Intellectualizing – The Friendly Mind

🎯 What Is Intellectualizing?

Intellectualizing is the tendency to describe how you feel emotionally with abstract, conceptual, or metaphorical words as a means of avoiding the discomfort of using specific emotion words.

📊 Types of Intellectualizing

There are three especially common forms of intellectualizing:

Metaphors. Wonderful for poetry, but generally unhelpful for emotional health, using metaphors to describe how we feel emotionally is a common means of putting distance on or avoiding how we actually feel. The vagueness and ambiguity of metaphorical language allows us to avoid dealing with the frequently uncomfortable specifics of our emotional experience. Spread too thin instead of anxious, down instead of sad; tense instead of irritable.
Bucket Terms. Bucket terms are words or phrases that act as a container for many possible feelings. For example, people frequently used the term stressed as a bucket term for muscle tension, anxiety, irritability, fatigue, and worry. The key is to realize that the bucket is not the same thing as the water (or whatever the bucket is holding). Substituting the container for the thing itself is a subtle sleight of hand many people fall into as a way to avoid the discomfort that goes along with acknowledging the raw emotion itself.
Jargon. It’s increasingly common for people to use mental health jargon as a substitute for the plain emotional feeling. For example, instead of saying I’m sad it’s I’m a little depressed. Instead of saying I was pretty scared it’s that was a little traumatic. Again, the (typically unconscious) motivation here is to avoid the raw feeling associated with plain emotion by substituting in a more conceptual or intellectual version of the feeling. As therapy culture becomes more common and accepted, this trend is increasingly common.

👀 Examples of Intellectualizing

You’re angry with your spouse for not putting the dishes away. After dinner, they can tell something’s wrong and ask you how you’re feeling. So, instead of saying I’m angry because you left the dishes out again you say Nothing. I’m just a little bugged right now. Bugged is a metaphor. Angry is an emotion word.
After getting some bad news about your sick parent… you show up to work and your coworker asks if you’re doing okay. You respond by saying: Yeah, I’m just a little stressed. Stressed is a bucket term. Sad and anxious are emotion words.
You’re feeling nervous about an upcoming speech… you have to deliver at your best friend’s 20th wedding anniversary. As you’re waiting for your turn to speak, in your self-talk you tell yourself: Stop being a wuss and get it together! Being a wuss is a generalization/metaphor and intellectualization. Nervous is an emotion word.

😬 Problems Associated with Intellectualizing

Emotional Fragility. The more you avoid difficult emotions—including through the use of intellectualizing—the less resilient you are to them in the future. On the other hand, the less you avoid emotions and the more you’re willing to acknowledge, confront, and tolerate them, the more emotionally resilient and confident you become.
Low Self-Awareness. It’s difficult to listen to your emotions and learn anything from them if you chronically ignore them by intellectualizing. But if you’re willing to label them plainly, you become more aware of how you’re feeling in different circumstances, what types of behaviors contribute to your feelings, and what you need to do to feel or act better in emotionally challenging scenarios.
Chronic Anxiety. If you habitually avoid something, your brain learns to fear it. So, if you habitually avoid your emotions by intellectualizing them, you’ll become increasingly afraid of them. And since you have emotions all the time, you’re going to start feeling chronically anxious.
Loneliness and Relationship Struggles. It’s difficult to maintain healthy relationships if you don’t understand and know how to deal with difficult emotions—either your own or other people’s—in a healthy way. And it’s awfully hard to understand emotions and know how to deal with them if you never practice because you’re in the habit of avoiding them by intellectualizing. The end result of this is that it can be difficult to cultivate or sustain intimate, high-quality relationships in your life. Chronic loneliness and/or interpersonal conflict often result.

💡 Key Insights About Intellectualizing

It’s not about the words, it’s about the motivation behind the words. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with saying you feel stressed, bugged, or overwhelmed. What matters is why you’re using those words and not plain emotion words. The essence of intellectualizing is that you substitute conceptual words for plain emotion words in order to avoid feeling the emotions themselves. It’s a defense mechanism. And like all defense mechanisms and coping strategies, you’re trading short-term relief for long-term suffering.
Intellectualizing isn’t always a problem. If you intellectualize thoughtfully and for a good reason, it’s not necessarily a problem. For example: There are many work situations where it may not be appropriate to discuss precisely how you feel emotionally, and choosing to use more conceptual or metaphorical language might be the better decision. Intellectualizing tends to become a problem when it is habitual and reactive as opposed to infrequent and deliberate. That being said, most people do more intellectualizing—and do it far more reactively/unthinkingly—than they realize.
Intellectualizing is different than alexithymia. Alexithymia is a condition characterized by significant difficulty recognizing, describing, and expressing your emotions. The vast majority of people who intellectualize, however, have the ability to recognize and express their emotions, they’ve simply gotten into a habit of avoiding them. And while chronic intellectualizing can make it harder to identify and express your emotions, it’s much more an interference than a deficit.

🛠️ Tips and Tools for Dealing with Intellectualizing

Say it like a six-year-old. A simple but effective trick to break the habit of intellectualizing is to ask yourself: When faced with a difficult emotional experience, how would a six-year-old describe what I’m feeling? Six-year-olds describe their emotional state with terms like sad, mad, scared, and happy; they don’t say things like overwhelmed, stressed, or depressed.
Pay attention to other people’s intellectualizing. Sometimes it’s easier to start noticing your own intellectualizing if you get better at noticing it in other people. So, whenever you observe someone else being upset, pay attention to how they describe the way they feel and label those descriptions as either intellectualizations or emotion words.
Keep a list of emotion words. Create a notes file on your phone called Emotion Words. Then, anytime you hear or read a good emotion word, jot it down in your little notes file. This will help increase your emotional fluency—your ability to easily use emotional language.
Look out for intellectualizing triggers. Most people intellectualize a lot in certain situations and far less in others. If you can learn to spot these patterns—people or situations that tend to trigger your habit of intellectualizing—you’ll be better able to anticipate your intellectualizing and substitute some plain emotion words instead.
Practice validating other people’s emotions. Validation means reminding yourself or someone else that whatever you’re/they’re feeling emotionally—however painful—isn’t bad or dangerous and is okay. So, if your kid loses a baseball game and is visibly sad afterward, you might say something like: Hey buddy, I know it feels sad to lose, but it’s okay. I feel sad a lot of the time after losing too. The idea here is that the more practice you get describing emotions—even other people’s—the easier it will be to describe your own.
Ask people to (gently) call you out on your intellectualizing. Have a conversation about intellectualizing. It could be with your partner, kids, a good friend, a coworker—anyone really. Then, at the end of the conversation, ask them to let you know (you can make it fun by creating a codeword or a silly hand signal) anytime they notice you intellectualizing.

🧩 What to Read Next

Work with Me

Once a year, I take a handful of students through a 4-week masterclass called Mood Mastery where I teach the key skills for emotional resilience.

Learn more about Mood Mastery →