It’s equally important to do this with “positive” emotions as well as “negative” ones. Here’s a vocabulary list of emotion terms you can find much more by searching Google for any one of these. You might be surprised at the breadth of your emotions - or that you’ve unearthed a deeper emotion buried beneath the more obvious one. But don’t stop there: once you’ve identified it, try to come up with two more words that describe how you are feeling. If you’re experiencing a strong emotion, take a moment to consider what to call it. Here are three ways to get a more accurate and precise sense of your emotions: Broaden your emotional vocabulary On the flip side, having the right vocabulary allows us to to see the real issue at hand–to take a messy experience, understand it more clearly, and build a roadmap to address the problem. There is a high cost to avoiding our feelings. It’s been shown that when people don’t acknowledge and address their emotions, they display lower wellbeing and more physical symptoms of stress, like headaches. If we think we need to attend to anger, we’ll take a different approach than if we’re handling disappointment or anxiety - or we might not address them at all. Like them, we need a more nuanced vocabulary for emotions, not just for the sake of being more precise, but because incorrectly diagnosing our emotions makes us respond incorrectly. These questions open up a world of potential inquiry and answers for Neena and Mikhail. Why didn’t the project work? And what’s going to become of her job now? All of these emotions feed into her anger, but they are also separate feelings that she should identify and address.Īnd what if what’s behind Mikhail’s stress is the fact that he’s just not sure he’s in the right career? Long days used to be fun - why aren’t they any more? He’s surely stressed, but what’s going on under that? With Jared interrupting her so frequently, that anxiety feels increasingly justified. Yes, Neena may be mad, but what if she is also sad? Sad that her project failed, and maybe also anxious that that failure is going to haunt her and her career. Yet they are often masks for deeper feelings that we could and should describe in more nuanced and precise ways, so that we develop greater levels of emotional agility, a critical capability that enables us to interact more successfully with ourselves and the world (more on emotional agility in my new book of the same name, available here). “I’m just stressed,” he says, pulling out laptop his to finish a report.Īnger and stress are two of the emotions we see most in the workplace - or at least those are the terms we use for them most frequently. Mikhail gets home after a long day and sighs as he hangs up his coat. In addition to interrupting her at every turn, he’s reminded everyone again about that one project she worked on that failed. Neena is in a meeting with Jared and the whole time he has been saying things that make her want to explode. Or we’ve never learned a language to accurately describe our emotions. We have certain (sometimes unspoken) societal and organizational rules against expressing them. There are a variety of reasons why this is so difficult: We’ve been trained to believe that strong emotions should be suppressed. But it’s harder than it sounds many of us struggle to identify what exactly we are feeling, and often times the most obvious label isn’t actually the most accurate. And naming our emotions - what psychologists call labeling - is an important first step in dealing with them effectively. doi:10.Dealing effectively with emotions is a key leadership skill. Borderline personality disorder symptoms and newlyweds' observed communication, partner characteristics, and longitudinal marital outcomes. Pharmacologic treatment of borderline personality disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder, An Issue of Psychiatric Clinics of North America. Pregnancies, abortions, and births among women with and without borderline personality disorder. 2011 8(2):14-8.ĭe Genna NM, Feske U, Larkby C, Angiolieri T, Gold MA. Sexual behavior in borderline personality: A review. Childhood sexual abuse in adult patients with borderline personality disorder. Menon P, Chaudhari B, Saldanha D, Devabhaktuni S, Bhattacharya L. Psychological therapies for people with borderline personality disorder. Stoffers JM, Völlm BA, Rücker G, Timmer A, Huband N, Lieb K. Romantic relationships of people with borderline personality: A narrative review. Characterizing couple dysfunction in borderline personality disorder.
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