Why Can’t I Identify My Emotions? Understanding Alexithymia

Alexithymia can make it difficult to identify, understand or put words to your emotions. You might know that something is happening internally, but when someone asks, “How are you feeling?”, your mind goes blank.

Maybe you can tell that you feel uncomfortable, restless or exhausted. Maybe your chest feels tight. Maybe you desperately want to leave the room. Maybe you know you are definitely not okay, but choosing between anxious, angry, overwhelmed, sad, frustrated and scared feels almost impossible.

And then someone hands you an emotion wheel containing dozens of words.

Helpful for some people? Absolutely.

For others? Not so much.

Difficulty identifying emotions does not necessarily mean you are disconnected from your emotions. Sometimes the problem is that the emotion word is being asked for before you have worked out what is actually happening inside you.

What is alexithymia?

Alexithymia is a term used to describe differences or difficulties in recognising and describing emotional experiences.

A person experiencing alexithymia might notice that something has changed internally without immediately knowing what emotion is associated with it. They might be much better at describing what happened, what they are thinking, what their body is doing or what they want to do than answering the question:

“What are you feeling?”

Research generally conceptualises alexithymia as involving difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings and, for some people, a greater tendency to focus on external events rather than internal emotional experience.

Importantly, having difficulty identifying an emotion is not the same as not having emotions.

You can be experiencing something intensely and still have no idea what to call it.

What does alexithymia feel like?

Sometimes it sounds like:

“I don’t know. I just feel weird.”

Or:

“I’m fine. I mean, I’m obviously not fine. I just don’t know what it is.”

You might notice the physical experience first. Your heart is racing. Your shoulders are tense. You feel heavy. Your stomach hurts. You are suddenly exhausted.

Or you might notice your behavioural urge first.

You want to leave.

You want everyone to stop talking to you.

You want to argue.

You want to hide under a blanket.

You want someone you trust nearby.

You want to move your body.

You want to cry, even though you could not explain why.

All of that is useful information, even if the word anxiety, anger, sadness or overwhelm has not arrived yet.

Why can it be so hard to identify emotions?

Emotions are not simply vocabulary words waiting in the brain to be retrieved.

We make sense of emotional experiences using information from multiple sources, including what is happening around us, our thoughts, previous experiences, internal bodily sensations and what our body seems prepared to do.

One concept that often comes up here is interoception.

Interoception broadly refers to how we perceive and make sense of signals arising from within the body. This can include sensations associated with hunger, thirst, temperature, pain, heart rate, breathing and other internal states.

There appears to be a relationship between aspects of interoception and alexithymia, although it is more complicated than simply having “good” or “poor” interoception. A recent systematic review found that the relationship varies considerably depending on which aspect of interoception is being measured.

That distinction matters because people can experience their bodies very differently. Someone might barely notice certain internal cues. Someone else might notice everything but have difficulty interpreting what those sensations mean.

Alexithymia and autism

Alexithymia is often discussed alongside autism, and there is a reason for that.

Research has found alexithymia to be more common among autistic people than non-autistic comparison groups. However, alexithymia is not synonymous with autism, nor should difficulty identifying emotions simply be assumed because someone is autistic.

There is also an important nuance around interoception.

You may have heard broad statements such as “autistic people have poor interoception”. Current research does not support making that assumption about every autistic person. A 2025 systematic review found mixed findings across different aspects and measures of interoception, including no significant overall difference in one commonly studied form of interoceptive accuracy in autistic adults.

As with many aspects of neurodivergence, individual experience matters.

The useful question is not:

“Should this person be better at identifying emotions?”

It is:

“Would understanding what is happening internally be useful to this person?”

Why emotion wheels don’t always help

Emotion wheels can be excellent tools.

They can provide vocabulary, show relationships between emotions and help someone move from a broad description such as “bad” towards something more specific.

But imagine that you genuinely do not know what you are feeling.

Now imagine being shown 60 possible answers.

The task has not necessarily become easier. It may simply have become a multiple-choice test with far too many options.

ACT practitioner Russ Harris describes this as a limitation of taking an overly “top-down” approach to emotion identification. If someone is having difficulty accessing or interpreting the underlying experience, searching through increasingly precise emotional vocabulary may not solve the problem.

Instead, Harris proposes beginning somewhere much simpler.

Can’t identify what you’re feeling? Start here

Rather than asking yourself to immediately name an emotion, work from the information that is already available.

Harris describes this as a three-layer approach: affect, impulse and label.

