What Can Our Emotions Tell Us About Our Work?
On turning toward the next thing and feelings as data.
I was recently talking to a friend about a career change he’s considering. He told me he had decided to start moving in the direction of The Next Thing, the thing that’s been on his mind for some time now, the thing that he’s been wanting to do.
He said that once he’d made that decision, just the decision to reorient himself toward what’s next, he immediately started feeling better about his work. Ostensibly, nothing had changed, but internally he had taken the first step toward what was next and that had created room for a different feeling.
It reminded me of when my co-founder and I finally decided to shut down our startup.
We had kept it running for some time knowing that our hopes for the growth we’d once imagined had already faded. He had taken another job and I was considering investing more of myself into independent coaching and consulting, but we hadn’t yet accepted the idea of giving up on the software company - of admitting defeat.
In some ways I could feel that the right answer was to shut the company down and to move on to what was next. But I hadn’t given myself permission to acknowledge the feeling because I still wanted to believe that it was possible to achieve our original vision.
These feelings - sometimes big and obvious, sometimes subtle and fleeting - are important.
They are the bodily data that inform our thinking and our decision making whether we acknowledge them or not. For example, anger promotes a desire for change and risk-seeking, fear tends to promote pessimism and risk-aversion1. These kinds of emotions and reactions may lead us astray in making decisions when what is needed is steadfastness an/or optimism.
But perhaps there is a deeper logic to our ongoing emotional processing.
USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has written extensively about how feelings shape our behavior in both individual and collective ways. In his book The Strange Order of Things2 he makes the case that emotions are essential catalysts in moving organisms toward a positive state of homeostasis - that is, toward more flourishing and away from languishing. As he put it:
The homeostatic process strives for more than a mere steady state. Considered in retrospect, it is as if single cells or multicellular organisms were striving for a particular class or steady state conducive to flourishing. This is a natural upregulation that can be described as aiming at the future of the organism, an inclination to project itself in time by means of optimized life regulation and possible progeny. One might say that organisms want their health and then some (p. 45).
He later goes on:
Feelings are experiences of certain aspects of the state of life within an organism. Those experiences are not mere decoration. They accomplish something extraordinary: a moment-to-moment report on the state of life in the interior of an organism (p. 104).
This book is a lot to take in, but in my small-minded way I read Damasio as saying that even at the cellular level we are designed to continually move toward more. That homeostasis is less like equilibrium - resting balance - and more like a virtuous spiral toward flourishing - balance, plus. Our feelings, both big and small, both conscious and subconscious, are at all times providing information and pushing and prodding and pulling and nudging us in that direction.
Which is all to say, if you feel bad about work, that’s a signal. And if you turn toward something else and it feels better, that’s a signal.
Now don’t misread me here as saying the pleasure principle is the only signal to attend to. We continually intellectualize our feelings, we turn them into ideas and concepts, and the hedonic impulse to seek pleasure and avoid pain is not always useful, especially in circumstances where choosing to engage in/tolerate some amount of discomfort/suffering may lead to more valuable outcomes. And there’s simply stuff about work that won’t always be enjoyable, even when (perhaps especially when) we’re doing the very thing we think we should most be doing.
But there is data to attend to in the feelings.
When you’re unsure what to do about your work, ask your body. It may be telling you more than you think.
Zaki, J. (2020). Integrating empathy and interpersonal emotion regulation. Annual review of psychology, 71, 517-540.
Damasio, A. (2019). The strange order of things: Life, feeling, and the making of cultures. Vintage.