by Angela Haupt
Updated Wed, June 10, 2026 (via health.yahoo.com)
The next time you’re furious, don’t try to calm down. Just put a name to the anger coursing through your veins.
Say “this is rage”—three words, three seconds—either out loud or silently to yourself, and you’ve already kept the feeling from swallowing you whole. The technique is called affect labeling, and it works by softening the intensity of whatever’s hitting you. “It turns down the volume on something that can feel really intense and overwhelming,” says Lizzie Cleary, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles. “It makes it a little bit quieter and more understandable.”
Here’s why such a small move does so much—and how to make it second nature.
Why addressing anger works
“Before you label an emotion, you are the emotion,” says Shannon Sauer-Zavala, a clinical psychologist and mental health treatment researcher in Lexington, Ky. It’s the heat in your chest, the racing thoughts, the urge to do something you’ll regret. The moment you put the feeling into words, it starts to loosen its grip. “When you label an emotion, you take it outside of yourself, and it becomes something you’re feeling, not something you are,” she says.
The wording matters. Psychologists generally recommend saying “This is rage” rather than “I am furious.” The goal is to create distance between yourself and the emotion—to remind yourself that rage is something you’re experiencing, not something you are. That split-second of separation can be powerful. It creates a brief pause between what you’re feeling and what you do next. “The pause allows you to choose with intention, so the emotion isn’t running the show—you are,” Sauer-Zavala says.
There’s a reason why that small shift can feel so powerful. When you’re angry or afraid, your amygdala—the brain’s threat detector—is firing. Naming the feeling pulls a different system online. “When we go through the exercise of observing, naming, labeling, and utilizing language, that tends to activate our prefrontal cortex,” Cleary says, referring to the analytical, language-based part of the brain. Once that happens, the feeling starts to lose steam.
The effect shows up even in the lab. Cleary points to a study in which people with a fear of spiders were asked to approach a live tarantula. The group that was instructed to narrate their fear out loud—saying things like “this is anxiety”—got closer to the spider than those who stayed silent, demonstrating better emotional regulation in the moment. “It makes the experience just a little bit more coherent, a little bit more manageable, and helps people be a little more regulated,” she says.
How to practice affect labeling
When your emotions are running strong, start by naming the dominant one: “This is rage,” “this is anxiety,” “this is grief.”
Which one it is will determine what you do next and what you need in the moment, whether that’s comfort, a phone call, or a few deep breaths. Each emotion comes with its own pull, Sauer-Zavala says. Anger, for instance, tends to push you to set a boundary. “When you label, you can identify what the emotion is trying to tell you and act accordingly,” she says. If you’re stuck on “I feel awful” after a tense exchange, you might just stew, or fire back something you’ll regret. But if you land on “This is rage,” you can reflect on the fact that someone crossed a line, and pivot your focus to setting a boundary.
Make labeling your emotions a habit
Sauer-Zavala tells beginners to try labeling their big emotions just once a day for a week, rather than treating it as a lifelong project. “You don’t have to become a Zen master,” she says. If you’re fuming in a traffic jam, stewing after a tense meeting, or lying awake ruminating at 2 a.m., name what you’re feeling. Over time, the labels will start to reveal patterns. Cleary asks people to pay attention to which feelings keep surfacing and when—anger that flares every evening, say, or loneliness that creeps in at night. Those throughlines point to the triggers worth addressing. The more you name what you’re feeling, she says, the more you’ll learn about yourself.
(Contributed by Janet Cornwell, H.W., m.)