Recognizing the Cues

Recognizing the Cues

In psychology, insight is the extent to which you intuitively understand a situation. In particular, we are really interested in the extent to which you understand yourself, as well as the characteristics and attributes you possess, that contribute to various life situations.

For example, a person who has a well developed insight may understand that his failed relationships are a result of him trying to find a partner that is a carbon copy of his mother. He would appreciate that he is setting a standard for potential partners that they simply cannot meet. As a result, he is – perhaps on a subconscious level – sabotaging these relationships with his unspoken expectations.

Conversely, a person who struggles with insight may have a hard time understanding why she continues to overeat when she is stressed. She may not be able to connect the pattern, which began in childhood, where she was taught that food was used as a stress reliever.

The better our insight, the easier it is for us to acknowledge problems and identify a remedy. To build our insight, we need to look for patterns, cues that inform us and help us connect some of the dots.

Missing the Cues

How do you know when there is a problem? What signal is sent to let you know that there are issues that need to be addressed?

Our body – including our mental state – tells us that there is a problem through the use of distress. When you feel distressed about something, that is a clue – sent directly from your body – that there is a problem. And although our body tries to communicate this to us, we all too often ignore it or try to mask it with something else.

You see, we have been taught, since we were children, that feeling worried, sad, or angry is a bad thing. If you feel this way, you need to “get over it” as quickly as you can.  Because the purpose of life is to always feel good, right?

Well, what if we inadvertently created a situation where we are now ignoring the critical information that our body is trying to communicate? What if we have trained ourselves to ignore the important cues that our body was made to share with us?

Recalibrating Our Perspective

To reverse the effects of years’ worth of training in muffling our senses, we need to reacquaint ourselves with our body. But to do so, in a way that will be meaningful, we need to be systematic about it; much like we do when we are calibrating test equipment or machines.

We all know how to interpret situations where we are happy and feel good. That is a feeling that few can miss. However, recognizing the more uncomfortable, “negative” feelings is more challenging. Not because we don’t know what they feel like, but because we do not allow ourselves to experience them long enough to interpret them and understand their message.

 

For example, many of us deal with depressive symptoms. We experience episodes where we are down and sad. We have very little energy and want to seclude ourselves from others. Now, for most of us, depressive symptoms seem to hit us — BOOM — and there it is. But the reality is that there are often signs or cues present in the preceding days that let us know that the depressed mood is on the way, we just fail to recognize it. We do not pick up on those early cues.

A simple exercise to help us become better in tune with upcoming changes comes to us from the area of mindfulness. Here is what you need to do. Set an alarm on your phone to go off every three or four hours. When it does, take a few moments to sit quietly and really think about how you feel. First, jot some notes down about how your physical body feels – aches, pains, and discomfort. Be thorough and move from your feet up to your head. Consider everything.

Next, think about your mood. Are you happy, satisfied, sad, stressed, frustrated? Be as descriptive as you can as you note these feelings, because your goal is to look for patterns.

Finally, consider your energy levels. Do you feel fidgety, as though you have a lot of pent up energy just waiting to be released? Do you feel fatigued and tired? Is it difficult to concentrate and focus? Or are you hyperfocused and frustrated that you have to break from whatever task you were working on to do this exercise? Again, details are important.

After a few days of note taking, you will begin to identify patterns. You may notice that  you are more fatigued and irritable in the afternoons after your boss gave you a new project to work on. This may explain why, on those days, you are short tempered and easily frustrated with your children when you get home. Has nothing to do with the kids, has to do with the stress placed on you at work, earlier in the day.

As you learn more about your feelings, and then the relationship between your current status and upcoming moods, you will be better able to read the cues that something is wrong. You will be able to anticipate a depressive spell or a situation when you might be more likely to become angry. You will then be able to adjust and accommodate. If you know, for example, that the way you feeling right now usually predict an irritable evening, you may want to cancel those plans to take your kids to the store, because you know you will not be able to tolerate it.

The better we become at reading the cues our body offers us, the better we will be at managing various life situations. And the better we are at that, the more success we will experience. Because when you have adequate insight and know how your feelings affect your actions, you are more likely to make decisions that work out for the positive.