I have news to share. FeelWise is now a Trusted Partner of npnHub.

npnHub is a global professional community for applied neuroscience. It brings together coaches, educators, clinicians, researchers, and leaders who use brain science in their work. It is also home to the npnInstitute, which sets competency standards for the field.

npnHub lists partners it has vetted. You can find FeelWise on the npn Trusted Partners page, next to training providers, research groups, and tools that apply neuroscience in real settings.

Why I joined

I built FeelWise to help people name what they feel.

That work sits close to the science of how the brain learns. I wanted to be around people who study that science and test it in practice.

npnHub gives me that.

A community with one shared interest

The people in npnHub come from many fields. Coaching. Education. Therapy. Leadership. Research.

What they share is one question: how does the brain change, and how do we use that well?

That common ground makes the conversations useful. I have already made good connections with people working on the same problems from different angles. Some build tools. Some run programs. Some run studies.

The learning is constant. npnHub hosts roundtables, expert panels, research updates, and small peer groups called Brain Pods. Members work in countries around the world, so I hear how neuroplasticity research is moving in many places, not just one.

It also keeps me honest. When you work next to people who read the research, you check your claims against it.

What neuroplasticity is

Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change with experience.

Your brain is a network of cells called neurons. They pass signals across connections. When a path is used often, those connections get stronger. When a path is not used, they get weaker.

This does not stop in childhood. It happens across your whole life.

Every skill you have learned is plasticity at work. Reading. Driving. Playing an instrument. Three things drive it: repetition, attention, and feedback.

Emotional skill works the same way. Naming a feeling is a skill. The more you practice, the easier it gets.

How FeelWise helps

Two lines of research shape how I think about this.

Putting feelings into words. In a 2007 brain imaging study at UCLA, people who labeled the emotion in a photo showed less activity in the amygdala, the brain's threat detector. They showed more activity in a part of the prefrontal cortex linked to regulation. Naming the feeling changed the brain's response to it.

Telling feelings apart. Researchers call this emotional granularity. It is the ability to tell frustrated from disappointed from resentful. People with higher granularity tend to handle stress and strong emotion better. Granularity is not fixed. It grows with vocabulary and practice.

Here is what I have seen over and over: most people do not lack the courage to talk about feelings. They lack the words.

FeelWise is built to close that gap.

  • A visual vocabulary. 156 Feelie characters, each tied to one feeling. You do not have to find the word from scratch. You pick the one that fits.
  • Practice you can repeat. The cards and the FeelWise app make naming a feeling quick, so you do it often. Repetition is how the brain learns.
  • Shared language. When a family, a team, or a client and clinician use the same set of words, a feeling named by one person is understood by the other.

One note: FeelWise is a tool for reflection. It is not a medical or therapeutic device, and it does not replace professional care.

What comes next

I will keep learning inside npnHub and share what I learn here.

If you are part of the npn community, I would like to meet you. You can find FeelWise on our npn partner profile.

To learn more about npnHub, visit www.npnhub.com.

— Tina Schweiger, Founder, FeelWise

References

  • Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.
  • Barrett, L. F., Gross, J., Christensen, T. C., & Benvenuto, M. (2001). Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion, 15(6), 713–724.
  • Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10–16.
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