An emotion is any sensation that we as human beings have assigned a name to. By naming emotions we have chosen how they should be reacted to when they occur. For example, when you are sad, you know how you should respond, and so will others if you experience it in their presence. However, there are actually many emotions that exist that currently do not have a categorization, yet.
For example, we are simulataneously blessed and cursed with the ability to understand our own mortality. Even with this knowledge, many people will still react in a panicked manner if they focus for too long on the fact that they will one day die. “For years I would get these sudden, stabbing chills when falling asleep, as I remembered that I was going to die one day,” stated John Koenig, or the individual that decided enough was enough and this emotion needed a name in order to be tamed.
Even though the Latin term memento mori, which means “remember (that you have) to die,” has actually existed since the time of Plato, there was never an English term for the feeling until Koenig. After some linguistic digging, he named the feeling moriturism. “Once I gave a name to it, it felt somehow OK,” he stated in Pyschology Today. “Recognizable. Less an abyss than a well-marked pothole. Now, it doesn't scare me as much because I feel like I can control it.”
There are many other emotions like moriturism, and many people are faced with these familiar yet unknown feelings regularly. Many psychologists believe that once a name is given to an overwhelming feeling, we are better able to know what to do with it.
Other feelings that people have been known to have with no known name:
- Sense of frustration, anger, or hatred when someone in line ahead of you gets the last of something.
- Crying brought on by an overwhelming sense of happiness, joy, or peacefulness.
- Heightened sense brought on by fear in the presence of an animal.
- When you have so much work to do that you enter a paralysis like state of procrastination and do nothing.
- How the sun feels after a long day spent indoors.
- Feeling brought on by a place that no longer exists – wistful plus longing plus regretful.
Here are a few complex emotions, others have already thought up names for:
- Sonder: When you realize that everyone you see, everyone who passes you has their own complex life.
- Zenosyne: When you feel that time keeps going by faster and faster. Think about how time passed when you were a 10-year-old compared to the way you think of it passing now.
- Chrysalism: Calm, relaxed feeling you have when you feel safe indoors during a storm.
- Monachopsis: Weird feeling that you are out of place.
- Lacheism: The desire to be struck by a disaster and survive such as a plane crash or fire.
- Jouska: When you play a conversation over and over in your head, but it never actually occurred.
Resources:
Pyschology Today – Odd Emotions
Mother Nature Network – 7 Emotions That Don't Have Names
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows