What Are the Hidden Messages in Emotional Signals?

A signal is a cue that conveys information. Some signals, like traffic lights, provide vital information, telling you when to stop (red) and when it is safe (green) to go through an intersection. Your body also signals you. Pain is a bodily signal that alerts you to a site of injury or internal damage or disease. Imagine what life would be like without a pain messaging system. Sadly, there are cases of children born with defective pain receptors. Their parents constantly watch over them, lest they suffer a serious injury without realizing it, possibly even bleeding out from a wound without knowing they were injured.

Emotional responses are bodily signals, but do you know how to read them?

Reading Emotional Signals

Emotions are bodily signals that something important requires our attention:

• Worry is a signal that a threat is looming.
• Fear is a signal that a physical or psychological threat is present, as when we suddenly encounter a snake when walking in the woods, or when we await a call from our doctor with our biopsy results.
• Anger is a signal that we feel we've been treated unfairly.
• Frustration is a signal that our efforts to achieve our goals are thwarted.
• Guilt is a signal that we blame ourselves for our failures or disappointments or for acting in ways that violate our moral standards.
• Sadness signals disappointment or despair about ourselves or the world at large. When we are sad, everything is cast in a negative or blue light. Speaking of the colors of the emotional spectrum, we say we are blue with sadness, red with anger, and green with jealousy. In reading these emotional signals, we need to decode what they are telling us.

Decoding the Signal

Decoding a bodily signal involves connecting the feeling to an underlying thought that drives it. In this post, I have focused on how distorted thoughts that ramble through our minds leave negative emotions in their wake. Like many of the people I work with in my therapy practice, you may be more aware of your feeling states than the thoughts that trigger them.

Many people believe that life events cause their emotional reactions. After all, attention is outer-directed and our perspective is one of looking out upon the world outside ourselves. We tend not to focus on the interior world of the mind, not unless we make an active effort to look inwardly. The takeaway message is the need to focus attention inwardly to capture the disturbing thoughts that trigger disturbing emotions.

Think of it this way: Feeling states are difficult to ignore but thoughts come and go. Emotions are sticky but thoughts are ephemeral. That said, we can use our feelings as cues to identify the thoughts that trigger them.

Let Your Feelings Be Your Guide

If you are feeling angry, reflect on the thoughts passing through your mind at that moment in time. Identify who it is, or maybe what it is, that provoked you, and identify the judgments you form in your mind about their actions—judgments that such-and-such is unfair or unjust and must be punished, judgments that breed anger and resentment. Capture what you mutter to yourself under your breath. By controlling these underlying thoughts, you can control the emotional responses that follow them.

To Control the Emotion, Control the Thought

A favorite touchpoint for me are the writings of the Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180 CE). With Marcus, we find statements that reflect on how we can control our emotions by controlling our thoughts.

Marcus reminds us that it’s all in how we perceive things; that we are in control of our thoughts and can choose to see things differently. If someone offends us, we can try to set them right, but if they can’t or won’t mend their ways, why should we spend our time stewing in anger? Or put another way, is it more likely to be able to control other people than it is to control how you respond to them?

Five Steps to Becoming an Emotion Signal Decoder

1. Read the signal. Are you feeling angry or frustrated? Fearful or worried? Sad or lonely? Emotional expressions have some common features (like bodily arousal), but they also have unique fingerprints. Anger, for instance, may be associated with feeling hot under the collar, whereas frustration may be accompanied by irritation and impatience. Worry is a generalized feeling of apprehension or foreboding, whereas fear is a response to a particular object or situation and can literally stop you in your tracks.
2. Read the environment. Something is setting you off, so take stock of your situation. Did something happen that thwarted your efforts to accomplish your goals, like just missing the bus or being told that the restaurant no longer makes your favorite dish, the one you’ve been looking forward to all week (sorry, that’s a personal aside)? What are the precipitants—the events in your environment—that precede your emotional responses?
3. Read your thoughts. Get a handle on the thoughts popping into your head. What was your read on the situation? What were you saying to yourself under your breath? Importantly, understand that no one or no thing can push your emotional buttons. You get angry by saying angering things to yourself and anxious or fearful when you have anxious or fearful thoughts or self-statements. So if you are feeling angry, anxious, sad, jealous, worried, guilty, or fearful, take notice of what you were thinking at that very moment in time. Stop and ask yourself, “What thoughts are on my mind? What am I saying to myself under my breath?”
4. Jot down your thought triggers. Keep a personal diary or electronic record of your thought triggers, so you can be better prepared to respond by talking back to yourself rationally and calmly the next time they enter your mind.
5. Talk sense to yourself. In other posts, we examine how our thoughts underlie our emotional responses. Like a dog on a leash, our emotional reactions tag along after our thoughts. Angering thoughts induce anger, but what are angering thoughts? Fearful thoughts induce fear, but what are fearful thoughts? Check out our other entries to learn more about the particular thoughts that trigger different emotional responses. You may also want to consult a cognitive behavior therapist to help you identify triggering thoughts, understand their origins, and learn ways of replacing them with more constructive thoughts.

General Disclaimer: The content here and in other blog posts on the Minute Therapist is intended for informational purposes only and not for diagnosis, evaluation, or treatment of mental health disorders. If you are concerned about your emotional well-being or experiencing any significant mental health problems, I encourage you to consult a licensed mental health professional in your area for a thorough evaluation.

© 2021 Jeffrey S. Nevid

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