Emotions are information, not problems: the case for naming feelings precisely

The Short Version

Across four conversations, a neuroscientist of emotion, a clinical psychologist, a psychiatrist and a neurobiologist land on the same idea: an unpleasant feeling is a message to read, not an enemy to wipe out. Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that the brain builds emotions as predictions about what its bodily signals mean and what to do next, so a more precise emotion word gives the brain a sharper, better-matched plan [1]. Clinical psychologist Julie Smith teaches that emotion "is information" and that the goal is to regulate difficult feelings, "not make them disappear" [2], while psychiatrist Judith Joseph calls naming how you feel a free, evidence-based first step that "decreases anxiety" [4]. Andrew Huberman turns this into a daily habit: label your feelings precisely several times a day, a practice he links to better vagal tone, heart rate variability and mood [3]. They differ on details, such as whether to sit with a feeling or reinterpret it, and whether every bad feeling is really about the world at all, but they agree that precise labels give you more options than suppression does.

Table of contents

What They Said

Lisa Feldman Barrett: emotions are the brain's guesses, and better words make better guesses

Barrett, a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University and author of How Emotions Are Made, begins by taking apart the familiar picture of emotions [1]. In 150 years, she says, scientists have never agreed on what an emotion is, and the hunt for a telltale bodily or facial "fingerprint" for each one, such as a racing heart and a wide-eyed gasp for fear, never worked out [1]. When a panel of five senior scientists who disagreed with one another reviewed more than a thousand papers for the Association for Psychological Science, they concluded there is no evidence that facial expressions of emotion are universal [1]. Even in Western cultures, people scowl only about 35% of the time when angry, and half of scowls have nothing to do with anger: people "might be concentrating really hard or they might have gas." [1] Anger, she says, is a highly variable category: "It's not a noun. It's a verb." [1] Her distinction between the body and the meaning we give it runs through everything she says: "A movement is a movement. An expression is an interpretation of the meaning of a movement." [1]

In place of the old picture, Barrett describes the brain as trapped in the dark, silent box of the skull, receiving only the outcomes of changes in the body and the world, never their causes [1]. It has to keep guessing what a signal means, whether a loud bang is a car door, thunder or a gunshot. "It's a guessing machine." [1] And the guess is not an intellectual conclusion but a motor plan for adjusting the body and preparing to act [1]. We do not sense something, feel it and then act: "Your brain is preparing the action first," and experience comes out of that preparation [1]. Huberman cites philosopher Andy Clark's phrase for experience, a "controlled hallucination", and Barrett agrees [1].

This is where precise naming comes in. Barrett explains that the cortex works as a compression gradient, turning fine details like lines and edges into shapes, faces and, at the front of the brain, broad summaries such as threat or reward: "summaries of summaries of summaries." [1] The word anger is itself a couple of sounds standing in for thousands of very different instances [1]. Almost 30 years ago she coined the term emotional granularity for how finely a person carves up these categories [1]. Using Huberman's library metaphor, she explains that if your brain's category is as broad as threat or feeling bad, it has to search a whole wing of options; anger narrows it to a bookcase, and frustration to a single shelf [1]. Finer-grained concepts make the brain's predictions more efficient and its actions better matched to the situation [1]. Huberman observes that simple categories are fine when things feel good, but nuance helps most when things feel lousy, and Barrett agrees, because "emotions are recipes for action." [1]

Barrett also argues that no single language is enough [1]. Other cultures name states English does not: a German word for a face that seems to deserve a punch, a word for the urge to squeeze an irresistibly cute baby, a Japanese word for the despair of a bad haircut, and a Turkish concept that combines the loss and anger of having your goals blocked, which English would split into sadness and anger [1]. Her most striking example is of former soldiers who wondered if they were psychopaths for feeling exhilarated in combat with their buddies; with the right concept, she says, they would have understood they had felt a normal, intense, group-based feeling [1]. A label, in other words, can change what a feeling means about you.

