EI International / Noticing Your Own State

The gap between feeling something and knowing what it is

Having a reaction is automatic; identifying it is a separate step that often does not happen.

Most of the time you are not confused about your feelings, you are simply not attending to them. There is a reaction running, it is affecting your tone and your choices, and no part of you has stopped to put a word on it. Then someone asks how you are and you say fine, which is not a lie so much as a report from a system that never checked. The gap between feeling and knowing is not mysterious. It is the ordinary result of attention being elsewhere, usually on the task, the screen or the next thing you have to say.

The gap widens under load. When there is a lot happening, the reaction gets less attention rather than more, even though it is doing more work on your behaviour. This is why people are most likely to be wrong about their own state precisely when it matters, and why asking yourself how you feel in a calm moment is easy and mostly useless. The interesting question is what you can notice while something is going on, which is much less than the reflective version and much more valuable. In practice the achievable target is coarse: something is up, and it is roughly of this kind.

Coarse is fine. You do not need a precise account of your inner life to act better; you need enough to know that your current judgement is being coloured. Knowing that you are frustrated rather than merely busy changes what you do with the next email. Knowing that you are flat rather than unconvinced changes whether you should decide today. The accuracy required is the accuracy required for the decision at hand, and it is usually low. Chasing more than that tends to turn into a hobby of self examination, which is not the same activity and does not produce the same benefits.