Mind & Awareness
What My Emotions Are Telling Me
Also called: feelings as information
- Personal interest
- Observed in experiments
- Working interpretation
Emotions shape what I pay attention to, what I do and what I remember, and they can point to what I value or what I need. I want to take them seriously without treating every feeling as a final judgment about what is true.
What value is this emotion pointing toward?
The idea
An emotion is a fast summary. Before I have worked anything out, it tells me something seems important, threatening, unfair or good. That summary can be wise, because it draws on experience I cannot spell out (The Mind Working Below Awareness). It can also be wrong, because it can attach itself to the wrong cause. The rainy-day study is a gentle example: a mood caused by the weather leaks into a judgment about a whole life.
An example
Steady, one of my side projects, has a skill called "Name the feeling." One version asks you to choose a feeling word and notice where you are comfortable or tense, with no need to force the feeling away. Its question is: "What might this feeling be asking you to notice?" Naming a feeling turns it from a verdict into a piece of information I can look at.
What I think (and don't know)
I think many strong reactions point to something I value. Frustration about a goal sometimes shows what the goal was really for (What My Goals Are Really For). Staying composed (Staying Clearheaded Under Pressure) then means responding to that signal on purpose, not pushing it down. What I don't know is how reliably I can tell a meaningful feeling from one that is mostly tiredness. I suspect the honest answer is "not very," at least without checking.
Where it connects
Emotions are one of the strongest pulls on attention (Attention Shapes Experience), which is part of why they shape so much of what I remember.
What this does not establish
Emotions carry useful information, but a feeling is not proof about the world. Feeling certain does not make something true, and feeling anxious does not show that something bad will happen.
Questions I'm still exploring
- How do I tell an emotion that carries a real message from one that is mostly tiredness or stress?
- What need sits underneath the feeling I keep having in the same kind of situation?
- How can I name a feeling honestly without letting it make the decision for me?
Sources and further reading
- Norbert Schwarz & Gerald L. Clore (1983), "Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45(3) — The sunny-day and rainy-day study behind the idea of feelings as information.
Working interpretation: drafted from my notes and interests for review. It is not a direct quotation, and I may still change it.