Confucian scholars had a practice called 'rectification of names' — the idea that sloppy language produces sloppy thinking, and sloppy thinking produces sloppy living. Xunzi, the most psychologically rigorous of the Confucian thinkers, extended this into something surprisingly relevant to mental wellness: he argued that suffering is often prolonged not by circumstances but by mislabeling them. Calling temporary exhaustion 'who I am' is not just imprecise — it is, in Xunzi's framework, a kind of cognitive error that reshapes how you act and what you expect. The practical move today is not journaling or reframing in the usual sense, but something more precise: when a difficult mental state shows up, resist naming it as an identity ('I am anxious') and try naming it as an event ('anxiety is present right now'). The distance between those two phrasings is not semantic — it changes what you believe is possible next.

How do you habitually name your difficult mental states — as facts about yourself, or as events passing through you? And has that naming ever quietly closed a door?

Drawing from Confucian Philosophy — Xunzi