Feelings Check-In: What It Is, Why It Works, and How It Differs From Overthinking

When we talk about emotional regulation, one of the key skills is being able to identify and label your emotions. Checking in with your emotions is a useful way to practice – but when does it cross the line into overanalyzing, and how does it actually work?

In this article, we’re going to explore how to check-in with your feelings, including the psychological concepts of emotional granularity and affect labeling, the neuroscience of a feelings check-in, when it becomes unhelpful ruminations, and how your attachment style shapes your experience.

What Is a Feelings Check-In?

Checking in with your feelings doesn’t sound complicated, but it can be difficult to do at first, especially when you’re experiencing intense emotions. A feelings check in simply means labeling the emotion you’re feeling – it doesn’t have to involve writing it down, reflecting on it, or taking it apart to look deeper.

Simply labeling your feelings – which psychologists sometimes call affect labeling – is enough to help you regulate emotions, even if that’s not what you’re trying to do¹. It’s a little more detailed than mood tracking, but less effortful than reflecting in a journal or with a friend or therapist.

How to Use a Feelings Wheel

Some people find it helpful to use a feelings wheel, such as the one created by psychologist Gloria Willcox, which was based on work by Dr. Plutchik².

People usually use the feelings wheel by starting with the emotions on the inner circle, then branching out to find a more specific name for the feeling.

Willcox also suggests using a black and white version to color in the things we’re feeling, or using the wheel to look at which emotions might be used as a “bridge” from one to another. In her own example, Willcox suggests boredom or sleepiness can be bridges from sadness to peace.

The Neuroscience of Naming What You Feel

It can be easy to dismiss naming emotions as a regulation tool – it seems so simple, and you might not notice its impact at first. But we can actually see brain and body changes associated with emotional regulation in studies of affect labeling.

When we experience negative emotions like anger and fear, the amygdala is the part of your brain that lights up with activity. However, when we use emotional regulation skills, part of the prefrontal cortex activates and regulates amygdala activity. Brain imaging studies have found that labelling your feelings activates this part of the prefrontal cortex, leading to diminished responses in the amygdala³.

Affect labeling has also been shown to reduce autonomic responses in both the short- and long-term after an unpleasant experience¹. Autonomic responses are the physiological signs of emotional intensity, like sweating and changes to our heart rate, and researchers can pick up on very small changes in autonomic responses that signal emotional changes.

This decrease in autonomic responses after naming your feelings is even greater than decreases in the same signals after distraction and reappraisal, which are other emotional regulation tools, and more negative labels could lead to lower autonomic responses and even greater progress in exposure therapy¹.

Differentiating Emotions: What is Emotional Granularity?

Granularity is another word for the level of detail in something – something that is more granular, or has greater granularity, is finer and has a higher level of detail. Therefore, emotional granularity is the level of detail you can name your emotions with.

People with higher emotional granularity, who differentiate between negative emotions more, have been found to have better emotional regulation while experiencing intensely negative feelings⁴. In a study of negative emotions, emotional granularity, and aggression, people with greater emotional granularity had 17% fewer aggressive tendencies and reported 43% less daily aggression when they felt angry⁵.

In simple terms, the more specific you can be when you name your feelings, the more you might be able to regulate them.

5 Signs You’re Overthinking Instead of Checking In

With all this said, it’s important to consider where labeling our feelings crosses the line into overthinking and overanalyzing. Affect labeling can actually increase stress in response to low-intensity experiences, suggesting we can become more distressed when we try to assign emotional labels when we don’t really need them⁶.

To help you understand whether you’re checking in or overthinking, consider the following 5 signs:

Sometimes, analyzing a feeling is helpful – we can do this by taking time to reflect, which we might do with a journal or another creative outlet. However, if it’s increasing our negative mood and feeling like something we don’t have control over, this is when it can cross into overthinking.

How Attachment Style Shapes Your Feelings Check-In

For some people, checking in with their feelings comes easier than others. This has to do with lots of factors, and your attachment style could be one of them.

Avoidant Attachment

People high in attachment avoidance tend to try to regulate emotions through suppression. This can make it very difficult to label their feelings – labeling requires acknowledgement, and this goes against their learned strategies. Attachment avoidance has been associated with alexithymia, or “emotional blindness”, mainly through discomfort expressing or verbalizing emotion⁷.

However, this also means that learning it might be one of the most helpful emotional regulation tools for their toolkits, because it’s a less confrontational way to start acknowledging feelings.

Anxious Attachment

People high in attachment anxiety can experience intense emotions, and find emotional regulation difficult for different reasons compared with people with attachment avoidance (which may compound if you have both). Because of this, they can actually be better at recognizing and verbalizing their emotions⁷. However, when unregulated, this can easily spiral into overthinking.

For people high in attachment anxiety, practicing a feelings check-in might be more about limiting emotional acknowledgement until it’s the right time and place to analyze their feelings.