Her best-known personal story shows how a better label opens better options. Just before the COVID pandemic was declared, she was in New Zealand with her daughter and felt intense, unpleasant arousal [1]. She recognized it not as anxiety but as uncertainty. Anxiety calls for freezing or fleeing; uncertainty calls for tolerating discomfort and foraging for information, which she did before deciding to fly home just before borders closed [1]. Similarly, her daughter's karate teacher, before a black-belt test against much bigger boys, told her not to banish her nerves but to "get your butterflies flying in formation." [1] Barrett says you can learn to experience a pounding heart as determination [1].

Barrett adds a second layer: affect. The brain constantly regulates the body, a process called allostasis, and it summarizes the returning signals as a simple feeling of pleasant or unpleasant, worked up or calm [1]. Affect is always present, even when we are not "emotional," and we often mistake it for a fact about the world, like the rudeness of a driver who cuts us off [1]. Emotions are the story the brain tells about what caused those feelings and what to do [1]. She describes a body budget of glucose, salt, oxygen and water, with withdrawals, deposits and taxes; being socially stressed within two hours of a meal, she says, makes you metabolize it as if you had eaten about 104 more calories, adding up to around 11 pounds over a year [1]. Her daughter, recovering from depression and badly jet lagged in Sweden, seemed to be slipping into another episode; after a meal, ibuprofen and five more hours of sleep, she was fine, and she later coined the term "emotional flu" for a bad body-budgeting day [1]. Feeling bad, in this view, does not always mean something is wrong in the world [1].

Julie Smith: emotion is information, and your attention is the spotlight

Clinical psychologist Dr. Julie Smith, author of Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? and Open When, describes her work as moving tools out of the therapy room, because "it's not therapy skills, it's life skills." [2] Her first lesson for people who come to therapy with too many unwanted feelings is plain: "emotion is normal human experience and it's information. It's not something that's wrong with you." [2] Sadness, anger or anxiety do not necessarily mean something is broken; the emotion "has something to tell you usually about what you need or what's going on around you." [2] In therapy, she says, "we take the judgment out of it and we look at it with curiosity instead." [2]

She is careful to say that regulation is not deletion. The aim is to learn "things you can do to help you regulate the negative emotion, not make them disappear." [2] She pushes back against online "positive vibes" messaging, which sets people up to feel like failures the moment a negative or self-critical thought shows up [2]. Her metaphor is a mind as a stage full of actors: most people scramble onto the stage trying to drag unwanted actors off, which does not work [2]. What you control is the spotlight. "You don't have to eradicate those other thoughts. There are other possible scripts that you could listen to, but you get to choose which ones you give the limelight to." [2]

For overwhelming feelings, Smith's approach is to allow them rather than numb or push them away [2]. Describing her own work with clients, she says she has helped people through big feelings "not to eradicate them, but to sort of hold their hand as they experience it." [2] She compares the inner world to "a bit like a sauna": there are benefits to being there, but only if you do not stay too long [2]. Her ocean image makes the same point: if you try to hold back a wave standing waist-deep, you get knocked over; if you accept that waves are coming and turn sideways or bend your knees, you land again [2]. Once the wave has passed, you listen to what it said. After her breast cancer diagnosis, her overwhelm was telling her she was scared for her children and her future, and once she had heard that, she turned to the next step [2].

Her version of reading the signal includes a reality check. "What we teach in kind of emotion regulation work is to feel an emotion, look at it, and say, is this warranted? And is it proportionate to the situation?" [2] Poor sleep, dehydration or too much coffee can make a reaction far bigger than the situation deserves [2]. And she says frankly that the message is not always rich: sometimes an emotion "has a lot to say. And other times, it might not have a lot to say, and that's okay too." [2] The failure mode she sees most is the opposite of curiosity: "we just judge ourselves. In fact, we've had the feeling. And then we try to numb it and push it away." [2]

