“Untranslatable Emotions: Why Describing Your Feelings Can Help You Understand Them”

Have you ever completed a task so beautifully that you feel incredibly yuan at felt? Or did you feel a big rush of pronoia, because you suddenly had the idea that everything would work out in your life? Maybe, maybe not, who’s to say? We seem to find it quite difficult to experience emotions for which we have no words in our own language.

Fascinated by these untranslatable emotion words, English psychologist Tim Lomas has started an online collection. He has now found more than a thousand.

Whoever immerses himself in this, imagines himself in a kind of fairytale world with enigmatic emotions such as amumbuk: a sense of heaviness, gloom and loneliness felt by the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea when guests leave the house. Or ilinxa French word for the feeling when you have something precious and fragile in your hand, and you actually feel like breaking it.

Or how about last minute panic, which translates from German as ‘a fear that the doors will close’. Time passes, opportunities slip through your fingers, and you feel like you haven’t accomplished enough. For non-Dutch people there is also a lot to experience in Lomas’ dictionary, with untranslatable words such as inner fun, cozy and nothing.

Yet we are generally not very aware of our colorful inner world. Even the basic emotions of fear, happiness, sadness and anger are difficult for some to recognize. A shame really, because we are capable of experiencing very complex feelings. That just takes a little practice, like a connoisseur can learn to taste wine varieties. Once you have mastered this, you will also know better what to do with those emotions. Knowing words for emotions seems to help with this.

Canadian professor and neuropsychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett put it to the test. She asked people to keep an emotion diary and looked at how often people said they had certain emotions. The more words people used to describe their emotions, the more able they were to deal with those emotions.

These ‘feelings’, for example, discovered a glimmer of hope in moments of disappointment, or noticed that they also felt combative in the face of setbacks and were able to come up with new solutions. People who can do this well recover faster from stressful events and also drink less alcohol.

Time to expand our feel palette considerably. And why shouldn’t we invent new words? What feelings are you missing a word for?

Want to know more about psychology and work? Read Chantal’s books Why perfectionists are rarely happy, 13 tips against perfectionism (2021) and Our fallible thinking at work (2018).