Emotional identification
Broadly speaking, we experience three different kinds of emotions in our brains: reactive, routine, and reflective emotions.
Reactive emotions are primitive, hardwired, and innate emotions, such as fear and defensive rage, produced in response to a perceived threat. They energize us for fight-and-flight and live in our limbic system.
Routine emotions such as happiness, sadness, surprise, and anger nourish our lives, lasting for a while then fading. Humans, on average 30 or more different emotional states every day. These emotions don’t require thought—they occur as a matter of course, and originate in the sensory part of the brain. (Note: it is likely the routine emotions that are hardest for people with alexithymia to access.)
Reflective emotions such as anger, grief, and jealousy occur primarily in our prefrontal cortex and require conscious thought.
Reactive emotions are some of the hardest ones to cool off. These are happening in the limbic and survival portions of the brain, and our prefrontal cortex is what houses our executive functioning and observing self. When this part of our brain is online, we’re more easily able to calm ourselves down. But that is the precise part of the brain that tends to go offline during emotionally intense moments. Some studies have shown that ADHDers and Autistic people have reduced connectivity between the more emotional centers of our brains and our prefrontal cortex, and must work harder to bring the prefrontal cortex back online during emotionally hot moments.
When we can take two seconds to pause and identify the emotion, we are bringing observing and reflective self to the forefront, which helps to bring our prefrontal cortex back online. This helps calm the whole system down. When we label our emotions, we recruit our prefrontal cortex to come help down-regulate the limbic system and so-called “reptilian brain.”
This is likely one reason we see increased rates of anxiety among people with alexithymia. Because they cannot label their emotions, they aren’t as easily able to recruit their prefrontal cortex to help out and self-soothe when their fear system gets activated. So for people who struggle with emotional regulation or alexithymia, emotional labeling can be particularly helpful in developing effective self-soothing and coping strategies.