Other Languages Have Words for How You Feel. English Just Has "Fine."

Language & Wellbeing

Other Languages Have Words for How You Feel. English Just Has "Fine."

Fine is working extremely hard and it deserves a break.

By Cian O'Driscoll  |  Low Tide Calm  |  May 2026  |  6 min read

If someone asks how you are and you say "fine", what does that actually mean? Could be great. Could be quietly falling apart. Could be somewhere in the vast grey middle where most of us spend most of our time. English is remarkably unhelpful here. "Fine" has been doing the work of about forty different feelings for centuries and frankly it is exhausted.

Other languages are better at this. Not better as in superior, just more specific. They have words for emotional states that English can only gesture vaguely at, and some of them are startlingly useful once you know they exist. This is a tour of the best ones.

Fair warning: this is not a linguistics lecture. It is just a collection of words that might make you feel slightly less alone in whatever it is you are currently feeling and calling "fine."

The Heavy Ones First

Toska (Russian). There is no clean translation. The writer Vladimir Nabokov described it as a longing with nothing to long for, a dull ache of the soul, a vague restlessness. Not depression, not grief, not quite sadness. Something lower and quieter. The feeling of sitting in a room and not knowing why you cannot settle.

If you have ever described yourself as "just a bit flat lately" and struggled to explain what you meant beyond that, toska is probably the word you were looking for. It maps very naturally onto what a lot of people experience in the early stages of burnout before they have a name for it.

Aware (Japanese, pronounced ah-wah-reh). A gentle, bittersweet sensitivity to the world. An awareness that things are beautiful partly because they do not last. Autumn leaves. A conversation that goes well. A Sunday afternoon. Aware is what you feel when something is lovely and you notice, almost at the same time, that it is already passing.

This one sits right at the heart of mindfulness practice. The ability to be present with something good without immediately trying to hold onto it is one of the harder skills to develop, and aware is the feeling that comes when you get it right.

The Ones That Explain a Lot

Sonder. Technically this one was coined rather than inherited. It comes from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a project by writer John Koenig that invents words for feelings that do not have them. Sonder means the realisation that every person you pass on the street is living a life as complex, exhausting, and full as your own. Every stranger in a coffee shop, every car on the motorway. All of them with their own versions of toska. Their own version of fine.

It went viral because it named something people recognised immediately. That is exactly what good emotional vocabulary does.

Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan, a language from Tierra del Fuego). The shared look between two people who both want the same thing and are both waiting for the other one to say it first. If you have ever sat in a meeting where everyone knows something needs to be addressed and nobody wants to be the one to bring it up, that is mamihlapinatapai. It is also the look exchanged across a table when the bill arrives.

The Good Ones

Not all of these are heavy. Some of them are just the vocabulary of things going well.

Hygge (Danish/Norwegian). The closest English gets is "cosy" but hygge is more deliberate than that. It is the active creation of warmth, safety, and presence. Candles on a dark evening. Good food with people you actually like. The feeling of being exactly where you are supposed to be. Hygge is not passive comfort. It is a value. The Danes treat it as something worth making time for, which is a fairly different relationship with rest than a lot of us have.

It is also, for what it is worth, the opposite of the chronic overstimulation that drives stress and overwhelm. Your nervous system knows what hygge is even if it has not had enough of it lately.

Meraki (Greek). Putting your soul into what you do. Not performing. Not grinding. Actually caring about something enough that a piece of you goes into it. This one is particularly relevant if you are recovering from a period where work stopped feeling like anything at all, which is one of the quieter signs of burnout that tends to get missed.

Fernweh (German). The ache for somewhere you have never been. Not homesickness but its opposite: a longing for a place that does not yet exist in your experience. If hygge is arriving, fernweh is before you leave.

The Hiberno Bonus

This would not be a Low Tide Calm post without at least one Irish angle. Irish has its own entry in this category: suaimhneas. A deep sense of calm, ease of mind, and stillness. Not just relaxed. The specific feeling of your nervous system actually settling. There is no English word for it either.

We covered it in more depth in the Irish language post, but it belongs here too because it is one of the better descriptions of what breathwork and the Low Tide Calm app are actually trying to help you reach. Not a concept. A felt state. The Irish just happened to name it first.

What "Fine" Is Actually Covering

The reason these words matter is not that English is a bad language. It is that emotional vocabulary shapes emotional experience. When you do not have a word for something, it is harder to locate, harder to communicate, and harder to do anything useful with. Toska stays vague and heavy. Aware gets lost in "I felt a bit weird." Meraki has no home so it gets folded into productivity instead.

Part of what emotional regulation actually involves is getting more specific about what is going on. Not in a clinical, worksheets-and-flowcharts way. Just in the basic sense of being able to tell the difference between tired and sad, between restless and anxious, between a bad day and something that has been going on for longer than you have admitted.

"Fine" is a useful word. It covers a lot of ground quickly in social situations and there is nothing wrong with it. But if fine is the only tool you have for everything between excellent and crisis, it is doing a lot of heavy lifting for one four-letter word.

If you are based in Wicklow and want to work on that in person, one-to-one sessions are launching from late summer 2026. Or if you want somewhere to start now, the app is free and the who this is for page might tell you whether any of this sounds familiar.

Either way. Glad you are here. Even if you are, technically, fine.

You know what you are. Even when you do not have the word for it yet.