You probably know that friend who says "ugh, I'm so anxious right now" in the group chat, and someone quietly wonders if that's a bit much? Or maybe you are that friend. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the idea that saying our feelings out loud is a little indulgent, like we should just keep it together and move on. Turns out, your brain may disagree.
In a 2007 study, ‘Putting Feelings Into Words,’ published in the journal Psychological Science, UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and team found that the simple act of naming an emotion, known as “affect labeling,” was associated with calmer activity in the amygdala, the brain’s built-in alarm system for detecting threat.
