Name it precisely

Saying "I feel bad" or "I am stressed" is like a map with only two colours. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls the ability to tell feelings apart emotional granularity: is it disappointment, embarrassment, loneliness, resentment, dread or fatigue?

Research on affect labelling, including brain-imaging studies by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA, suggests that simply putting a feeling into words can reduce its intensity. Precise names also point to different actions: loneliness needs connection, fatigue needs rest, dread needs a plan.

Try a feelings wheel, a chart of emotion words from broad to specific, and pick the closest word two or three times a day. You can do this in any language; some feelings have better words in Urdu, Hindi or Bangla than in English.