You can think about it as:

1. What is the basic feeling state? Does this experience feel pleasant, unpleasant or somewhere in between? Does your body feel highly activated and energised, or slowed down and low in energy?
2. What do I feel like doing? Do you want to leave, hide, argue, protect yourself, cry, rest, move, connect, seek comfort or be left alone?
3. Is there an emotion word that seems useful? Perhaps anxious, angry, excited, disappointed, overwhelmed, content or sad. Or perhaps there isn’t one yet.

Notice the order.

You do not have to begin with:

“Which emotion am I experiencing?”

You can begin with:

“This feels awful, I’m really activated, and I want to get away.”

That is already meaningful information.

High energy or low energy? Pleasant or unpleasant?

One particularly simple starting point is to think about two dimensions: activation and pleasantness.

There is no rule saying that high activation plus discomfort must mean anxiety, or that low activation plus discomfort must mean sadness.

The point is to reduce the task.

Instead of choosing between dozens of emotion words, you are initially asking:

Does this feel good, bad or neutral-ish?

and

Am I revved up or slowed down?

Harris suggests that even this basic information can substantially narrow what might be happening.

Your urge can tell you something too

Next, ask:

What does my body seem to want me to do?

Consider two people who both describe themselves as highly activated and feeling awful.

One says:

“I want to get out of here. I want to hide somewhere nobody can find me.”

The other says:

“I want to yell. I want to tell them that isn’t okay.”

Those experiences may eventually receive very different emotional labels.

Looking at action urges can provide information that the question “How do you feel?” does not. Harris describes urges such as withdrawing, escaping, protecting, confronting, resting, connecting and seeking affection as another layer through which an emotional experience can become clearer.

Do I actually need to find the “right” emotion?

Here is perhaps the most useful part:

There may not be one perfectly correct word.

Emotion labels are ways of organising and communicating incredibly complex internal experiences. Harris notes that people may use ordinary emotion words, slang, metaphors, colours, textures or even personally invented terms if those descriptions are meaningful to them.

“I feel red and spiky.”

“I feel completely wrung out.”

“Everything feels buzzy.”

“I feel like I need to crawl out of my skin.”

“I don’t know what the emotion is, but I need some space.”

Those descriptions may tell you something important.

The goal does not have to be winning a vocabulary competition.

“Near enough” can be enough

There are good reasons to become more aware of emotional experiences.

Recognising what is happening may give you a little more space between having an emotion and automatically responding to it. Being able to describe your experience can also make communication easier, particularly when another person is trying to understand what you need. Harris identifies these as two important functions of noticing and labelling emotions: creating some separation from the experience and supporting communication.

But greater emotional precision is not automatically better.

If trying to identify exactly which emotion you are experiencing becomes frustrating, exhausting or another thing you feel you are “failing” at, it may defeat the purpose.

Sometimes:

“I feel bad, I’m completely wired and I need ten minutes alone.”

is enough.

In fact, Harris explicitly argues that the first two layers, understanding the general feeling state and the associated urge, can sometimes provide enough information without a conventional emotion label at all.

How can a psychologist help with difficulty identifying emotions?

If difficulty recognising emotions is creating problems for you, therapy does not have to involve repeatedly asking “and how does that make you feel?” until an answer magically appears.

A psychologist might instead help you notice patterns in your internal experiences, understand body signals, explore what happens before and after particular reactions, experiment with different ways of describing your experience, and work out what information is actually useful to you.

The aim is not to teach you the “correct” way to experience emotions.

It is to help you understand your own experience well enough to make choices, communicate what you need and navigate situations that matter to you.

Frequently asked questions about alexithymia

Is alexithymia a mental health diagnosis?

Alexithymia is generally conceptualised as a multidimensional psychological construct or trait rather than a standalone mental health diagnosis. It describes differences in identifying and describing emotional experiences.

Does alexithymia mean you don’t have emotions?

No. Difficulty identifying or describing an emotion does not mean there is no emotional experience occurring. Someone may experience strong physical sensations, behavioural urges or distress while finding it difficult to put those experiences into words.

Is alexithymia part of autism?

Not necessarily. Alexithymia is more common among autistic people, but many autistic people do not experience significant alexithymia, and alexithymia also occurs in non-autistic people.

What if an emotion wheel doesn’t work for me?

You do not have to start with an emotion word. Try noticing whether the experience feels pleasant or unpleasant, whether your activation or energy feels high or low, and what you feel like doing. You can then consider whether an emotion label adds anything useful.

Do I need to learn to label my emotions?

Only if doing so is useful to you.

As Harris emphasises, emotional awareness work should connect with the person’s own goals rather than being imposed simply because a therapeutic model says it is important.