Seeing Sideways - Emotional Reasoning: When Feelings Masquerade as Facts

“Emotional reasoning is the shortcut that convinces us our feelings are facts.”

A clear, practical walkthrough of emotional reasoning—the bias that makes feelings feel like facts—and how to separate signal from story. Learn simple tools to build self-awareness, better decisions, and steadier leadership.

When a strong feeling hits—anxiety, shame, anger—are you reading the room, or just reading your nervous system?

Key Takeaway Insights & Tools 

• What emotional reasoning is—and why it feels true. Emotions arrive fast and loud; the brain turns them into beliefs (“I feel like a failure” becomes “I am a failure”). [01:02–01:50]
• The closed loop that traps us. Feeling → story → stronger feeling. Nervous becomes “I’m not ready”; unsettled becomes “they’re mad at me.” [01:50–03:16]
• Why evolution primes the error. Emotions were built for survival speed, not modern nuance—like using a smoke alarm to navigate a conversation. [03:16–04:25]
• The real cost. Moods turn into meaning: capability shrinks, feedback gets distorted, progress stalls because discomfort is misread as danger. [04:25–05:30]
• The contrarian move. Create a pause, name the feeling, separate feelings from facts, and test the story against evidence. [05:30–07:08]

If this helped you separate feelings from facts, share the episode with one person who leads, coaches, or parents—someone who could use a steadier inner compass.

Jason White Birkevold Liem is the host of It’s an Inside Job and author of Seeing Sideways. He helps leaders and coaches turn psychological insight into everyday practice—so they can think clearly, choose wisely, and lead with intent.

