The Read You Can't Quite Trust

Why a true signal and a false alarm can feel exactly the same, and how to tell them apart

Welcome to The Executive Energy Journal, written for professionals who choose to lead with purposeful clarity. A grounded, science-informed exploration of subtle energy, spanning from neuroscience to spiritual connection.

How EEJ works

• What's measurable: what research and observable mechanisms support
• What's unknown: where evidence ends, and interpretation begins
• What I do pragmatically anyway: the simplest reliable practice I use with clients
• Your role: take what is useful and leave the rest

You are three minutes from a meeting. You have read the brief, your numbers are solid, and nothing on paper warrants concern. But your chest tightens, your jaw sets, and a thought arrives with complete clarity: something here is doesn't feel right.

You have felt this before. Sometimes it was accurate: the deal really was wrong, the hire really was a mistake. Sometimes it was nothing, and the meeting went fine. In the moment, both feel identical.

This is the real difficulty for a perceptive professional. A true signal and ordinary anxiety move through the same body, and the louder the sensation, the more readily it gets believed.

1. The body takes in more than it can read

In research terms, the body's signalling system works in layers. Recent work on interoception, the sensing of internal bodily signals, separates it into distinct operations (Greenwood & Garfinkel, 2025):

1. The signal: what the body registers, the tightening, quickened pulse, drop in the stomach.
2. The accuracy: how precisely you detect what is actually happening inside you, rather than what you assume.
3. The interpretation: the meaning you place on the sensation, whether a warning, excitement, dread, or nothing at all.

These are different operations, and they can come apart. A strong sensation tells you the first layer is active. By itself it says nothing about the third.

Long-time readers will find this familiar. In Issue 50, Data vs Direction, I drew the same line in my own terms: one channel for perception, what you sense and notice, and another for meaning, which in my framework is where intuition actually lives. It is very satisfying to watch the research arrive at the same architecture.

Under pressure, the layers collapse. The body registers something a beat before a decision, the mind names it within a second, and you respond to the name rather than the sensation beneath it. The naming feels like reading. Often it is closer to speed.

Pause here. Notice whether your shoulders have lifted as you read. Let them settle before the next line.

2. The gap between sensing and useful knowing

Here precision is relevant, because the most useful finding is also the least expected.

Perceptive professionals usually assume they are uncertain, or feel scattered, or even anxious because they feel too much. The evidence points somewhere else.

What unsettles a perceptive person is the gap: the distance between how accurately you read what is happening and how confident you are in that reading.

 

Researchers call this a trait prediction error (Garfinkel et al., 2016). That work was done in a specific population, so I consider it a mechanism rather than a universal law.

In practical terms, the unease reflects how far two things have drifted apart: what your body is registering, and the meaning your mind assigns to it. Two capacities hold them together: 

1)  the precision of your reading and

2) the quality of your meaning-making.

When they sit close, perception feels clear. When they separate, the same sensation produces alarm with no clean referent. That alarm, with nothing solid to attach to, is what most people end up calling anxiety. In practice both capacities can be developed; neither is fixed.

Decision science agrees from the other side: subjective confidence is an unreliable guide to whether a judgment is sound (Kahneman & Klein, 2009).

A signal's strength tells you how loudly it arrived. It does not tell you whether it is true.

One line needs to stay clear. This issue concerns the ordinary anxiety that appears or lives under a working day and can pass itself off as a signal. Clinical anxiety is a different matter, and the right support for it is professional and medical.

3. The warning you trust, the invitation you miss

We have separated perception from meaning, the sensing channel from the intuition channel. The next separation lives inside that meaning channel, because even a true read arrives in one of two registers:

A genuine signal tends to arrive in one of two registers:

• Warning is contraction: the no, the something is wrong, the tightening. It is fast, loud, and built around threat.
• Invitation is expansion: an unassuming yes, a sense of rightness, a pull toward something that does not announce itself.

Most perceptive professionals have learned to trust the first and overlook the second. Threat signals are weighted more heavily, registered faster, and held more durably than positive ones of equal size, while positive signals arrive quieter and more diffuse (Baumeister et al., 2001). The warning shouts; the invitation whispers. Anxiety lives in the register that shouts, which is exactly why it can pass for a true read.

