It’s Sunday at 6pm and something is sitting in your chest. Not pain, not quite dread — just a kind of pressure. You know the feeling. You’ve been trying to work around it since this morning. You went for a run to shake it. You cleaned the kitchen. You turned on a show. It’s still there.
You would not say you’re anxious. You’d say you’re “a little off” or “not in the mood” or “kind of out of it.” The imprecision is deliberate — naming it feels like it would make it more real. So you don’t.
Here’s what the research suggests about that choice: it’s almost certainly making things worse.
The default strategy — feel around it — isn’t working
When something uncomfortable shows up, most people do one of three things. They distract (scroll, watch, eat, run). They analyze (why am I feeling this way, what does it mean, is something wrong). Or they suppress (not now, just get through today, deal with it later).
All three of these are attempts to manage the feeling without naming it. And all three have the same weakness: the emotion is still running. Your amygdala — the brain region most closely associated with threat detection and emotional reactivity — doesn’t care whether you’re consciously attending to a feeling. It stays activated whether you’re looking at it or not. The feeling keeps generating a physiological response. Your chest stays tight. Your concentration stays scattered. The run helps for 45 minutes and then the pressure returns.
The distraction strategy in particular has an irony built in. To successfully distract yourself from a feeling, you have to keep just enough attention on it to know you’re avoiding it. You’re not gone. You’re circling. This is why the show you turned on doesn’t land the way it usually does — part of you is still at the kitchen table with whatever you didn’t name.
Affect labeling: what happens when you just say the word
In 2007, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA ran a study that has become one of the more replicated findings in affective neuroscience. They showed participants images of faces with angry or fearful expressions while measuring brain activity with fMRI. In one condition, participants simply labeled the emotion on the face (“angry,” “afraid”). In another, they chose between two labels. In a control condition, they labeled the person’s gender.
When participants put a word to the emotion, amygdala activation decreased — measurably, in the scanner, in the moment. The prefrontal cortex activation increased. The act of labeling the emotion appeared to engage regulatory processes that dampened the threat response. This effect, which they called affect labeling, held across the study.
Lieberman’s 2007 paper in Psychological Science — “Putting Feelings Into Words” — was one of the first studies to show this mechanism directly in brain imaging. A follow-up review by Torre and Lieberman in 2018 in Affective Science surveyed 18 years of research and confirmed the pattern: verbal labeling of emotion consistently reduces self-reported emotional distress and physiological arousal markers. The effect was not large in every study, but it was consistent.
The working theory for why this happens is something like: putting a word on a feeling activates language regions in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in executive function and top-down regulation. That activation competes with the amygdala’s bottom-up reactivity. Not suppressing it — not overriding it — but adding a regulatory signal that reduces its intensity. The emotion doesn’t disappear. The grip loosens.
There’s a specific detail in this research that I find genuinely strange and useful: the labeling works even when the label is just approximate. You don’t have to be right. “I think this is anxiety, or maybe shame” still activates the regulatory mechanism. Precision helps, but approximation is enough. The language doesn’t have to be exact — it just has to engage the verbal system.
How to do this the next time something lands
The next time you notice an uncomfortable feeling — pressure, agitation, that something-is-wrong-but-I-can’t-say-what sensation — before you do anything else, name it.
Out loud if you can. Writing it down works too. Thinking it might work, but it’s weaker than externalizing it — the act of saying or writing the word appears to engage more of the verbal regulatory pathway than just thinking the label.
Use specific language. Not “bad” or “upset” — those are categories, not labels. The vocabulary that tends to matter: anxious, dreading, embarrassed, ashamed, irritated, resentful, disappointed, envious, lonely, overwhelmed. If you’re not sure which one it is, say “I think this is [X]” and see whether that lands. Often the feeling itself will signal when you’ve found the right word — there’s a small drop in tension when the label fits.
The practice is three words: “This is [name].” That’s the whole thing.
You do not have to then process it, analyze it, meditate on it, or tell anyone. The labeling effect appears to operate independently of what you do next. You can name the feeling and then go back to the thing you were doing. The point is not to open a therapeutic inquiry. The point is to engage the regulatory mechanism so the feeling stops running in the background at full activation while you’re trying to function.
In practice this might look like: you sit down to work and notice you can’t focus. Before opening Slack or checking the news or getting another coffee, you take five seconds and say — quietly, to yourself — “this is dread.” Maybe it’s the conversation you haven’t had, the project you haven’t started, the thing you agreed to that you already regret. Whatever the source, the word dread is probably more accurate than “I’m distracted.” Say the word. Then do the next thing.
The experience of doing this for the first time is usually: nothing happens, or almost nothing. A very slight easing. That’s what it is — not a release, not a breakthrough, a slight reduction in grip. The value of it is cumulative. The feelings that you name reliably over time start to feel less dangerous. Not because you’ve resolved them, but because you’ve practiced having them without the added layer of trying to not have them.
What this isn’t
This is not emotional repression in a different form. Naming an emotion is not the same as labeling it and then deciding not to care — “I’m anxious, whatever, moving on.” The goal isn’t to dismiss the feeling, it’s to register it at the verbal level so the amygdala gets some top-down regulation rather than running unchecked.
It’s also not journaling, though journaling can extend the practice. The version that works in the moment is much faster than journaling. You don’t need paper. You don’t need five minutes. Three words, said quietly, before you do anything else. That’s the minimum effective dose.
The Sunday evening version of this, which is the one most people actually need: when the unnamed pressure is sitting in your chest at 6pm, before the show or the wine or the third snack, try saying: “This is dread about Monday.” Or “This is low-grade guilt about the thing I didn’t do.” Or just “This is Sunday anxiety and it’s familiar.” Then proceed with whatever you were going to do. You’ll probably still turn on the show. But the pressure may be slightly less present while you watch it.
If the anxiety you’re naming tends to be specifically about the week ahead — the kind that sits in your chest every Sunday no matter what you accomplish — the loop of anticipatory dread has its own mechanics worth understanding: what’s behind Sunday anxiety and how to interrupt it before Monday. And if the feeling that lands most often is the specific, grinding kind that happens when you can’t stop working at night, that’s a different signal worth knowing about too.
You don’t have to feel less to function better. You just have to stop pretending the feeling isn’t there.