Smith applies the same thinking to specific feelings. Anxiety, she teaches, is not something wrong with your brain; the question is what is making you vulnerable right now [2]. For a new mother isolated at home, anxiety often points to needs for connection, reassurance and adult conversation [2]. Resentment is read as a signal too: "Resentment is not a reflection of what the world owes you. It is a sign of what you need to work on." [2] It usually means you have not held healthy boundaries, or sometimes that you have been taking someone for granted [2]. Fear, when she was diagnosed with cancer, left her feeling "like a rabbit in headlights" until she rewrote her own chapter on fear around becoming the predator rather than the prey: "This cancer isn't coming after me. I'm coming after it." [2] The fear did not vanish; the point, she stresses, is that you do not need it gone before you do something useful [2]. Her summary of the whole approach: "you do not have to be at the mercy of your own emotional experience." [2]

Judith Joseph: validation is the first step, and skipping it blocks the rest

Double board-certified psychiatrist Dr. Judith Joseph builds her "five V's framework on validation, venting, values, vitals and vision, and calls validation the most important of them, even though it sounds cheesy and, for someone with her training, is one of the hardest things to do [4]. At a talk to high-powered working women, she asked who had held in the need to pee because they were doing something important, and every hand went up [4]. We invalidate how we feel all the time. We don't acknowledge our stress. We say, I'm fine. [4] Her case for naming is direct: when we acknowledge how we feel, that in itself is an act of therapy because the human brain releases stress. It decreases anxiety when we can pinpoint how we feel and it's evidence-based. But we don't do it. And it's free." [4]

For Joseph, naming a feeling is the first step toward acting on what it means: acknowledging what you really feel lets you find out why you feel that way and then come up with a solution [4]. Without it, people stay in relationships where they feel disrespected or keep pushing at jobs hoping the next project will fix things, effectively gaslighting themselves, which teaches others to invalidate them too [4]. For people who have been numbing their feelings for years, she offers a reframe: "Avoidance is a trauma response," and simply knowing that busyness may be a way of avoiding pain helps people slow down before a physical breakdown or crisis forces the issue [4]. Mel Robbins sums it up with an analogy: "You can't be sober until you stop drinking." [4]

Joseph's practical method adapts to how people learn: look yourself in the eye in a mirror and ask how you really feel, write it down, circle words on a feelings chart for people with alexithymia who struggle to identify emotions, or, for artist clients, play a song that expresses the feeling [4]. Then comes venting, which she likens to releasing air from a bubble [4]. Don't vent in the heat of the moment, don't trauma dump on someone with less power, do plenty of self-venting first, and when leaning on someone repeatedly, check that it is fair and reciprocal [4].

Joseph and Robbins also make a structural argument. The five V's are not just things to add; they remove hidden obstacles [4]. If you have not acknowledged and released an emotion, walks and other happiness tips give only fleeting relief, which Robbins calls "a bandaid on a giant wound." [4] Robbins's husband meditated, exercised and volunteered in hospice after his business failed, but could not feel better until he acknowledged his shame and began talking and journaling about it [4]. Joseph's own story fits: as a former surgical resident she scoffed at process groups, then learned in required therapy how much pain she had pushed through without acknowledging it [4].

Andrew Huberman: granularity as a daily practice with a physiological payoff

In his solo mental health toolkit, Huberman draws directly on Barrett and turns her idea into a protocol [3]. He contrasts precise labels with the "emojification of emotions": broad bins like happy, sad, anxious or depressed [3]. Barrett's research, he says, shows that the more specific the words we use for our emotions, even silently, the better we fare [3]. He cites two studies: one on self-monitoring through experience sampling in people with depression, and another, co-authored by Barrett, on how emotional granularity grows with frequent assessment in non-depressed people [3].

His tool is simple: three to six times a day, perhaps every time you take the stairs or an elevator, ask how you really feel and answer precisely, because "good is not an emotion" [3]. Something like "curious, but a little anxious" is the level of detail he means [3]. He is candid that this is a two-sided blade: detail on positive emotions deepens them, and detail on negative ones sharpens them too, but negative emotions carry useful information, for example about which interactions to avoid [3].

