What overachievers get wrong about their emotions
Since 2019, I’ve surveyed thousands of people about their relationship to their emotions. I have also interviewed hundreds of licensed professionals, from talk therapists to coaches, from counselors to somatic therapists.
I have sat with the patterns that show up over and over again, across demographics, backgrounds, levels of education, and self-awareness.
This is the pattern I see most consistently:
The people who appear most emotionally capable from the outside are often the most emotionally lost on the inside.
Not because they lack intelligence.
Not because they don’t care.
Not because they haven’t done “the work.”
But because they have learned to do something with emotions that looks like emotional awareness and isn’t.
The thing that looks like emotional awareness but isn’t
Let’s take a closer look.
Overachievers tend to be exceptional at talking about emotions.
✓ They can name them.
✓ They can trace their origins.
✓ They can connect them to childhood experiences, to relationships, to patterns.
✓ They can articulate in a therapy session exactly what they are feeling and why.
And then after they do all of these things, they go back to their lives, and still feel controlled by those emotions.
Because what they have developed is not emotional awareness.
What they have developed is emotional analysis.
Analysis happens in the head.
Awareness happens in the body.
And, they most certainly are not the same thing.
The three patterns I see most often
Over 6 years of coloring with overachievers of all ages and life stages, 3 patterns show up consistently.
Pattern 1: Intellectualizing instead of feeling
This is the most common pattern.
Something happens. An emotion arises. And instead of experiencing it in the body, the person immediately moves to explanation.
“I know why I feel this way. It’s because of X. Which connects to Y. Which is probably about Z.”
The analysis is accurate. The insight is real. And none of it touches what is actually happening in the body at that moment.
The emotion never gets felt. It gets filed.
And filed emotions do not resolve. They accumulate. They show up later as physical symptoms, like snapping at the wrong person, or as a free-floating sense of overwhelm that has no apparent cause.
Pattern 2: Outsourcing making sense of your emotions
Do any of these sound familiar?
Detailing an experience to someone and then asking them, “How should I feel about this?”
Waiting to see how another person reacts before checking in with yourself and deciding how you feel.
Reading the room and everyone else in it before checking in with yourself.
Defaulting to what “makes sense” to feel, or what you’ve seen other people model when they’re in similar situations, rather than what you actually feel.
When you are consistently seeking external input to make sense of your inner world, rather than taking the time to make sense of your own inner world…
…That’s not a confidence problem.
And, it is not a people-pleasing problem.
It is an interoception problem.
Your body is constantly generating signals. But if you have learned, for whatever reason, to distrust or bypass your body’s data, you will likely default to looking externally to others to help you make sense of your inner world.¹
Pattern 3: High emotional vocabulary, low emotional access
This is the one that is hardest for people to recognize in themselves, because their vocabulary is so convincing.
You know all the words:
Triggered
Activated
Anxious
Nervous system dysregulation
Attachment wound
Speaking fluently about your inner world isn’t the issue. You might even be able to articulate how all of your past experiences impacted and shaped your current mental models (beliefs you have about yourself and the world).
But research on alexithymia (the clinical term for difficulty identifying and describing emotions) suggests that the ability to use emotional language and the ability to accurately sense emotional states in the body are two separate capacities.²
One does not guarantee the other.
You can have an extensive emotional vocabulary and still be largely disconnected from what your body is actually signaling to you in any given moment.
Knowing the word for something is not the same as feeling it.
Why overachievers specifically?
This is a fair question.
The short answer is that the same qualities that make someone overachieving in a demanding world can actively work against them when it comes to emotional access.
High cognitive capacity means you can analyze and intellectualize faster than most people. What might sit in the body as unprocessed sensation for someone else gets quickly converted into an explanation before it is ever fully felt.
High performance expectations — in work, in relationships, in parenting — mean you have learned to keep moving regardless of what your body is doing. Override the signal. Finish the task. Fall apart later, maybe.
High self-awareness means you know a lot about your patterns, but self-awareness at the cognitive level does not automatically translate into self-awareness at the body level. Knowing your pattern and feeling your pattern are two different things.
And for many overachievers, particularly those who grew up in environments where emotions were unsafe, unpredictable, or unwelcome, the disconnection from body signals is not a personality trait. It is a learned strategy.³ One that was probably very useful at some point. And, one that is now getting in the way.
What is actually missing
The missing piece is interoception.⁴
Interoception is the sensory system that carries your body’s internal signals — heart rate, muscle tension, gut sensation, temperature, breath depth — to your brain for interpretation.
It is the biological foundation of every emotional experience you have.
When interoception is well-developed, you receive body signals clearly, early, and accurately. You notice the tightness before it becomes a headache. You catch the hollow feeling before it shuts down. You have lead time.
When interoception is underdeveloped or disrupted, emotions feel like they arrive out of nowhere. Or they feel muted. Or they arrive late and loud, with no middle ground. Or you genuinely do not know what you are feeling, despite every intellectual resource being fully intact.
This is not a character flaw. It is a skill gap.
And skill gaps can be addressed.
The simple mental reframe
The shift I have watched change things for the people I have worked with and surveyed is a simple reframe.
Stop asking: “What do I think about what I’m feeling?”
Start asking: “What am I actually feeling in my body right now?”
The first question takes you into analysis.
The second takes you into your interoceptive system.
Once you can access what is actually happening in the body, before the analysis, before the explanation, before the story, you have something you can actually work with.
Emotions are clues. But you can only read them if you are looking at the right source.
The source is not your head.
Want to start viewing your emotions as clues?
I created a free guide that walks you through what this looks like in practice.
It is called Emotions are clues, not rules. It introduces the foundational ideas behind Color Mending: what your emotions are actually communicating, why most emotional tools skip the most important step, and how to begin reading your body’s signals more accurately.
New to interoception? This foundational post was written for you: What is interoception? The body sense that shapes every emotion.
References & further reading
The following sources directly inform the content of this article. For readers who want to go deeper into the science, each is worth your time!
1. Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (The foundational text establishing that emotions are constructed by the brain from interoceptive body signals — and that when the interoceptive signal is unclear, the brain looks to context and past experience to fill the gap.) https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/
2. Murphy, J., et al. (2018). Alexithymia: A General Deficit of Interoception. Royal Society Open Science. PMC. (Research establishing that difficulty identifying and describing emotions — alexithymia — is rooted in a broader interoceptive deficit, not simply a vocabulary or cognitive limitation.) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5098957/
3. Mahler, K., McLaughlin, E., & Anson, D. (2020). Interoception Across Varying Degrees of Mental Wellness. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 74(S1). (Research connecting interoceptive underdevelopment to a range of life experiences, including environments where body signals were repeatedly overridden or unsafe to express.) https://www.kelly-mahler.com/kellys-research/
4. Barrett, L.F. & Simmons, W.K. (2015). Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(7), 419–429. (Peer-reviewed paper establishing interoception as the foundational sensory system through which the brain constructs all emotional experience — and that disruptions in interoceptive processing are a common vulnerability across mental and physical health.) https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3950
