Why Naming Your Emotions Might Ease Chronic Pain Updated 08.05.26 By Shannon Phillips Most of us have had the experience of feeling something we can't quite name. A heaviness that isn't quite sadness. A restlessness that isn't quite anxiety. We know there's something going on in our emotional landscape, but perhaps we can't quite put it into words. For people living with chronic pain or illness, this kind of difficulty may matter more than we realise. A study in press in the journal Health Psychology followed over 1,400 adults with chronic pain across two years. It looked at a quality called alexithymia (pronounced a-lex-i-THY-mia), which is a term used to describe the difficulty of identifying and describing one's own feelings. The researchers found that, of these people with chronic pain, those who had greater difficulty identifying and describing their emotions at the start of the study tended to experience higher levels of anxiety and depression a year later. And that increase in psychological distress, in turn, made pain more disruptive to daily life by the study's end. The effect was modest, and this kind of research can't prove cause and effect definitively. But what stood out was an interesting sequence of events. People who struggled to name their feelings were more likely to develop distress, and it was that distress (rather than the original emotional difficulty itself) that made the existing pain harder to live with day to day. The researchers suggest that when we struggle to notice and name what we're feeling, we're less able to work with those feelings and regulate our emotional state, for example seeking support from others. Distress accumulates, and the experience of living with pain becomes harder to bear. Concluding their paper, the researchers pointed to practices that build emotional awareness, such as mindfulness, as a potentially supportive tool for people living with chronic pain. So how can we build our emotional awareness and ability to name what's going on for us, internally? There are a few simple ways to begin. Some people find it helps to find a metaphor rather than adjective, for example if you're not sure if you're feeling angry or anxious, perhaps you might notice that your internal weather feels a little cloudy or stormy? Others find it easier to connect with emotions when they get 'out of their heads' and into the body, experiencing more of a felt sense than something abstract or conceptual. You could try a body scan meditation like the one linked below (12 minutes), and just spend a short while being curious about what shows up. Maybe there's a sense of lightness or tension — what could that tell you about your emotional landscape? Breathworks-Mindfulness · Body Scan Sometimes, just watching thoughts pass and quietly labelling them as they go — worry, planning, sadness — can create a little breathing room between us and what we're experiencing. Maybe we notice some flavours of thought are more common than others, and that could give us a clue to what might be going on for us. Events you may find helpful If any of this resonates and you would like to go deeper in this self-work, there are a couple of things you might find supportive:Our Mindfulness for Health course is an eight-week programme designed for people living with chronic pain, illness or fatigue. You'll be guided be an experience teacher, together with a small online group, through weekly lessons, meditations and reflections to help you better understand — and therefore work with — the emotional and physical impact of health challenges. For those with some experience of mindfulness who are ready for something more immersive, our Balancing the Nervous System retreat with Breathworks Founder, Vidyamala Burch OBE and somatic movement teacher, Padmadarshini Cole, offers a week of practice exploring the mind-body connection, nervous system regulation, and the freedom that comes with a better understanding of our bodies, habits & beliefs. 📖 Research paper Temporal Pathways Between Alexithymia, Psychological Distress, and Pain: An Autoregressive Mediation Analysis Authors: Rachel V. Aaron, Scott G. Ravyts, Jennifer S. De La Rosa, Claudia M. Campbell, and Chung Jung Mun. Published in Health Psychology (American Psychological Association). DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hea0001604 Manage Cookie Preferences