings back intrusive memories, or if you are in a severe depressive episode where the exercise becomes one more thing you are failing at. In both cases the same skills are worth building, but with a therapist pacing the work.

The usual mistakes: judging the feeling instead of noticing it (I shouldn't feel this), treating one word as the whole answer when there are usually two or three feelings at once, rushing to fix the feeling before you have understood it, over-analyzing until the exercise becomes rumination, and only doing it when you are already overwhelmed. Practice when the feeling is a three out of ten. If emotional numbness, overwhelm or outbursts are persistent and affecting your relationships, work or health, a therapist can help you build these skills in a way that fits your history. Psychology.com's therapist directory is free to search.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the exercise structure and the claims about affect labeling, interoception, alexithymia and granularity for accuracy and appropriate caveats.

References

1. Lieberman MD, Eisenberger NI, Crockett MJ, Tom SM, Pfeifer JH, Way BM. Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science. 2007;18(5):421-428.
2. Torre JB, Lieberman MD. Putting feelings into words: affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review. 2018;10(2):116-124.
3. Barrett LF. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2017.
4. Gross JJ. Emotion regulation: current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry. 2015;26(1):1-26.
5. Bagby RM, Parker JDA, Taylor GJ. The twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale: I. Item selection and cross-validation of the factor structure. Journal of Psychosomatic Research. 1994;38(1):23-32.

Emotional Awareness Exercise FAQ