Emotional vocabulary or emotional granularity means how many words you have to describe your emotions and physical sensations.
Increasing my emotional vocabulary improves the quality of my decisions during challenging situations when I need to rely on my instincts for lack of time to think.
A simpler way of stating that, now, is: Working on feelings words fine-tunes my instincts.
I used to have such a small emotional vocabulary until I started working on it a few years ago. I used to make too many bad impulsive decisions. Emotional granularity was one of the main keys in changing that for the better.
Having precise words for how I'm feeling helps me remember guiding values and principles that I can use that have worked well in the past when I felt that way. It's like having a waypoint, or a marker, or some starting point to remember a string of thoughts on a subject. The emotional words become connected to the feelings and sensations.
When the difficult situation passes, it's important to reflect on how the decisions were made so my instincts can be updated to be even better in the next emergency.