
Expressing Your Emotions with Words: Your Emotions Dictionary
Emotions are a natural, essential part of being human. Everything we do and experience leads to an emotional response. Emotions are messy, complex, and can be rather confusing. Understanding your emotions is an absolutely necessary component of emotional intelligence. It’s also important to understand how to express your emotions. But expressing your emotions with words isn’t as easy as it sounds. At least not for a lot of us. Why is that? Vocabulary. Expressing your emotions Although emotional expression is not limited to verbal language, it’s certainly one of the most common methods. Being able to express your emotions using words requires a very specific skillset: understanding emotions in oneself. Before we can effectively communicate how we’re feeling, we must first understand our emotions. One of the key components to understanding emotions is being able to label them. People who can label their emotions with a high degree of specificity can more easily regulate their emotions. This also means they are less likely to participate in unhealthy behaviors, such as aggression. Labeling our emotions requires developing an emotions vocabulary. You’ve got to know the words in order to use them. Before we go into a list of emotions, let’s first review a couple different ways to categorize or organize emotions. Emotion organization Categorizing emotions need not be a big deal, but let me explain why it can be helpful for vocabulary development. When we review a long list of words in alphabetical order, for example, it can be difficult to sift through and pick out the best word to use in a specific situation. If, instead, the words are grouped together by category, it can help us to narrow down our options. Having words grouped together by varying categories can be helpful as our question or context changes. Let’s use food as an example. Perhaps we’re interested in our fruit options. Skimming a long list of foods in alphabetical order could be daunting. However, if the list is instead organized by meat and fish, dairy, fruit, vegetables, and grains, it suddenly becomes much easier. Now all we have to do