For most of my life, I had a vocabulary of about four emotions.
Good. Bad. Fine. Off.
That was it. That was the entire range. If you'd asked me what I was feeling on any given day, I would have picked one of those four words, and I would have meant it. I genuinely didn't have access to the other 83.
The cost of that vocabulary was enormous, and I didn't know it was costing me anything.
What Brené Brown's work named for me
Brené Brown's research into emotional language — particularly the work that became Atlas of the Heart — pointed at something I'd been missing without knowing.
When you can't name what you're feeling precisely, you can't respond to it precisely either.
If everything difficult lands in the same bucket called "bad", every difficult feeling gets the same response. Numb it. Distract from it. Override it. The brain doesn't get to differentiate between disappointment and grief, between loneliness and shame, between anxiety and dread. They all look identical from the inside. They all get treated identically too.
That's catastrophic for emotional regulation. It's like trying to be a paramedic with one bandage.
What naming actually does
The act of naming an emotion specifically changes what the emotion does in your body.
There's a clinical term for this — affect labelling. It's well-documented in the regulation literature. When you put accurate language on a feeling, activity in the amygdala drops measurably. The feeling de-intensifies. Not because you talked it away, but because precision itself has a regulating effect.
I noticed this without knowing the science first. When I started catching myself saying "I'm fine" and asking what was actually underneath — was that disappointment? Was that resentment? Was that grief? — the feeling would shift in my chest within a few seconds. Sometimes it would soften. Sometimes it would get sharper but easier to handle. Always it would become workable.
The vocabulary expansion was a regulation tool I'd been missing for forty years.
Why I wrote a song about it
There's a song on the Emotions album that came out of exactly this — sitting with the idea that I'd been miscoding most of my internal life, and trying to find a way to make that legible to other people without it being a TED talk.
Songs do something prose can't here. A song can hold the feeling of being inarticulate at the same time as it's putting the inarticulate feeling into words. It performs the problem and the resolution at the same time.
When I write, I'm trying to point at something. When I sing, I'm trying to inhabit it. Both have a place.
What to do if your vocabulary is small
You don't need to memorise 87 emotions. That's not the point.
The point is to notice when you've defaulted to "fine", "good", "bad", or "off", and ask one follow-up question. Is that actually what I'm feeling, or is that just the closest available word?
Sometimes it'll be the closest available word. That's okay. But more often, if you sit with the question for ten seconds, a more specific word will surface. Tired isn't it. Disappointed is closer. Actually — I'm disappointed in myself. That move from "tired" to "disappointed in myself" is the entire game.
You can do this without a workbook. You can do it without anyone watching. You don't need anyone's permission. You just need to be willing to be more honest with yourself than the four-word default lets you be.
The first time you do this and the feeling shifts, you'll understand why this matters.
It changes everything you do next.
Tony Bailey is in recovery, studying counselling at Torrens University, hosts the podcast Fall From Grace, and writes and releases music as Tony Bailey.