The difference between "I feel awful" and "I feel let down"

Hello,

When someone asks how we are on a bad day, most of us reach for the same few words. Awful. Stressed. Not great. Fine, which usually means not fine.

They're honest answers, but they're blunt tools. "Awful" can mean disappointed, embarrassed, lonely, jealous, exhausted or guilty, and each of those asks for something different. Disappointment needs time. Loneliness needs company. Exhaustion needs rest. If all you have is "awful", you don't know which one to give yourself.

That's why one of the simplest and most useful things we can do with an emotion is to name it, and to name it as precisely as we can.

There's good research behind this. In a well-known study at UCLA, the psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues showed people pictures of angry or frightened faces while scanning their brains. When people simply put a word to the emotion they saw, activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain closely tied to alarm and threat, went down. Naming the feeling seemed to turn the volume down a little. Researchers call this "affect labelling".

The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett adds another piece. She talks about "emotional granularity": how finely a person can tell their feelings apart. People who can say "I'm not angry, I'm hurt" or "this isn't sadness, it's homesickness" tend to cope better with difficult moments. Not because their feelings are milder, but because they know better what to do with them.

What does that look like in a normal day?

Say a friend cancels plans at the last minute and you feel bad for the rest of the evening. If you stop and ask what exactly you're feeling, you might find several things. A little disappointment, because you were looking forward to it. A bit of rejection, because it's the second time this month. Maybe some relief, because you were tired anyway. Three different feelings, and only one of them, the rejection, might be worth talking to your friend about.

Or you snap at someone at work and can't understand why. When you look more closely, it isn't anger. It's worry about something at home, leaking out in the wrong direction. Once you see that, the snapping makes sense, and you know where your attention actually needs to go.

Naming a feeling doesn't make it disappear. It does something quieter and more useful. It gives you a small step back from it, enough to see it rather than just be inside it. And from there, you have choices.

A small practice

The next time you notice a strong feeling, pause and try to find a more exact word than your usual one. Not "bad", but which kind of bad. If it helps, try finishing this sentence: "I feel ___ because ___." You don't need to fix anything. Just name it, and notice if anything shifts, even slightly.

Take care,

Kate