EI International / Noticing Your Own State

How an unnamed reaction leaks into a decision

Feelings you have not identified do not disappear, they get reclassified as reasons.

The characteristic move is not that emotion overrides judgement. It is that emotion becomes judgement, wearing the clothes of an argument. You do not think you are irritated, so the objection you raise feels like an objection about the proposal. You do not notice you are anxious, so the risk you emphasise seems like the obviously important risk. Afterwards the reasoning still looks sound, because the reasoning was real. It was just recruited. This is why the leak is hard to catch from the inside: nothing feels emotional, everything feels reasoned, and the tell is in the pattern rather than in the feeling.

There are practical signals. If your position on something changed in the twenty minutes after a bad conversation, the conversation is probably in it. If you find yourself unusually certain, and the certainty arrived quickly, that is worth a second look, since speed and confidence often mark a reaction rather than an analysis. If your objection keeps changing shape while your conclusion stays fixed, the conclusion came first. None of these prove anything on their own. They are prompts to check, and checking costs very little compared with the cost of a decision made in the shape of a mood.

The remedy is unimpressive: delay, when delay is available. Not because time makes you wise, but because the reaction usually decays faster than the situation does, and what remains after a day is a better guide to what you actually think. Where delay is not available, saying the state out loud can do some of the same work. Telling a colleague that you are annoyed and that you might be overweighting one thing does not make you objective, but it flags the possibility to somebody who can push back, and it makes it harder for you to dress the reaction up afterwards.