Name It to Tame It: Labelling Emotions When You Have Alexithymia

Someone asks how you're feeling and you genuinely do not know. Not in a coy, deflecting way — you have checked, looked inwards, and found a sort of static. Maybe a tightness in your chest. Maybe a vague urge to leave the room. But a word? A clean label like "anxious" or "hurt" or "overwhelmed"? Nothing. If that's familiar, you may be living with alexithymia — difficulty identifying and describing your own emotions — which is common among neurodivergent people, particularly autistic and ADHD folk.

I (Matt) have spent a lot of my life answering "fine" because "fine" was the only word that wasn't a guess. It took me years to understand that I wasn't emotionless or shut down. The emotions were absolutely there — roaring, sometimes — I just couldn't read the dial. This guide is about learning to read the dial. Not to become a wellness influencer who journals their feelings at dawn, but because being able to name a feeling genuinely does take some of the heat out of it.

What alexithymia actually is (and isn't)

Alexithymia literally means "no words for emotions". It isn't a disorder in its own right and it isn't the same as not having feelings. It's better understood as a trait — a particular way the brain handles the step between *experiencing* something and *recognising* what it is. People with alexithymia often feel emotions intensely at the body level (a racing heart, a clenched jaw, a sudden flatness) but struggle to translate those signals into named states.

It frequently travels alongside autism and ADHD, though plenty of people have it without either. Importantly: it is not a character flaw, it is not "being cold", and it is absolutely not your fault. If you've been told you're hard to read or that you "don't communicate", that's the alexithymia at the wheel — not a lack of caring.

The reason naming matters comes from a well-known idea in psychology often summarised as "name it to tame it": putting language to an emotional state appears to help the thinking part of the brain get a grip on the more reactive part. You don't need to believe any neuroscience to test this. Most people find that the moment a nameless dread becomes "oh, I'm anxious about that email", it shrinks from a fog into a thing you can actually do something about.

Start with the body, not the feeling

Here's the trick that changed everything for me: stop trying to name the *emotion* first. Name the *sensation*. The body is almost always more legible than the feeling.

When someone asks what you feel, the question is enormous and abstract. But "what is happening in my body right now?" is concrete and answerable. Try running a quick scan:

• Jaw, shoulders, hands — tight or loose?
• Chest and stomach — fluttery, heavy, hollow, churning?
• Temperature — hot face, cold hands?
• Energy — wired, sluggish, restless, frozen?
• Urge — do you want to leave, hide, snap, sleep, or move?

You don't have to leap from "tight chest" to "I am experiencing grief". You just gather data. Over time you build a personal dictionary: *hollow stomach plus wanting to leave* tends to mean overwhelm; *hot face plus replaying a conversation* tends to mean I felt rejected. The mapping is yours and it doesn't have to match anyone else's.

Treat your emotions like weather you're reporting, not a test you're failing. You're a slightly baffled meteorologist with a clipboard, not a fraud.

Build a feelings menu instead of a blank page

"How do you feel?" is a blank page, and blank pages are paralysing — the same way a blank to-do list can trigger ADHD paralysis. Recognition is far easier than recall. So don't make yourself conjure the word from nothing; give yourself a menu to point at.

Keep a short list somewhere you'll see it — phone notes, a sticky note, the back of a planner. Three columns is plenty: a handful of "high energy unpleasant" words (frustrated, panicky, jittery), some "low energy unpleasant" ones (flat, drained, numb, low), and a few pleasant ones (calm, content, buzzing, proud). When you're stuck, you're not writing an essay, you're choosing from a list. That single shift — from recall to recognition — does a lot of heavy lifting.

If you want this done for you, the brain-dump sheet in our free toolkit gives you a low-pressure place to offload the static before you try to sort it into words. Getting the noise out of your head and onto paper makes the naming step far less daunting.

Name it in the moment: a 60-second routine

When something lands — a tense meeting, a curt reply, a wave of nothing-makes-sense — you don't need a journaling session. You need something fast enough to actually use. Here's the routine I rely on:

• Stop and locate. One slow breath. Where is it in my body?
• Describe the sensation literally. "Chest is tight, hands are cold, I want to leave." No interpretation yet.
• Point at the menu. Which one or two words fit closest? Close enough counts. You are not under oath.
• Add the because. "I think it's because…" — even a guess gives the feeling a shape and a cause.
• Choose one small thing. Water, a walk, a message to a friend, ten minutes away from the screen.

The "because" step matters more than the perfect label. The point isn't accuracy, it's getting from a formless cloud to "I'm probably frustrated because that plan changed at the last minute" — which is something you can respond to. This is the same engine behind learning to calm an RSD spiral in the moment: name the thing, and it stops running the show from the shadows.

When the words still won't come

Some days the words just aren't there, and forcing them makes it worse. That's fine. A few things that help when you're properly stuck:

• Rate, don't name. If you can't find a word, just score it. "Unpleasant, about a 7 out of 10, high energy." That alone is useful information you can act on.
• Use a colour, a weather system, or a number. "Today is grey and overcast." Metaphor often gets through when vocabulary won't.
• Check the basics first. A startling amount of "I feel terrible and don't know why" is actually hunger, thirst, tiredness, needing the loo, or too much sensory input. Rule out the body before you interrogate the soul.
• Lower the stakes. You don't have to name it correctly. You have to name it *roughly*. Precision comes with practice, and it builds faster than you'd expect.

Alexithymia often overlaps with broader emotional dysregulation in ADHD, so be gentle: the goal isn't to feel less, it's to feel with the lights on. And building a calmer baseline helps — when your nervous system isn't permanently maxed out, those body signals get easier to read. A few of the grounding bits in our calm collection are designed to help with exactly that, giving you something steady to come back to when the static rises.

None of this is a cure, because alexithymia isn't an illness to be cured. It's a way of being wired that you can absolutely learn to work *with*. You won't wake up one day fluent in feelings. But you will, slowly, get better at reading your own dial — and that quiet, unglamorous skill genuinely makes the bad days shorter and the good days clearer.