Naming

Giving names to things you are reflecting on can help with your ability to process things effectively and to engage in perspective shifting.

There are various things it can be helpful to assign names to:

• Emotions — Naming the emotions you experience can help to reduce their impact on your thinking. A useful tool is the Plutchik emotion wheel. But you may want to undertake a more detailed emotional categorisation.

• Meaning schemas — Giving names to your established patterns of evaluating and responding to your experiences can help you to become more aware of their influence on you and to recognise the possibility of alternatives. Schema therapy has named a number of maladaptive schema modes which is similar to the ego state model of transactional analysis. 

• I-positions and alternative selves — Giving names to different aspects or alternative versions of yourself (e.g. 'Investigative Me', 'Efficient Me') can help to crystallise internal conflicts when using dialogical approaches.

• Scenarios  and counterfactuals — Giving snappy names to alternative future or past scenarios (e.g. 'Count to 10', 'Ask first', 'Assume the positive') can help you to analyse and remember them.

One use of generative AI, such as ChatGPT, is to ask it to help you to come up with names things that you describe.

Dangers of naming

There is always a danger of mistaking the label for the reality. Attempting to encapsulate complex ideas, circumstances or people via a simple term can lead to over-generalisation and stereotyping.

It is always useful to examine the names we give to things in order to see how these names affect the way we think about those things (see socio-linguistic analysis).

This can be particularly true if we are using metaphorical thinking if we focus only on the similarities and ignore the differences.