Obscure Sorrows and the Power of a Name

The act of naming emotions plays a significant role in how you process and understand your internal experiences. When a feeling remains undefined, it can linger in the background of your awareness and contribute to discomfort or confusion. Assigning a specific label to an emotion helps you shift from passively experiencing it to actively recognizing and examining it. This process helps to clarify what you are feeling, making it easier to reflect on the underlying causes and determine appropriate responses. In doing so, you cultivate a more objective perspective, which can support emotional regulation and self-awareness. By giving form to previously ambiguous emotions, you create opportunities for meaningful insight and personal growth.

The Science of Naming the Ghost

Putting feelings into words is more than just a linguistic exercise. Expressing emotions through language, known as affect labeling, is a subtle form of emotion regulation. It allows you to decrease emotional intensity and gives you an opportunity to manage how you experience your feelings by naming them rather than acting them out or suppressing them. By simply labeling what you feel, you naturally modulate your emotional response without needing significant conscious effort. This practice is healing, as it lowers the physiological arousal associated with strong emotions, providing a science-backed shortcut to improved emotional processing [1].

Assigning words to emotions activates brain regions responsible for both language processing and emotional regulation, allowing you to move from experiencing a raw feeling to a more thoughtful, reflective state [2,3]. This shift doesn’t eliminate the emotion itself but provides enough cognitive space for you to assess your reactions and make more intentional choices about how to respond. For instance, labeling a feeling such as anxiety or frustration can help you better recognize its triggers and outcomes, supporting the development of healthier coping strategies. Moreover, this approach is not limited to reducing the intensity of negative emotions like sadness or anxiety; it can also heighten and enrich positive feelings, such as joy. Naming positive emotions may sharpen their definition and deepen your appreciation of those moments [4].

The use of language to identify, observe, and manage emotions is a grounded and evidence-based practice that supports emotional awareness and adjustment. By accurately identifying what you feel, you gain a better understanding of your internal states and can respond in ways that are both thoughtful and effective. Essentially, by expanding your emotional vocabulary, you are refining your internal GPS. You improve your awareness, foster healthier social interactions, and ultimately, claim more agency over your subjective well-being [1,2].

The intentional use of language to recognize, articulate, and navigate your emotions is a well-established, evidence-based strategy; one that empowers you and deepens your emotional intelligence. By precisely naming what you feel, you gain a greater insight into your inner world, which allows for thoughtful and effective responses to life’s challenges. Expanding your emotional vocabulary isn’t just an intellectual exercise; it’s an act of self-care and agency. With a more nuanced understanding of your feelings, you enhance your self-awareness, cultivate richer and healthier relationships, and take ownership of your well-being. In essence, refining your emotional lexicon equips you with a sophisticated internal compass, guiding you confidently through both the everyday and extraordinary moments of your life.

A Lexicon for the Unnamed

Noticing that some dictionaries fail to capture the hyper-specific textures of human existence, John Koenig created The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It is a compendium of invented words designed to give a name to those fleeting, “soulful” aches you recognize but rarely mention. Take a look at this curated selection of labels to help you navigate your own internal topology: as you read, consider whether you have already inhabited these states or, if they feel foreign, try to imaginatively simulate the experience to see how it lands in your system:

• Adronitis: You feel a sharp frustration with the "latency period" of human connection; the weeks and months it takes to actually get to know someone and move past the superficial layers.
• Altschmerz: You find yourself weary of the same old issues you’ve always had. It’s the boredom of your own flaws; those same anxieties you’ve been gnawing on like an old bone for years.
• Anecdoche: You are in a room full of people where everyone is talking, but you realize with a sting that nobody is actually listening.
• Chrysalism: You are tucked safely indoors during a massive thunderstorm, feeling a strange, amniotic tranquility as the world outside rages.
• Ellipsism: You experience a sudden sadness upon realizing you will never know how the "plot" of history eventually turns out after you are gone.
• Énouement: You have finally arrived in the "future" and seen how things turned out, but you feel a bittersweet ache because you can’t go back and tell your past self what you know now.
• Exulansis: You decide to stop trying to talk about a significant life experience because you realize that people simply cannot relate to it, and the telling feels like it’s being worn away.
• Jouska: You find yourself compulsively playing out a hypothetical conversation in your head, rehearsing every line and rebuttal.
• Kenopsia: You walk through a place that is usually bustling with people, (a school at night, or an empty office) and feel the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of its abandonment.
• Kuebiko: You feel a heavy state of exhaustion inspired by witnessing acts of senseless violence in the world, leaving you feeling like a stationary bystander.
• Lachesism: You feel a bizarre, dark desire to be struck by a disaster, e.g., to survive a plane crash or lose everything in a fire, just to see what it would feel like to start over.
• Liberosis: You feel a deep, gnawing desire to simply care less about things, to loosen your grip on the stakes of your life.
• Mauerbauertraurigkeit: You experience an inexplicable urge to push people away, even the close friends and loved ones you truly like and admire.
• Monachopsis: You carry a subtle but persistent feeling of being slightly out of place, as if you are a guest in your own life.
• Nodus Tollens: You look at your life and realize, with a jolt, that the "plot" no longer makes any sense to you.
• Occhiolism: You are suddenly, acutely aware of the smallness of your own perspective in the vastness of the universe.
• Onism: You feel the frustration of being "stuck" in just one body, which can only inhabit one tiny place at a time.
• Opia: You look someone directly in the eye and feel an ambiguous intensity, a sensation that feels simultaneously invasive and dangerously vulnerable.
• Rubatosis: You become uncomfortably, unsettlingly aware of the rhythmic thumping of your own heartbeat.
• Rückkehrunruhe: You return home after an immersive, life-altering trip, only to feel the memories and the "new you" fading rapidly from your awareness.
• Sonder: You watch a stranger pass by and realize that they have a life as vivid, complex, and messy as your own, filled with their own epic stories and secret sorrows.
• Vellichor: You step into a used bookshop and are overcome by a strange wistfulness for the thousands of lives and stories resting on the shelves.
• Vemödalen: You feel the frustration of trying to photograph something amazing while knowing that thousands of identical, better photos of this exact thing already exist.

he Evolution of Your Self

Which of these "ghosts" did you recognize? Did reading the word Altschmerz feel like finally finding the right key for a very old, rusted lock? Or perhaps imagining Chrysalism provided a momentary, simulated exhale for your nervous system? You might have noticed that many of these labels aren't strictly "feelings" in the traditional sense; they describe compulsive mental loops (Jouska), social urges (Mauerbauertraurigkeit), or shifts in perspective (Occhiolism). This is because, from a biological standpoint, the distinction between a feeling, a thought, and a behavior is often an academic illusion.

In your biological mental architecture, the primary purpose of an affect is to act as a command center. It evolved to direct your attention and thoughts and prepare your body for a specific action to ensure genetic transmission or survival. Because these systems are so highly integrated, the chain of trigger – feeling – response often feels like a single, blurred event. It is difficult to see where the "sadness" ends, and the "withdrawal" begins.

This is why affect labeling is such a potent tool for personal growth. By pinning a name to the experience, you are essentially inserting a cognitive wedge into that automated chain. You are moving the experience from the ancient, reactive parts of your brain to the reflective, linguistic centers. In this practice, you aren't just playing with words. You are engaging in an important form of "system reprogramming." When you name your obscure sorrows, you stop being a passive passenger in your own evolutionary script. You gain the clarity to see the triggers, the space to dampen the physiological alarm, and the agency to choose a response that serves your subjective well-being rather than just your genes. By expanding your lexicon, you are quite literally expanding your freedom.

Sources

[1] Li, Y., Yue, P., & Shi, M. (2025). The Effect of Childhood Maltreatment on Affect Labeling in Youth: An ERP Study. Brain and Behavior, 15(10),  e70929. https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.70929.

[2] Torre, J., & Lieberman, M. (2018). Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling as Implicit Emotion Regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116-124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073917742706.

[3] Givon, E., Meiran, N., & Goldenberg, A. (2025). The process of affect labeling. Trends in cognitive sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.09.017.

[4] Vlasenko, V., Rogers, E., & Waugh, C. (2021). Affect labelling increases the intensity of positive emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 35(1), 1350 - 1364. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2021.1959302.