What makes Huberman's contribution distinctive is the link to physiology. He describes work with Barrett "exploring how putting more word label emotional granularity on one's emotional states positively impact our physiological state," and says that thinking about emotions more often and labeling them more finely "is correlated with this improvement in respiratory sinus arrhythmia and heart rate variability" [3]. He points to a 2017 review in Biological Psychology titled "cardiac vagal control as a marker of emotion regulation" [3]. In his words, vagal tone, "our ability to kind of put the brakes on our autonomic nervous system and slower heart rate down deliberately through our breathing and perhaps even just by stopping and reflecting on what our emotional states are is really beneficial for our overall mood and mental health" [3]. He stresses "overall: the benefit appears not just in the moments when we do a practice or in the few minutes afterwards but 24 hours a day" [3].

Huberman also carries Barrett's body-budget framing into his toolkit. Affect is your general internal state, and emotions are context-dependent states, the nervous system's best guess about what is coming [3]. Tending what he calls the big six pillars (sleep, light and darkness, movement, nutrition, social connection and stress control) builds a neurochemical background that biases the brain toward positive affect and emotions, even during a hard conversation [3]. On relationships he uses Barrett's language directly: interactions are "net savings, neutral or taxing" [3].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

The shared core

All four sources reject the idea that an unpleasant feeling is a malfunction to eliminate. Barrett treats feelings as the brain's predictions and "recipes for action" [1]; Smith says emotion "is information" and "not something that's wrong with you" [2]; Joseph says naming a feeling lets you get to its cause and a solution [4]; and Huberman says negative emotions carry useful information, such as which interactions to avoid [3].

They also agree that precision helps. Barrett's granularity argument is that finer concepts let the brain narrow from a whole wing of the library to a shelf [1]. Huberman's daily protocol asks for answers like "curious, but a little anxious" rather than "good [3]. Joseph says anxiety falls when we can pinpoint how we feel [4]. Smith's version is less about vocabulary and more about a precise question: what is this feeling telling me about what I need, and is it warranted and proportionate [2]? For the isolated new mother, the useful label is not simply anxious" but a need for connection, reassurance and adult conversation [2].

They agree that suppression backfires. Smith says pushing and numbing is what most people do and what keeps them stuck, and that dragging unwanted actors off the stage does not work [2]. Joseph calls avoidance a trauma response and says unacknowledged feelings block the usual happiness advice [4]. Barrett's soldiers, lacking a concept, turned an ordinary feeling into a fear that they were psychopaths [1].

And they agree that relationships and the body shape the signal. Barrett says "the best thing for a human nervous system is another human and the worst thing for a human nervous system is also another human." [1] Huberman repeats her savings-and-taxes framing [3], Joseph names the quality of your relationships as the single most important vital [4], and Smith says that when you are really struggling, reaching out to someone you trust helps regulate emotion [2].

Where they differ

Feel it, or change it? The sources do not fully agree on what to do after naming a feeling. Smith emphasizes allowing it, riding the wave and listening to what it says [2]. Joseph adds an explicit release step, venting, after validation [4]. Barrett, asked by Huberman whether to fully feel emotions or regulate them from the top down, says it is the wrong question: flexibility matters, and it depends on your goal [1]. Sometimes she deliberately lets herself feel discomfort, as she did with pain after back surgery so her brain could register it decreasing; other times she reinterprets arousal as uncertainty or determination [1]. The difference reflects their roles. Smith and Joseph are clinicians working with people who have been judging and numbing feelings, so their first move is permission [2][4]. Barrett's constructionist model says the category itself is built by the brain, so relabeling is a legitimate option, not denial [1].

Is the signal always about the world? Smith and Joseph mostly read feelings as messages about needs and circumstances [2][4]. Barrett adds an important caveat: much of what feels like a problem in the world may be a strained body budget, the "emotional flu," fixed by food, ibuprofen or sleep [1]. Smith partly meets her here, saying poor sleep, dehydration or too much coffee can make a reaction disproportionate, and that sometimes an emotion "might not have a lot to say" [2]. So the information is real, but it may be information about your body rather than your situation.