There is an inversion worth noticing. Often a real signal gets filed away as just my anxiety. Here the trouble runs the other way: anxiety borrows the loud, urgent register and is waved through as intuition.

A real-world example

I worked with a partner in a professional-services firm. She was sharp, fast, and dependable, and her read on risk was almost always correct.

In her 360 reviews, the same word kept coming back from colleagues: cold. It puzzled her. She read problems and what might go wrong with great accuracy, yet barely registered hope or what might go right, and her colleagues felt the absence of that second register as coldness.

She trusted her intuition when it said this will not work, and had almost no access to it for anything constructive. Asked what she needed, she received nothing, just an emptiness she read as failure.

We stayed with the emptiness rather than forcing an answer. In this kind of work, silence is often information that has not yet found proper interpretation.

Then an image arrived. A beach. No logic attached, and her instinct was to wave it away. As she stayed with it, the meaning settled. She had assumed a holiday; what it pointed to was larger: time, a sabbatical of nearly a year. After careful planning, she took the sabbatical, and afterwards moved into a role that fit her far better.

Her intuition was the same as ever; she had simply learned to hear a register that had been transmitting all along, while she listened only for the loud one.

Much of the work is exactly this: lowering the volume of the warning until the quieter register becomes audible, then staying with it long enough to finish. That quieter register often carries the meaning, a direction, an opening, a sense of what would be alive for you.

4. How the quieter register becomes a trustworthy tool

The warning register is easy to recognise because it shouts. The invitation asks for a different kind of attention. It does not argue with itself, multiply your options, or press for an immediate answer. Often it comes as an image, a sensation, or a sort of a settling rather than a verdict. In clients I watch it land in the body as something calm and steady, easy to overlook precisely because it carries no urgency.

That quietness is also why people distrust it. A true signal rarely flatters you; it points toward what you need, which is not always what you hoped to hear. Wishful thinking feels like wanting. The quieter signal often feels closer to recognition of something that has  existed for a while.

It becomes reliable the way any judgment does, through feedback. You notice the quiet signal, you act or you wait, and afterwards you check what actually happened. That loop, the same one that makes any expert intuition trustworthy, gradually teaches your system which of its signals to trust.

The signal you are most certain of may be the one most worth questioning. The one you keep filing under "nothing" may be the one carrying the way forward.

5. The part that is hard to do alone

Most of this is yours to work with on your own, and Friday's Debrief   gives you a way in.

One limit is worth naming, though. It is hard to tell your own anxiety from your own signal while you are inside the loop, because the part doing the sorting is the same part generating the noise.

This is the part of one-to-one work that is hardest to convey on a page. In a session I can usually sense whether someone is in contact with a real signal or circling inside the anxious loop, and steer accordingly. The steadiness of another grounded system lets yours settle enough to hear the quieter register it could not reach alone. 

5. The next step

If this is a general pattern, sit with it this week and watch which register you reach for first.

If it is one specific situation, a decision that will not settle, a message you keep rewriting, a read on a person you cannot separate from your own worry, that is hard to sort from the inside. This is what the private 15-minute Recalibration call is for. We take that one situation and find where the gap sits, so you leave knowing whether you are responding to a true signal or to anxiety, and what the next step is.

You can book one here.

Until next Sunday,

Niina

References

• Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370.
• Garfinkel, S. N., Tiley, C., O'Keeffe, S., Harrison, N. A., Seth, A. K., & Critchley, H. D. (2016). Discrepancies between dimensions of interoception in autism: Implications for emotion and anxiety. Biological Psychology, 114, 117–126.
• Greenwood, B. M., & Garfinkel, S. N. (2025). Interoceptive mechanisms and emotional processing. Annual Review of Psychology, 76, 59–86.
• Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree. American Psychologist, 64(6), 515–526.
• Further reading / contested: Corns, J. (2018). Rethinking the negativity bias. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 9(3), 607–625.