Words for feelings
Words for feelings
Words for feelings help you say more than good, bad or fine. Each page below takes one everyday feeling, explains what it usually means, compares it with the words closest to it, and gives a few questions to ask yourself on an evening when it fits.
Naming a feeling precisely is a skill, and for many people it gets easier with practice. Drained and tired are not the same evening. Neither are overwhelmed and stressed, or restless and on edge. A closer word can make it easier to see what caused the feeling and what might help.
The words here are the ones people actually use at the end of a day, grouped by what they have in common. Each page is short, written in plain language, and ends with a few questions you can answer in writing or out loud.
These pages describe ordinary feelings. They are not a way to assess your mental health, and they do not replace a conversation with a professional.
Too much at once
When there is more coming in than you can take.
Running on empty
When the energy is gone, or gone in the wrong way.
Hard to settle
When your body or your mind will not slow down.
A short fuse
When small things land harder than they should.
Questions
Why does naming a feeling help?
Putting a feeling into words can take a little of the edge off it. In a brain-imaging study on affect labeling, people who picked a word for the emotion shown in a picture had a quieter response in the amygdala, a brain area involved in emotional reactions, than when they processed the same picture in other ways. Research on emotion differentiation adds that people who tell their unpleasant feelings apart in precise words, rather than lumping them together as bad, tend to be less likely to turn to harmful ways of coping, such as binge drinking, under heavy stress. The effects are modest. A precise word is a starting point: once you know you are frazzled rather than sad, it can be easier to see what caused it and what might help.
What if no word fits exactly?
Use two, or describe it: tense, then easing; restless but not worried. Feelings often come mixed, and a short phrase can be more accurate than a single word.
How is this different from a feelings wheel?
A feelings wheel shows many words at a glance. These pages go deeper on fewer words: what each one means in everyday life, and how it differs from its neighbors.
Leeway · AI voice journal for iPhone
Start with one evening.
Leeway does the naming with you. Talk for a couple of minutes about your day and it names what you felt, from how you speak and what you say. You can correct it, and over a few weeks you see which feelings keep coming back.
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Sources
We checked this page against these references. They are not affiliated with Leeway and do not endorse it.
- Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli (Lieberman et al., 2007, Psychological Science)Association for Psychological Science
- Unpacking Emotion Differentiation: Transforming Unpleasant Experience by Perceiving Distinctions in Negativity (Kashdan, Barrett & McKnight, 2015, Current Directions in Psychological Science)Association for Psychological Science