Where do feelings live? Barrett pushes back on the popular idea that emotions are stored in the body: "your brain keeps the score, your body is the score card." [1] Huberman, discussing the William James question of whether anxiety is felt in the body first or the mind first, concludes that the two cannot really be separated [3]. This is a difference in framing more than in advice; both lead to tending the body.

Granularity has a cost. Huberman alone flags that detailed labels sharpen negative feelings as well as positive ones [3]. None of the other sources contradicts him, but it is a caution the others do not raise.

Medication. This is on the edge of the topic, but the sources differ in emphasis. Huberman frames SSRIs and other drugs as tools to open neural plasticity that work best with talk therapy [3], while Barrett and Huberman, in their conversation, discuss the possibility that SSRIs help at first but that the nervous system may compensate over time [1]. Joseph jokes that if depression were as simple as a pill, "We just put the meds in the water" [4]. All of them treat medication as, at most, one part of the picture.

Why It Works

The sources offer three levels of explanation.

Prediction and compression. Barrett's model is the deepest mechanism offered. Because the brain only receives effects, not causes, it must constantly guess, and each guess is a plan for the heart, lungs and muscles that arrives before we are aware of it [1]. Those plans are built by reinstating past experience similar to the present, creating a category of possible futures [1]. Because compression is lossy, the brain has to add detail back when it acts, guessing which specific instance of anger or threat this is [1]. A broad category like "feeling bad" forces a costly search; a precise one like "frustration" narrows it, making prediction more efficient and action better suited [1]. Reducing uncertainty matters because uncertainty is metabolically expensive [1]. Words help build these categories from very early: babies as young as three months group visually different objects together once each is called a "bling" that beeps [1]. The reframe from anxiety to uncertainty works because the two categories call for different actions: freezing or fleeing versus tolerating discomfort and gathering information [1].

The body budget. Affect is a quick summary of the body's resources, which is why sleep, food, a walk or even ibuprofen can change mood [1]. Huberman carries this forward: daily care of the big six builds a neurochemical background that makes the brain more predictable and biases it toward positive affect [3]. This explains Smith's warranted-and-proportionate check: a tired, dehydrated or over-caffeinated body turns up the volume on a feeling [2].

Vagal tone and heart rate variability. Huberman explains respiratory sinus arrhythmia: inhaling moves the diaphragm down, the heart gets slightly bigger and heart rate speeds up; exhaling does the reverse, and the vagus nerve slows the heart [3]. This is a major basis of heart rate variability, which he links to lower anxiety, better sleep and better mood [3]. Frequent, finely labeled check-ins on your emotions are correlated with improvements in this measure, and the 2017 Biological Psychology review supports cardiac vagal control as a marker of emotion regulation [3]. Huberman's Stanford trial with Dr. David Spiegel found that five minutes a day of cyclic physiological sighing gave the best results for mood, anxiety and autonomic measures [3]. Joseph's clinical explanation is simpler: acknowledging a feeling is "an act of therapy because the human brain releases stress" [4].

Attention and evidence. Smith's mechanisms are behavioral. Where you point the spotlight shapes how you feel [2]. Socially anxious attention points inward and feeds more anxiety, while confident people focus outward [2]. Each time you face a feared situation and get through it, "your brain clocks another bit of evidence" that you can survive [2]. Avoidance brings almost addictive relief but shrinks your life stripe by stripe, like her wooden rainbow [2].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

Where it applies. Precise labeling helps most when things feel bad, since that is when nuance changes what you do next [1]. It fits situations of high arousal where the default label is "anxiety but a better one might be uncertainty, determination or excitement, as in Barrett's COVID trip or the karate test [1]. It fits people who habitually say I'm fine" and push through, the pattern Joseph sees in high-functioning depression and in her own past [4]. It fits social anxiety, where Smith pairs outward attention with a ladder of gradually harder situations [2]. And it fits relationships, where reading resentment as a sign of unheld boundaries [2] or noticing which people tax you [3] leads to concrete change.

Where it doesn't, or needs care.

