Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
You do not need a long list of feeling words. Half a dozen you can actually reach for under pressure will do more than forty you have to look up.
Angry, sad, afraid, ashamed, surprised, glad is enough to start with, and most hard moments are some mixture of the first four. The aim is not to classify yourself accurately, it is to have something to say while the feeling is still happening. Precision can come later, and often arrives on its own once the rough name is out.
Qur’an and Sunnah
inspired it to know its own rebellion and piety (Quran 91:8). What the soul is given is a plain sense of its own two directions, not an elaborate scheme.
فَأَلۡهَمَهَا فُجُورَهَا وَتَقۡوَىٰهَا
and inspired it [to know] its own rebellion and piety
Qur’an 91:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a large study of over two thousand emotional clips, people's reported experience sorted into 27 categories that shade into one another, and specific labels such as amusement described experience better than broad measures of pleasantness and intensity. So specific words do carry more, which is an argument for a real word rather than fine or stressed. It is also an argument against expecting one label to be exactly right.
Cowen AS, Keltner D. (2017). Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients.. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A word you can find in the moment gets used, and a perfect word you have to search for does not.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Nobody ever came for help because they were too happy. What arrives as irritation or flatness on the surface is usually fear, grief or shame underneath.
Often nothing is buried. The pieces are all there, they have simply never been put next to each other.
You cannot taste food you are eating fast. Feeling works the same way, so slow the pace until there is something to actually notice.