The granularity of emotions?

What if we told you that when it comes to emotional intelligence, it’s all in the details??

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How many times a day are you asked how you are, or how you’re feeling? What is your go-to response? Do you say “good” or “fine” without a second thought? But what does “good” really mean? And why has “good” become the standard answer??

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Friend of the podcast Lisa Feldman Barrett shared extensive research showing that finer granularity when it comes to describing and noting emotions positively affects your physical and mental health. The foundation in exploring emotional granularity begins with being able to differentiate between our physical feelings and our emotions. Let’s start by unpacking emotions vs. feelings, and specifically interoception – the ability to distinguish what’s going on inside your body.??

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We’ve all experienced feeling “hangry” – that sense of irritability and impatience that accompanies hunger pangs close to mealtime. But what comes first?? Interoception enables us to sense that our bodies need fuel –feeling a rumbling in our stomachs, a slight salivation in our mouths, a bit of light-headedness or even increased feelings of thirst. The irritability and impatience that happens if that need is not being met, comes after.? Your brain is continuously checking in with your body, making sense of cues that you experience as physical feelings. The key is building your interoception skills – your ability to distinguish what’s going on inside your body, so you can recognize when your needs are not being met before you start to make emotions. Yes, that’s right - as Barrett shares, we don’t have emotions, we make them. Truly understanding and noting how you are feeling helps you regulate your body more precisely, which means you’re less likely to get sick, less likely to push your physical boundaries, and more likely to bounce back when you do feel ill.?

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So how does this relate to emotional granularity? Recognising that cues from the body come before emotions will help us know when we are making emotions and how they’re linked. If we recognize when a need is not being met – such as hunger – we can begin to understand the emotions that we make that accompany this and either meet that need in the moment or communicate our impending emotion with the people it may affect.??

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Imagine this – you’ve been in back-to-back video calls since the late morning. You haven’t had a chance to eat lunch, and you’re going into yet another ideation session with your team. You ignore the signals your body is sending you – you simply don’t have time to grab a snack. You jump into the call hungry, stomach grumbling, a bit resentful at the fact that you didn’t plan time for lunch, with your mind on the snack sitting in your fridge downstairs. Your teammate opens the call with a quick check-in, asking the team how everyone is feeling. When they get to you, you say “I’m good”, and internally feel impatient that the group isn’t just jumping into the matter at hand. During the call, you snap at a colleague who offers feedback on an idea. You then leave the call angry with yourself and spend the rest of the day ruminating on the exchange in frustration.?

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Let’s back up and re-imagine the situation.??

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Imagine this – Instead of jumping into the call hungry, you recognize the feelings your body is sending you – stomach rumbling, mouth salivating. You send a quick message to your team - you’ll be a couple of minutes late - and run downstairs to grab a snack to tide you over. When you do jump into the call, you flag to your teammates during check-in that you haven’t had a chance to eat lunch and are feeling a bit hungry, which may impact your presence on the call. Your team now has additional information to be able to meet you with grace if your emotions do arise, but you’ve also opened the door for flexibility and alternatives – maybe you’d like to join the call with your camera off so you can eat during the first part? You’ve also modelled vulnerability by asking for support and understanding from your team, making it ok for other teammates to be honest and open during the check-in process. Nice work – reward yourself with a nourishing lunch!?

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Barrett shares that our brain operates on predictions – it uses our experiences of the past to make sense of the future, which becomes our present. If we can observe this happening, and communicate with ourselves with deeper precision, this skill naturally transfers to our communication with others, helping us express how we’re feeling through a more precise language of verbal cues. If we can positively impact our health and wellbeing by being more precise and granular in noting feelings and emotions, then the next step is shifting our vocabulary from “I’m good” to a broader spectrum of emotions to communicate where we are at to our wider team and community.??

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The good news is, interoception and emotional intelligence can be built with practice, and we’ve got a couple that you can implement now to help remove “good” from your lexicon and get you on the way to feeling and expressing on a deeper level.?

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• Get curious. Become inquisitive with your body every day. We love the body scan, an easy ritual you can implement every morning, before even getting out of bed. When you first wake up every morning, take 1-2 minutes to scan your body. Keep your eyes closed, and scan from toes to crown. Ask yourself “how am I feeling today?” The more you check in with yourself and note your physical feelings, the better you will become at noting and describing the accompanying emotions.?
• Get creative. Grab your favourite art book, or put on your favourite piece of music, and ask yourself how the piece makes you feel. Do this daily, and challenge yourself to use different words every day.?
• Get wordy. Start brushing up on your vocabulary. Get an emotional thesaurus, learn new words to describe your emotions. Have vocabulary lists at hand so you can easily reference them when asked how you’re feeling.??
• Get moving! As another friend of the podcast, Caroline Williams, shared, your mind works best when your body is on the move. Physical feelings are heightened in movement – think of how deeply you can feel your lungs pumping when you’re running. If physical feelings are the precursors to emotions, and movement heightens physical feelings, then moving will offer you a golden opportunity to observe and describe accompanying emotions that arise. Next time you’re taking a brisk walk, observe the body’s cues and the emotions that follow.?

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?As you build a deeper sense of your own emotional granularity, put this sensitivity to the test. Feldman-Barrett challenges Evolving Leader listeners to use our own affective (physical) feelings and emotions as a guide to what’s happening around us. She suggests that, in higher stress moments, we recognise if a reaction is coming through our body’s physical feelings, to stay with that feeling and to defer judgement about what our emotions are telling us. So instead of focusing on emotions of fear, anger, defensiveness or guilt, tune into your heart rate. Let the elevated physical feelings calm down before you start trying to make sense of what your emotions might be telling you. By deferring judgement you’re less likely to create negative stories that may prove to be false or disempowering.???

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With time and practice, it can get easier to stop, be curious, and evaluate the best solution for the situation before saying something we don’t mean, making a reactive decision, or ruminating for hours on end on how we responded.??

?And always have a snack at hand, just in case.?

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Listen to Lisa Feldman Barrett’s episode here.

Listen to Caroline Williams’ episode here.