• Not every bad feeling is a message about your life. Sometimes it is an "emotional flu" from a depleted body budget, and the right response is a meal, sleep or a walk rather than interpretation [1]. Smith likewise says some emotions "might not have a lot to say" [2].
• Reading other people is different from reading yourself. Barrett's review found no universal facial expressions, and she warns that courts and juries who believe they can read remorse on a face can do real harm; she mentions a woman placed on death row partly because an officer claimed to read her emotions from her face and body [1]. People close to you can learn your personal tells, but that is learned pattern, not a template [1].
• Granularity sharpens negative feelings too, so it is a tool to use for the information it gives, not a way to dwell [3]. Smith's sauna image makes the same point: stay only as long as it helps [2].
• Venting has limits. Joseph warns against venting in the heat of the moment and against trauma dumping on someone with less power [4].
• Labeling is not a substitute for treatment. Huberman says major or repeated trauma should be processed with a trained clinician [3], Joseph notes that some people carry heavy biological loading, such as autoimmune conditions, that needs medical care [4], and someone with PTSD may need trauma and coping work before other steps [4]. If feelings are persistent, severe or tied to a possible mood disorder, see a licensed clinician; Huberman repeats this advice throughout his toolkit [3].
• One size does not fit all. Joseph insists the framework be tailored to each person's biology, psychology and social world, and that you start wherever you feel the most stress [4].

What To Do With It

1. Check in three to six times a day. Tie it to a routine cue such as taking the stairs or an elevator, as Huberman suggests, and answer precisely, not with "good [3]. Aim for two-part answers like curious, but a little anxious" [3].

2. Build a bigger vocabulary. If words don't come easily, use Joseph's options: a mirror check, writing it down, circling words on a feelings chart, or playing a song that matches the feeling [4]. Borrow concepts from other languages when English falls short, as Barrett suggests [1].

3. Before labeling arousal as anxiety, test other names. Ask whether a pounding heart might be uncertainty or determination, as Barrett did in New Zealand [1]. If it is uncertainty, tolerate the discomfort and gather information; if it is determination, get your "butterflies flying in formation" [1].

4. Ask what the feeling is telling you, then run the proportion check. Ask what you need or what is going on around you [2], then ask whether the feeling is warranted and proportionate, and whether sleep, dehydration or coffee are turning it up [2].

5. Rule out the emotional flu. When you feel low for no clear reason, look after your body budget first: eat real food, sleep, move, and see whether the feeling lifts, as it did for Barrett's daughter [1]. Barrett's top priorities are consistent good sleep, then real food, then exercise [1].

6. Ride the wave rather than fight it. Let a big feeling be there, soothe yourself through it knowing it is temporary, and then listen to what it said [2]. Treat it like a sauna: useful, but don't stay too long [2].

7. Move the spotlight, don't evict the actors. You don't have to eradicate unwanted thoughts; choose which ones get the limelight [2]. In anxious social moments, turn attention outward toward the other person or a task, such as taking notes [2].

8. Vent in a healthy way. Take a beat first, self-vent out loud or through art, and when leaning on others, keep it fair and ask them to tell you if it becomes too much [4].

9. Audit your relationships. Spend five or ten minutes listing which people and groups tax you, which are neutral and which give you savings [3]. Then decide, in Barrett's words, "are you going to be a savings or are you going to be a tax" for others [1].

10. Add a physiological lever. Try five minutes a day of cyclic physiological sighing, which in Huberman's trial with Spiegel gave the best results for mood, anxiety and autonomic measures, and pair it with your labeling practice [3]. If difficult feelings are persistent or severe, bring them to a licensed clinician rather than managing them alone [3].

Sources

1. Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett How To Understand Emotions · Huberman Lab
2. If You’re Feeling Uncertain or Anxious, You Need to Hear This · The Mel Robbins Podcast
3. Mental Health Toolkit: Tools to Bolster Your Mood & Mental Health · Huberman Lab
4. How to Create the Life You Want: Lessons From the #1 Happiness Researcher · The Mel Robbins Podcast