The Training Log What the research actually supports
The answer
Probably not, and the research behind that claim is thinner than you've been told.
The short version: putting a feeling into words does change some things in the brain and the body in lab conditions. What it doesn't reliably do is make you feel better. The best-designed recent test found that naming a feeling didn't reduce distress at all, nudged it slightly upwards, and made a later attempt to reframe the situation work worse.
That's not the same as saying it's useless. It's saying the popular version, name it to tame it, is a catchphrase rather than a finding, and it's worth knowing the difference before you build a habit on it.
Four takeaways
- The famous 2007 study had 30 people choose between two words for faces in photographs. It measured brain activity. Nobody measured how they felt.
- The best-designed recent test found naming a feeling didn't reduce distress, and made a later attempt to reframe the situation work worse.
- Treat any percentage attached to this claim as invented unless it arrives with a source you can check.
- The evidence that holds up best is about the body. In a 2012 experiment, people who put their fear into words showed lower physical arousal a week later, but didn't report feeling any less afraid.
Where "name it to tame it" comes from
The phrase "name it to tame it" was popularised by Dan Siegel, who made it one of the strategies in The Whole-Brain Child, written with Tina Payne Bryson.
The research people point to is one study, from 2007, at UCLA. Lieberman and colleagues, published in Psychological Science. Lieberman et al. 2007
Thirty people lay in a brain scanner. They were shown a photograph of a face with a strong expression, angry or frightened, with two options underneath. Depending on the round, they pressed a button to pick the emotion word that fitted the face, or the name that fitted the face's gender. Researchers call picking the emotion word affect labelling (affect labeling in US spelling).
When they picked an emotion word rather than a name, activity in the amygdala was lower. The amygdala is a region involved in flagging things that matter, including threats. At the same time, a region behind the forehead was busier, one associated with processing emotion in language.
Three details get lost every time this is retold, and they change what the study means.
- They were choosing between two words. Not writing, not speaking, not generating their own.
- They were labelling other people's faces in photographs. Not their own feelings.
- The outcome was brain activity. Nobody asked them how they felt, and nobody measured it.
The paper's own conclusion is careful. It says the results suggest labelling may diminish emotional reactivity. The university's press release was much less careful, and that's where the therapeutic framing came from. Most of what circulates today traces back to the press release rather than the paper.
What happened to the claim after that
It grew.
You'll find it stated that naming a feeling reduces emotional intensity, or amygdala activity, by up to fifty per cent. That figure doesn't appear in the 2007 paper. It doesn't appear in any study I could find behind it. Treat any percentage attached to this claim as invented unless it arrives with a source you can check.
You'll also find it said that participants spoke their feelings aloud in the scanner, that generating your own word works better than choosing one, that a more precise word calms you more, and that saying it out loud beats writing it down. None of those has been tested in the way the claim implies. The precision one has some evidence pointing the other way.
What the better-designed tests found
This is the part that matters, and it's the part almost nobody reports.
A 2021 study found that labelling alone didn't change distress compared with not labelling, and that labelling first made both reframing and mindful acceptance less effective afterwards. Nook et al. 2021
A 2026 study, pre-registered, which means the method and the analysis were locked in before anyone saw the results, ran two experiments with 226 people between them. People looked at distressing images and either just looked, named their strongest emotion, reframed the situation, or named it and then reframed. Ariely et al. 2026
Naming alone didn't beat just looking. Compared with their own starting point, the people who named the feeling reported feeling worse, not better. And naming first substantially cut the benefit of reframing, which was the thing that did work. At a follow-up a day or two later, everyone was back where they started.
There's no pooled meta-analysis of this effect on how people feel. There's no registered replication report. The famous study had thirty participants and wasn't pre-registered, which was normal for its time but matters when a whole self-help genre is built on it.
So is naming your feelings pointless?
No. But it's worth being precise about what it might be for, because the popular claim has been pointing at the wrong thing.
The evidence that holds up best isn't about feeling calmer. It's about the body. In a 2012 experiment, 88 people who were frightened of spiders went through a brief exposure session. A week later, facing a different spider in a different room, the group who had put their fear into words showed lower physical arousal than the others. Kircanski et al. 2012 They didn't report feeling any less afraid. The body changed and the feeling didn't.
That's a strange result, and it's honest to say it's strange rather than smoothing it into something tidier.
What I think it's actually for
It's not a calming technique. It's an aiming technique.
This next part is mine, not the research. I want to be clear about which is which.
I don't think naming a feeling is a calming technique. I think it's an aiming technique.
You can't do anything useful about the wrong feeling.
For a long time I would've told you I was angry. Angry at the message, angry at the person, angry at the way it was handled. And I would've acted on that, which usually meant going quiet, or going in too hard, or both in the same week.
What was actually there underneath a lot of it was hurt. Betrayed. Abandoned. The anger was sitting on top, and it was real, but it wasn't what was driving the reaction. Once I could tell the difference, I stopped having the argument I thought I was having.
That's not calmer. That's more accurate. Different thing, and the research doesn't speak to it either way.
If going quiet is your version, this week's video goes through seven ways it shows up that feel like coping at the time: 7 Signs You're the Avoidant One (Without Realising It).
What to ignore
If you see any of the following, you're reading marketing rather than evidence.
- Any percentage. Naming your feelings cuts amygdala activity by fifty per cent, or any other number.
- Any claim that it rewires your brain, or that the effect lasts.
- Any claim that the more precise the word, the calmer you feel.
- Any claim that speaking it aloud beats writing it down, or the reverse.
- Any claim that it's well replicated, or that meta-analyses confirm it.
- Any claim that journalling your feelings lowers anxiety, citing this study. That's a different body of research about expressive writing, with modest and contested effects of its own.
And the one nobody mentions: naming the feeling first appears to make it harder to reframe the situation afterwards. At least two studies have now found that. If you're the sort of person who names it and then tries to talk yourself round, that order may be working against you.
The short answer, again
Naming what you feel is an interesting lab finding with a promising clinical thread and real limits. It's not a proven calming technique. Anyone selling it as one is going further than the evidence goes.
Worth doing anyway, in my experience, for a completely different reason. Not because it settles you down. Because you can't aim at something you haven't named.
Sources
5 sources · 4 studies · 1 systematic review
- 01 "Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli", Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428.
- 02 "Feelings Into Words: Contributions of Language to Exposure Therapy", Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086-1091. DOI 10.1177/0956797612443830.
- 03 "Emotion Naming Impedes Both Cognitive Reappraisal and Mindful Acceptance Strategies of Emotion Regulation", Affective Science, 2(2), 187-198.
- 04 "Affect Labeling and Reappraisal as an Emotion Regulation Strategy", Affective Science, 7(2), 282-292.
- 05 "Effectiveness of affect labelling as an emotion regulation strategy in individuals with high emotional reactivity: a systematic review", Current Psychology.
I'm not a therapist and this is educational, not treatment. If any of this brings up more than you expected: in Australia, Lifeline 13 11 14 or 1800RESPECT 1800 737 732. In the US, call or text 988.
Next step
If you've noticed you react differently depending on who you're with, The Attachment Map lets you look at four of your relationships side by side. It's free and takes about five minutes.
The Attachment Map