There’s a feeling you can’t quite place. Not quite anxiety, not quite sadness, not quite exhaustion. Something else, with its own texture, its own cause, its own remedy, if only you could figure out what remedy applied.
In the absence of a name, you probably do what most of us do. You reach for the closest available word — “stress,” “burnout,” “feeling off” — and move on. The label doesn’t quite fit, but it’s close enough to talk about.
The problem is that the label shapes the response. Call it stress and you think about stress remedies. Call it burnout and you think about rest. Call it feeling off and you think about sleeping it off. If the state was none of those things, none of the remedies work; and you conclude the problem is stubbornly persistent, when really the problem is that you misnamed it.
We have this experience constantly. Our vocabulary for the inner life is astonishingly coarse compared to the resolution of what we actually feel. We have one word, “anxiety,” for at least four genuinely different phenomena: a stable trait (you are an anxious person), a behavior pattern (you anxiously check things), a sudden state (you’re in a panic right now), and a persistent mood (you’ve been on edge for a week). Different causes. Different timelines. Different interventions. One word.
This is not a failure of your introspection. It’s a failure of the language you were handed.
I’ve spent years working on this problem, trying to build a more precise vocabulary for the inner life. Not because I think naming is everything, but because naming is a precondition for most other things: for self-understanding, for communicating with the people close to us, for changing the parts of ourselves that we actually can change, and for accepting the parts that we can’t.
The result is a framework called the Human Elements System — HES for short — that tries to name more of what’s going on inside us, and to distinguish the things we tend to confuse. 343 named elements so far, organized into four interlocking layers. A book laying the whole thing out comes in September 2026. The Periodic Self is where I write about what’s inside it in the meantime.
But you don’t need the system to benefit from the underlying move. Every time you upgrade the language you use for what you feel, you upgrade what you can notice, what you can communicate, and what you can change. Most of us walk around with vocabularies good enough for small talk but not nearly precise enough for an examined life.
This Substack is where I try to offer some better names. Some posts will be about specific states or traits: small, practical, immediately useful. Some will be about the architecture of how they fit together — slower, more foundational, about reshaping the lens you look through. All of it is free. All of it will stay free.
And if any of it lands, or doesn’t, I’d like to hear.
Welcome.
Areg