What to Do When All You Feel Is "Bad"

Have you ever tried to tell someone that you were simply "in a bad mood," unable to tell them why?

Maybe you were angry, sad, disappointed, and anxious at the same time—or maybe you hadn't the faintest idea what you were feeling at all. That fuzzy, indistinct sense of misery is typical, but emerging research indicates that it comes with a psychological cost.

Over the past decade, a growing body of research has uncovered a surprising truth: people who can distinguish their emotions more precisely—who can tell frustration from guilt, or sadness from shame—cope better with stress and are less likely to develop depression. Conversely, when emotions blur together, life’s challenges can hit harder and linger longer.

Psychologists call this ability "emotion differentiation" or "emotional granularity"—essentially, how finely tuned your emotional awareness is.

The Science of "Murky" Emotions

Emotion differentiation isn’t about avoiding emotions—it’s about understanding them. High differentiation means being able to identify exactly what you’re feeling and why. Low differentiation (what scientists call “low NED,” for Negative Emotion Differentiation) means emotions blend into a vague sense of feeling bad.

Researcher Emre Demiralp and colleagues put this hypothesis to the test in 2012 in adults with major depressive disorder (MDD). Participants were given handheld computers for a week to assess their emotions several times a day. Depressed people didn't just feel worse—they felt less specifically. Their emotional experiences were more diffuse, less nuanced. Sadness, anger, guilt, and shame increased and decreased together, merging into a cloud of badness.

Most notably, this was not merely because their feelings were more intense and variable. Even after statistically adjusting for emotional intensity and variability, depressed persons had lower emotional differentiation than non-depressed persons. The research provided one of the first behavioral clues about the ways in which depression may warp the texture of emotional life. (1)

When Stress Hits, Precision Matters

If depression blurs emotions, could that fuzziness also make people more vulnerable to future stress?

Subsequent studies followed up on that discovery, demonstrating that emotional specificity may not only be an indicator of depression, but an important determinant of susceptibility to it.

In 2020, psychologist Lisa Starr and colleagues investigated the role of emotional differentiation in how individuals cope with stress. They tracked more than 200 teens for a year and a half, monitoring their daily mood and life stressors. (2)

The outcome revealed a compelling picture: low emotion differentiation rendered stress more poisonous.

On stressful days, low-NED adolescents experienced abrupt rises in negative mood. When the big stresses of life hit—fights, school failures, family changes—the same adolescents were far more likely to be depressed down the line.

Teens who could better identify their feelings, on the other hand, were more resilient. Their moods were more stable from one day to another, and stress was less likely to snowball into depression.

Emotion differentiation served as a psychological sieve: individuals who could accurately label their emotions were also better able to regulate them. Those who couldn't were left at the mercy of undifferentiated distress.

Is Low Emotion Differentiation a Temporary Disposition or a Lasting Personality Trait?

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Until now, the story seemed simple: low emotional differentiation may lead to depressive symptoms and can catastrophize the effect of stress. But was it a state that persisted for a while only during depressive symptoms, or a causal factor and an enduring personality trait?

One research study in 2021 gave an answer. The group compared three adult groups: individuals with chronic depression, individuals in remission (who had depression in the past but are not currently depressed), and individuals who never had depression. Participants reported their transient moods a few times a day for two weeks, so the researchers could determine how finely they discriminated between positive and negative emotions. (3)

The findings were unexpected: both currently depressed and remitted subjects had similarly low levels of emotion differentiation compared to healthy controls. That is, even those who had recovered from depression still experienced emotions in less differentiated ways.

That persistence suggests emotion differentiation may be a trait-like risk factor or "emotional scar." Depression may leave subtle residues in the ways that people feel and label emotions—residues that persist even after mood has returned to normal, perhaps increasing the likelihood of relapse.

But, maybe those with more expansive verbal ability also naturally have higher emotional granularity? Fortunately, Thompson's team attempted to determine if this deficit could be explained by verbal ability—perhaps people with weaker vocabularies simply used fewer emotion words. Surprisingly, verbal ability wasn't predictive of emotion differentiation. The gap wasn't in language, but in emotional processing itself.

Why Emotional Precision Protects Us

Through all three studies, one message stands out loud and clear: emotions are information, and the precision with which we decipher that information is crucial to mental health.

When feelings are vague, it's harder to understand what caused them or how to deal with them. If you can't recognize that you're angry versus ashamed, you can't choose an effective coping strategy—you might lash out when what you really need is compassion for yourself. With repeated episodes, this vagueness can lead to ruminating, avoidance, or hopelessness—the thought patterns that keep depression going.

By contrast, those with higher emotional granularity can move feelings to perception and action. They can recognize that frustration calls for problem-solving, sadness calls for sympathy, and worry calls for planning. Such clarity makes emotional life less overwhelming and more attainable.

Emotion Differentiation Can Be Learned and Improved

The good news is that emotion differentiation isn't a fixed trait! Psychologists are beginning to investigate how to teach emotional granularity, typically by making people slow down and describe their emotions more precisely.

Mindfulness training, for instance, encourages noticing emotions without judging them and describing them as they arise ("This is disappointment," "This is worry"). Similarly, affect labeling—merely labeling feelings with words—has been found to reduce emotional reactivity in the brain's threat systems and promote greater activation in executive function brain areas, such as the prefrontal cortex.

With time, this exercise of labeling and defining emotions can build the brain's emotional regulation strength, much like exercising a muscle. The more precisely we name our feelings, the less power they have to define us.

From Blurred to Balanced

Taken together, these three studies paint a compelling picture:

In depression, emotions become less clear-cut and harder to decipher. This vagueness makes people—especially when under stress—more vulnerable to subsequent depression. And for some, even when recovered, this dynamic persists, quietly influencing emotional life. But the story is not deterministic. Emotional differentiation is a skill—one that can be honed with consciousness, thought, and repetition.

The next time you feel "bad," pause for a moment and ask yourself: frustrated, guilty, sad, irritated, annoyed, or afraid?

To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.

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