How do you feel about returning to school? Name it to tame it!

Going back to school after a holiday break is a transition that can be challenging to navigate. Perhaps you're filled with positive emotions, perhaps there’s more hesitation. How would you describe your feelings as we commence Term 4 2024?

People can readily identify happy, sad and angry. Pixar’s recent sequel Inside Out 2 popularised disgust, fear, anxiety, envy, ennui (or boredom – ‘meh’) and embarrassment to the common palette. But did you know recent scientific studies suggest there are at least 27 distinct emotions that account for the human range of feelings? (1)

Being able to label what you are feeling has been shown to reduce the severity of the emotion and allows us to work through them and develop skills to deal with them in the future. Labelling the emotion supports moving the feeling from our primitive downstairs brain responsible for feeling (limbic system) to our upstairs brain (pre-frontal cortex) which governs higher-order thinking. Giving a name to the emotion takes it from a sometimes overwhelming, unknown feeling, to something with a title and boundaries around it.

Simply put, we name it to tame it.

Sometimes we may need a little help to enrich our emotional vocabulary, so I’ve included a feelings colour wheel to help us out.

Next time we are experiencing a big emotion remember to give it a name using the thesaurus if you need to. After all, naming it, tames it.

How Many Different Human Emotions Are There? (berkeley.edu)

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