Emotions Are a Terrible Narrator and a Great Data Source, Simultaneously
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
Emotions have a bad reputation as sources of insight, and not without reason — the story an emotion tells about itself in the moment ("this is happening because you don't care about me") is frequently inaccurate, shaped more by the pattern being triggered than by the actual present-tense situation. As narrators, emotions are unreliable.
But the same emotion that narrates badly is, simultaneously, an excellent piece of raw data: its timing, its intensity, its specific flavor are precise and highly informative signals about which pattern just got triggered, even when the emotion's own explanation for itself is wrong. The feeling is data. The feeling's story about itself is not.
This distinction resolves what looks like a contradiction — "trust your feelings" and "don't trust your feelings" are both, in a sense, correct, once split into their actual components. Trust the emotion as evidence that something specific just occurred. Don't trust its immediate narrative account of what that something was or why.
Treating emotions this way — as data to be logged rather than narration to be believed — converts them from something to manage or suppress into something genuinely useful: the most immediate, real-time signal available that a pattern has just activated.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai