Why it’s Important to Label your Mental States
By: Philip Baker
Tags: Self, Self Improvement, Awareness, Self-awareness

Photo by Dan on Unsplash

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world”

With this quote, Ludwig Wittgenstein described for the first time that language is not just a tool to describe the world in an objective and unbiased way, but it works the other way around as well. The words themselves define the world we are living in and give us the tools to make sense of it as well.

In a way, this is counter-intuitive as it sets the ground for the idea that language and consciousness are tied together with each other in a much tighter bond than what we would anticipate. Words can acknowledge the things that happen around us and incorporate them into our communication and narratives but also they can bring things to our awareness that would be otherwise hidden and help us understand the world better.

The patterns that resonate the most with the people in a region are those that are used most often, communicated from its members most frequently, and become eventually part of their culture and character.

We’ve all have heard about the ’50 words for snow’ that Inuits people deploy in their vocabulary and you’ve probably met by now, some sort of incredible Japanese word that catches a feeling that is ineligible in the English language or that describes a scenario that we would never think to label on ourselves.

KOMOREBI describes the rays of the sun as they pass through from the leaves of the trees and is there to denote this beautiful moment that the light combines with nature and creates this magnificent interplay.

Obviously, this is not an experience that exists only in Japan. People in Germany or France had very similar encounters when they walk through their forests on a hot, sunny summer day, yet something in the Japanese obsession with nature and the environment made this experience important enough to depict it in a simple word and give it a name that people can use interchangeably to describe.

If you were to take a walk with a European and a Japanese through a forest one day, you would most probably realize that they both got a totally different impression out of it and many of their perceptions changed based on the language they were using. The Japanese would be able to depict a different set of phenomena around them based on their linguistic toolset which would be completely different than the one the European guy would have.

And then you get different words like Wabi-sabi, which shows one of the key Japanese characteristics in aesthetics, and describes the “acceptance of transience and imperfection”.

It is actually difficult to depict whether this is just a simple word or a whole different world view that defines a new paradigm, but the concept is incorporated in many aspects of the Japanese life that will purposefully bring imbalance to their art-work and prefer imperfection to flawlessness. It originates from the Buddhist philosophy on the transient nature of life and has found a way in many aspects of their life that would seem quite strange to anyone else that is not familiar with the concept.

The Two Sides Of Words

And then apart from the cultural differences, words can be quite confusing on their own because they can simply mean different things to people who try to communicate using a medium that can be quite controversial.

Words have two separate meanings on them based on the reactions they create to people. The denotative meaning and the connotative one.

The Denotative meaning comes from the cognitive definition of each word and the actual intellectual understanding of it. When a person says ‘table’ another one knows exactly what he means by imagining a piece of wood with four perpendicular sticks coming out of it to stabilize it.

Yet the connotative side of words is much more subjective and differs for each person based on his particular experiences, culture, and judgments that are associated with it. When I say the word ‘dog’ I may imagine the happy golden labrador that I have in my house, that wags its tail every time I return home and jumps on me out of its unrestrained joy. I may experience pure bliss every time I bring my mind back to it and I may conjure an emotional reaction based on that particular experience that I hold.

Yet these feelings may be completely foreign to people that may have a completely different reaction based on their particular past. They may have been bitten by a dog recently while trying to pass some obscure road or been attacked by one when they were a child and developed an innate fear for them that they never managed to bypass. Each person will go through a radically different emotional experience from each word that is communicated between them and it is not rare for people to be unable to communicate properly because of it.

Acknowledging The Mental Images

In a recent article published here on Medium, Felicia Sullivan went through some existing challenges that were described in the book “This Book Will Change Your Life “ that offered one single uncomfortable task for each day of the year. It suggests that you walk barefoot in green grass, dedicate a day to exchange gifts with friends, and even send a letter to a stranger with a $5 bill and a little image of yourself, for no apparent reason at all.

It was a particularly fun read and all challenges seemed quite intriguing and interesting in their promise that they are going to get you out of your comfort zone while teaching you something valuable.

Yet the one challenge that stuck with me the most and made me question why I hadn’t tried it before, was the one called “labeling your emotions” taking place on day 247, where the author suggests to find emotions within you that have no known word and put a tag on them. It could be for example Pluvialness, for your love of raindrops, or Cerebrosity for the affection you have for your intellect. Anything would be liable as long as it depicted a particular mental state that was true to you and was in some way reoccurring.

This little challenge actually made me think about the fact that we rarely pay attention to our inner world apart from the very basic, ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’, forgetting that there are so many intermingled, convoluted, and complex inner states that never see the light of day out of our unwillingness to acknowledge them.

As many psychologists have mentioned before, our ability to recognize what is going on in our heads is paramount for our emotional well-being, and being in a position to acknowledge our feelings is the first step towards managing them.

“This impoverished emotional labeling is, in turn, associated with deficits regulating those emotions. The less aware we are of our emotions, the less likely we are to figure out how to best regulate them.” — Amelia Aldao

If someone was to ask you what sort of feelings you experience yesterday or the day before you would most probably blur the whole period and compact it in one dimension positive to negative range, that you would pinpoint the most vivid curves. You would answer the question in terms of ‘OK’, ‘not bad’, ‘great’ and so on, missing out on the numerous little states we experience minute by minute.

But the fact is that our emotional functioning as we go through it minute by minute is not one-dimensional but multifaceted, which has many aspects and angles in it. And unless we put out the effort to get to know them, chances are that we are going to let them fly over our heads without having the words to make sense of them.

As was described by Daniel Goelman, self-awareness is highly dependant on our ability to recognize the emotions we experience, and labeling them throughout the day can help us bring more light on them and manage them as we please.