Secure Attachment

For people with attachment security, the feelings check-in might come more intuitively – they can access their emotions and name them, then move on until it’s time to reflect more deeply. However, emotional granularity is a skill we can all develop, and having a secure attachment style doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from practicing this and other emotional regulation tools.

Can Other People Help With Feelings Check-Ins?

An interpersonal feelings check-in is when someone else tries to label the emotion you’re feeling. According to a 2020 study, having a romantic partner label your feelings for you can actually reduce distress more than labeling your own:

“The results highlight the importance of empathy in social support and suggest that as simple an action as naming our partner’s emotions may be effective in reducing their distress.”⁸

The more empathic their partner, the greater the effect on reduced feelings of distress. Having someone else accurately name our emotions could make us feel seen and validated – feelings check-ins could be something you practice with important people in your life, as well as by yourself. Both social support and building your own emotional regulation skills can help you to gain emotional granularity.

How to Do a Feelings Check-In

For some people, it helps to start by noticing physical sensations. Physical feelings accompany emotional ones, and give us clues to how we’re feeling; the more we pay attention, the more we learn how certain feelings feel in our body.

Start by pausing – take a breath. Notice what you feel in your body and where. Try to name the feeling, then try to be more specific. This is where the feelings wheel might come in handy. You don’t need to understand why you’re feeling what you’re feeling yet or dig too deep, just name it and continue.

It’s helpful to practice skills like this when you already feel calm. This is when your brain is the most open to learning and forming new connections, so checking in with your feelings when you don’t feel the need to can make this skill more accessible when you do. Keep it light and simple, since focusing too heavily when emotions aren’t intense can be unhelpful.

Conclusion

Checking in with your feelings can help you to emotionally regulate. It’s a relatively simple activity, but it does take time for some of us to learn it. There’s real neuroscience behind the idea that naming your feelings is enough to reduce their intensity, as affect labeling has been found to reduce activity in the amygdala.

The more specific we can be when we name our emotions, the better the effect, as long as it doesn’t cross into overthinking. When emotions aren’t intense, trying to name them can actually make them worse. Keeping check-ins limited to acknowledgement and leaving reflection or analysis for another time can give us the most benefit.

Your attachment style can contribute to how easy or difficult you find it to do feelings check-ins. Other people also play an important role in co-regulating and supporting feelings check-ins – if you don’t know your attachment style, take our free attachment quiz.

FAQs

Is a feelings check-in the same as mindfulness?

Feelings check-ins can be considered a type of mindfulness – acknowledgement and judgement-free acceptance of emotions are central to both. However, mindfulness can be applied in other ways too.

Can feelings check-ins make anxiety worse?

Interrogating your feelings and trying to label them too specifically can increase distress. Keep check-ins time-limited and approach them with self-compassion – remember it takes time to learn this skill.

How do I check in with my emotions?

Take a pause, notice your physical sensations, and try to give the emotion a name. Try to be specific – a feelings wheel can help.

What if I can’t name what I’m feeling?

It’s okay if you find it difficult to name what you’re feeling, and this is a very common experience in some groups of people (like people with depression or people who are neurodivergent). Be patient and remember that you’re learning to do something new, and that it’s normal to find new things challenging. Spend a minute or so naming the feeling as closely as you can (even if it’s just “bad”) and move on, so that it doesn’t become frustrating and you’re ready to try again next time.

References

1. Torre JB, Lieberman MD. Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review. 2018 Apr;10(2):116-24.
2. Willcox G. The feeling wheel: A tool for expanding awareness of emotions and increasing spontaneity and intimacy. Transactional Analysis Journal. 1982 Oct;12(4):274-6.
3. Lieberman M, Eisenberger NI, Crockett MJ. Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychol Sci. 2007 May;(5):421–428.
4. Barrett LF, Gross J, Christensen TC, Benvenuto M. Knowing what you’re feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation. Cognition & Emotion. 2001 Nov 1;15(6):713-24.
5. Pond Jr RS, Kashdan TB, DeWall CN, Savostyanova A, Lambert NM, Fincham FD. Emotion differentiation moderates aggressive tendencies in angry people: a daily diary analysis. Emotion. 2012 Apr;12(2):326.
6. Levy-Gigi E, Shamay-Tsoory S. Affect labeling: The role of timing and intensity. Plos one. 2022 Dec 29;17(12):e0279303.
7. Fantini-Hauwel C, Boudoukha AH, Arciszewski T. Adult attachment and emotional awareness impairment: a multimethod assessment. Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology. 2012 Jan 1;2(1):10744.
8. Shamay-Tsoory SG, Levy-Gigi E. You name it: Interpersonal affect labeling diminishes distress in romantic couples. Behavior Therapy. 2021 Mar 1;52(2):455-64.