Chapters

• 0:16 Introduction to the Podcast
• 1:42 Practical Tips for Everyday Challenges

Transcript

0:07

Ever catch yourself focusing on what's wrong instead of what's possible? Or judging someone too quickly only to realize you were off? That's not a flaw. It's your brain doing what it was wired to do, taking shortcuts. In this special series, we're walking through my book, Seeing Sideways, One Chapter at a Time. Each episode explores a powerful cognitive bias that quietly shapes how we think, choose, and connect. These mental shortcuts helped our ancestors to survive. But today, they can cloud judgment, limit perspective, and chip away at well-being. So this isn't about fixing your brain. It's about understanding it so you can lead yourself with clarity, respond with intention, and build resilience from the inside out. This week, we're going to explore the fourth cognitive biases that influences the stories we tell ourselves. And so this week, we're going to explore emotional reasoning, why feeling something feels like proof. Now, emotional reasoning is the cognitive shortcut that convinces us our feelings are facts. So when we feel anxious, for example, we assume something is wrong. When we feel inadequate, well, we include we must not be good enough. If we feel guilty, well, then maybe we believe we've done something terrible. The emotion isn't just present. It becomes the evidence. You don't just feel nervous before a meeting. You tell yourself, I'm going to fail. You don't just feel down after a conversation. You conclude, they must be upset with me. You know, the brain folds your emotions into beliefs. Instead of saying, I feel like a failure, emotional reasoning pushes you to say, I am a failure. This bias is powerful because emotions are immediate and intense. They short-circuit the slower, more rational parts of your thinking and create narratives that feel urgent and true, whether or not they are. The trap. For example, you're preparing for a presentation. Despite doing the work, your nerves creep in and you start thinking, you know what? I'm not ready. I'm going to mess this up. The emotion feeds the story and the story strengthens the emotion. You mistake the feeling for a forecast or you finish a tough conversation and feel unsettled. Your inner dialogue says, they're probably mad at me, but there's no actual evidence, only the tightness in your chest. Still, your brain accepts the feeling as fact. And this shows up everywhere. If you feel awkward, the situation must be awkward. If you feel guilty, you must be in the wrong. If you feel unwanted, you must be unlovable. Emotional reason creates a closed loop. The emotion creates a story. And the story feeds the emotion. And all of it feels real. Very real. Because your nervous system is on board. The twist. From an evolutionary standpoint, emotions were designed to keep us alive. Feeling fear meant something might be dangerous and feeling disgusted, while it meant something might be toxic. Emotions were fast, efficient messengers in environments where quick decisions meant survival. But today's emotional landscape is far more complex. You can feel ashamed without doing anything wrong. You can feel confident and still be misguided. Emotions reflect your internal state, but that doesn't always map cleanly onto external truth. In modern life, emotional reasoning is like using a smoke alarm to navigate a conversation. It's loud, it's immediate, but it's not always accurate. The alarm might go off with no fire, just burnt toast, but it still gets your attention. And that's what emotional reasoning does. It confuses emotional urgency with objective reality. It treats internal signals as external facts. It takes a valid feeling and gives it the power to shape an invalid belief. The cost. Emotional reasoning blurs the line between perception and reality. It turns moods into meaning. You don't just feel bad, you become bad in your mind. You don't just feel nervous, you decide you're incapable. You just don't feel disappointed. You rewrite the story as a failure. This bias narrows your view. It makes it harder to challenge limiting belief, hear feedback, or separate discomfort from danger. If something feels threatening, you might assume it is, even if it's unfamiliar. If someone's words sting, you might assume they meant to hurt you, even if they didn't. It creates misjudgments in leadership. It fuels defensiveness or withdrawal in relationships. And it definitely halts progress in personal development because every difficult feeling is mistaken for a warning sign to stop. When emotion becomes the final word, well, clarity gets drowned out by the reaction volume. The contrarian approach to emotional reasoning involves intentionally distinguishing between feelings and facts. Emotions provide valuable signals but aren't definite proof of reality. Rather than accepting emotional intensity as unquestionable truth, the contrarian thinker practices mindful interrogation of their emotional responses. Now, this approach creates a vital pause, an opportunity to investigate, to validate, and to challenge the stories our feelings craft. Pause for emotional clarity. When a powerful emotion arises, deliberately pause to identify it. Acknowledge your feeling explicitly, naming it without immediate judgment or interpretation. Now, this pause, well, it disrupts automatic emotional narratives and it allows space for reflection. By clearly naming your emotions, you anchor yourself in the present moment and position yourself to explore rather than react impulsively. Distinguish feeling from fact. Emotions often masquerade convincingly as facts. To counter this, consciously separate your emotional experience from your objective reality. Ask yourself, what evidence supports this feeling, or is there a clear proof this emotion reflects truth? You recalibrate your perspective by questioning assumptions, derived solely from emotional states, and this reduces the likelihood of jumping to unsupported conclusions. Use Reflective Writing. Implement a structured reflection practice, such as the two-column method. Write your emotions in one column, and factual evidence supporting or contradicting those feelings in the other column. Now, this exercise helps visually separate emotional responses from verifiable facts, breaking down confusion between internal states and external realities. Reflective writing strengthens emotional awareness, facilitating better emotional regulation, and improve decision making. Clarity is resilience. Resilient thinkers don't avoid emotions. They engage with it strategically. They allow emotional waves to arrive without letting them dictate their responses. True resilience isn't about emotional suppression. It's about developing emotional fluency. It's the skill of recognizing, naming, and reflecting on feelings without being consumed by them. By cultivating emotional clarity, resilient individuals leverage emotions as information rather than defined truths. So a little homework you can consider doing if you wish. I want you to consider a recent moment when a strong emotion such as anxiety, shame or anger have overwhelmed you. Reflect on the narrative your emotion created. Was this story grounded in clear evidence or did emotional intensity drive it? The idea is to explore alternative explanations you might have overlooked. Rewrite that moment using your emotion as a clue rather than a defined conclusion. And that will reveal clear insights. Again, you don't have to be the character in the narrative. You can decide to be the author of the narrative. So the next time you feel something strong, pause and say, I'm feeling this, but that doesn't make it true. Then ask, what do I know and what am I assuming? You know, that single moment of reflection, well, it turns emotional reactivity into insight. That's not detachment. That's wisdom. So the next time we are going to explore the egocentric bias. Why we assume others feel, see, and think the same way we do. Thanks for listening to this episode of Seeing Sideways. These biases aren't flaws. They're part of how our brains make sense of a complex world. But with awareness, we can move from reaction to reflection, from assumption to intention. So if today's episode offered you a new perspective, please share it with someone who might benefit. Because the real work of thinking clearly, choosing wisely, and leading with purpose, well, it's all an inside job. See you next time. Thank you.