How Feeling and Naming Emotions Calms Anxiety
Learning to pause, feel, and name what's happening
I’m sitting in my therapist’s office and she wants to work on somatically feeling and then naming emotions, an area I haven’t had much experience with.
Andy, I want you to imagine a big thought bubble just popped out of the side of your head. In it, I want you to place one thing: an idea, a person, an event, a place.
Now imagine that thought bubble with that thing inside moves above your head.
It bursts and makes its way through your entire body.
Let it wash all the way down, thinking specifically about that thing in the bubble.
Now scan your body from head to toe. Are you feeling anything? Where in your body?
“I feel a little tight in my chest. My stomach sort of feels like it has butterflies.”
Ok, good. What emotions are coming up?
“Ummm, I’m feeling anxious. A little hurt. A little sad. Still confused, maybe.”
Ok. Good job, Andy. What do you think these emotions mean in relation to [the thing]?
We went on to discuss this and then ran through a couple other examples so I could get the hang of it.
The goal was to allow me to get out of my head, where the rumination happens, and to get into my body to make sense of what I was feeling.
This exercise is really meant to help me build more trust in myself, but it got me thinking about how it relates to anxiety.
Often when anxiety symptoms would arise in my body, I would feel the sensation, like my heart pounding or my palms starting to sweat. But I couldn’t take a quick step back to label what was actually building up in my system.
I couldn’t name the anxiety and fear.
I went from “Oh crap, I can feel my heart starting to quicken and my palms starting to sweat” to “I am not safe and something bad is happening” in a split second.
I just didn't feel safe enough in my body to take that quick pause and feel what was happening before naming it.
Avoid It or Drink Through It
Pausing to feel the sensations in my body and then naming the emotions that are coming up has been powerful.
Somewhere along my panic attack journey, I lost the ability to truly understand what was happening in my body.
All I knew was I wanted to avoid anything that caused those symptoms of panic to arise.
Which, as someone with social anxiety, meant either avoiding certain events and activities or doing them if I could drink alcohol.
I never learned that the anxiety and panic I had wasn’t trying to kill me. It was simply trying to protect me. And therefore, I never learned how to sit with the discomfort.
That’s where naming comes in.
What Naming Actually Does
Research suggests that naming the fear and anxiety in the moment actually reduces your body’s stress response.
A study by Kircanski, Lieberman, and Craske in 20121 focused on people with spider phobia, and it has been seen as evidence for the benefits of “affect labeling” (naming your emotions like fear and anxiety in response to a stressor—in this case, the spider).
The people in the study who said out loud what they were feeling showed a calmer physiological stress response a week later, even facing a different spider in a different room. And the more they named what they felt, the bigger that effect.
My personal experience has shown me that the more I’m able to feel the sensations in my body and name the emotions coming up, the more in control I feel.
I don’t fear sensations in my body at the same level I once did.
A physical sensation like my heart skipping a beat used to send me into a tailspin.
Now I can simply notice it, name it as fear or anxiety, and breathe into it for a few moments until the sensations pass.
No need to panic.
If It Does Get Worse
Of course, there is always the potential for a full-blown panic attack. I haven’t had one in a long time at this point, but it’s always there in the back of my mind.
The other piece of this is knowing what to do should it get worse. And I’ve written about this before (see below).
I’ve built up a panic attack toolbox with exercises I can do to calm back down, along with people I can call to talk.
But just knowing that toolbox is there takes some of the fear out of the moment while I'm figuring out what's actually going on in my body.
How I’m Moving Forward
I still make sure that I have a note on my phone with options from my toolbox in case things get much worse.
Twenty years ago, I wasn’t able to pause and name what was happening. I was busy trying to avoid these sensations at all costs.
Now I let them come, name them, and let them pass.
What do you do when anxiety shows up in your body? I’d love to hear how you handle it.