Why Stress Makes It Harder To Figure Out What You're Feeling
As many of us know too well, stress can seriously affect how accurately we perceive the world. And this in turn can affect our ability to make wise decisions based on information we take in. But according to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, stress may also affect another type of perception: a person’s sensitivity to what’s going on internally.
The authors give a great example of how stress degrades our ability to make the simplest decisions:
Imagine you have a huge and important project at work. The deadline is tomorrow, but you are far from finished and thus very stressed. Then your partner walks in, shows you a few color samples of different shades of white, and asks you which you like the most. You see little difference between them and say “They’re all white to me!” Indeed, research shows that the way we process information changes during stressful times: while some information becomes more relevant (your project), other information becomes less relevant.
The team wanted to see if this phenomenon extended to how we discern our own internal workings, and whether stress might predict a person’s ability (or inability) to differentiate his or her own emotions. Someone who is good at differentiating emotions might think, “I feel sad and slightly angry,” whereas someone who’s not very good at it might just think, “I feel bad.”
To look at how stress may affect things, the team gave university students phones that pinged them 10 times per day and asked what their emotional state was at that exact moment: In particular, the program asked them to rate how stressed, angry, sad, anxious, depressed, lonely, relaxed, happy, and cheerful they felt on a sliding scale of 0 to 100. This is a common method in studies trying to capture how a person is feeling on a moment-to-moment basis. By looking at how emotions fluctuated across time, the researchers were able to calculate how good each person was at differentiating emotions on a day-to-day basis, and correlate it with a person’s changing levels of stress.
They found that people were less good at emotion differentiation when they’re stressed vs. relaxed. The higher one’s stress level on a given day, the less they were able to tell what they were feeling the next day. Interestingly, it didn’t work the other way round.
“[S]tress predicted the level of emotion differentiation of the next day, but emotion differentiation did not predict stress on the next day,” the authors write, which suggests that there might be a causal connection.
The results have some interesting implications for the real world. One is that being able to identify accurately one’s emotions is good for mental health—this is also known as “affect labeling,” and people who are better at it are generally happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Research has also found that the act of labeling negative emotions can actually arrest the brain’s response to emotionally stressful images, which suggests that it really does have therapeutic value. And people from psychologists to Buddhist monks have extolled the benefits of labeling emotions, since describing a sensation accurately, including those present in anxiety and depression, tends to rob it of its power.
Being able to differentiate emotions, the authors write, is also linked to lower levels of neuroticism, higher levels of self-esteem and more empathic accuracy, which is the ability to read other people’s emotions correctly. So there are lots of reasons why emotional discernment is important—and, happily, the study hints at the fact that it might be malleable. But the team would need to repeat the experiment in older adults, since the participants in the study were just entering college, and their brains may not be fully developed.
In the meantime, the study suggests that stress does affect how much we’re in touch with our own inner workings. And we might do well not to try to make decisions based on emotions when we’re stressed.