If it’s not stress, what are you really feeling?

^{Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means knowing ourselves first.}

Happy Tuesday, founders!

Last Sunday, my 5-year-old’s best friend fell off his scooter and got frustrated. I overheard my son tell him: ‘Take a deep breath. Now, are you better?’

It was a proud mama moment. Although it’s always easier when we’re not the ones caught up in the emotion.

When my son is frustrated about a change of plans, my ‘Let’s take a deep breath together’ never works. I get a bigger pout, a clenched little jaw, and two clenched fists.

But one thing always seems to calm him down.

“It must be so frustrating, I know. I wish the park wasn’t closed, too. It must feel so annoying,” I’d say.

Then, almost magically, his little body relaxes, he starts to tell me how he feels, and he finally wraps his little fingers around my hand.

We’ve all heard this advice: put a word to how we feel, and the tension in our bodies softens.

But it’s easy to help others through their emotions. When we’re tangled up in our own, several emotions hit us at once, and we forget to even take a deep breath.

So, does emotional labelling really work?

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In 2007, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA scanned participants' brains while they looked at negative emotional images. When participants simply looked at the images, their amygdala (a region that reacts to threats and emotionally charged events) became active.

When the researchers asked them to choose a word to describe the emotion in an image, their amygdala responded less. Instead, activity rose in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (a region involved in self-control and regulating emotional responses), and the more active that region was, the less the amygdala responded.

Four years later, the same lab asked people how distressed they were while they labelled, reappraised, or distracted themselves from upsetting pictures. Labelling lowered distress about as much as the other two strategies.

But when participants were asked to predict how labelling would affect them, they expected it to worsen their distress, even though it had just lowered it.

The effect also appeared outside the scanner. In 2012, Katharina Kircanski, Lieberman and Michelle Craske exposed people who were afraid of spiders to a live spider.

A week later, facing a different spider in a different setting, the labelling group had lower physical arousal (measured by skin conductance, how much the skin sweats) than the other groups.

Interestingly, even though their bodies calmed down, the fear they reported was no different from the other groups. Participants who used more fear and anxiety words during exposure also showed larger drops in arousal.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains why a single word can change the body's response. In her theory of constructed emotion, the brain constantly predicts what the body's signals mean, drawing on past experience to make sense of them.

A racing heart, a tight stomach, and shallow breathing are all information that the brain combines with the situation and the concepts we have learned to then ‘build’ an emotion.

This also explains the experiment I wrote about in the last essay: Jamieson's participants were given a different concept for the same racing heart, and their bodies followed it.

If emotions are built from concepts, the concepts available to us matter. Barrett calls the ability to draw fine distinctions between feelings emotional granularity.

A founder with high granularity can tell disappointment from embarrassment and resentment. A founder with low granularity experiences all three as "bad" or "stressed."

In Kircanski's study, the people who used more fear words showed bigger drops in arousal. Instead of the blanket term 'stressed,' we might feel anxious when we wait for an investor call. When we release a product with lots of problems, we might feel embarrassed. If we compromise our boundaries without course-correcting, we might feel resentful.

Here are a few practical steps:

The heart before tomorrow's pitch will probably still race, but the word we give it is entirely up to us.

As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.

Until next week,
Lavena

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