Your emotions aren’t random, they’re predictions. Here’s what that means for you.
Most people believe their emotions are reactions.
Something happens. The emotion follows.
You feel sad because something sad occurred.
You feel angry because something unfair happened.
The event is the cause. The emotion is the effect.
This is the story most of us were taught. It is also, according to a growing body of neuroscience research, not how emotions actually work.
Your emotions are not reactions. They are predictions.¹
Let’s take a deeper look at what’s behind this perspective-shifting sentence.
Your brain is not waiting for things to happen
Your brain is not a passive receiver, sitting quietly until the world sends it something to react to.
It is constantly working ahead.
Every moment of every day, your brain is generating predictions about what is about to happen in the world around you and inside your body.¹ It does this because prediction is more energy-efficient than reaction. A brain that prepares for what is coming uses far fewer resources than one that waits to be surprised.
These predictions are based on everything your brain has learned from past experience. Every situation you have ever been in, every emotion you have ever felt, every outcome you have ever witnessed. All of this has been stored and organized into patterns. Your brain uses those patterns to make its best guess about what is happening right now.
Most of the time, you never consciously notice this is happening.
You just experience the result.
Where your body comes in
Your brain is generating two streams of prediction simultaneously.¹
One is about the outside world: what is about to happen around you.
The other is about the inside world: what your body is about to need.
That second or internal stream is called interoception.
Interoception is your body’s sensory system for its own internal signals: heart rate, breath depth, muscle tension, gut activity, body temperature, etc. Your brain is constantly receiving this data from your body and predicting what it means.
This is the part to pay close attention to:
Your brain does not receive these body signals and then label them with an emotion. It predicts the emotion first, based on past experience, and then uses the body signal as data to confirm or adjust that prediction.
In other words, the emotion concept arrives before you are fully conscious of it. Your body is providing raw data. Your brain is the one deciding what it means.
Two people can have the exact same body signals, like a racing heart, shallow breath, and tight chest, and experience two completely different emotions solely because their brains are running different predictions from different histories.
One person’s racing heart is excitement.
Another’s is dread.
Same signal. Different prediction. Different emotion.
What predictions are built from
Your brain builds its emotional predictions from three things.²
The first is past experience. Every emotion you have ever felt in a similar situation has been filed in your brain’s library. Your brain pulls from that library constantly, asking: What did this feel like before? What did it mean last time? What happened next?
The second is context. The same body signal reads differently in different situations. A racing heart at the gym means something different than a racing heart before a difficult conversation. Your brain weighs the current context heavily in deciding which prediction to apply.
The third is interoceptive data. The actual signals your body is generating right now. The physical raw material your brain is working with.
All three of these inputs get combined, in real time, to produce your emotional experience.
What you feel is not the objective truth of the situation.
It is your brain’s best guess, built from history, context, and body data.
This is not saying your emotions aren’t real
Saying that emotions are predictions does not mean they are imaginary, invalid, or easy to override.
They are completely real as experiences. They shape your perception, your decisions, your body, your relationships.
The grief you feel is real grief.
The fear is real fear.
The joy is real joy.
What the science is saying is something more specific: your emotional experience is your brain’s interpretation of a body signal, filtered through your history. It is not a direct readout of external reality. It is a model of reality, built from the best data your brain has.
And models can be more or less accurate.
That is the part that opens an opportunity for everyone.
When predictions get stuck
Your brain is highly efficient. It repeats what has worked before. If a certain body signal, say, tightness in the chest, has been consistently predicted as anxiety in your history, your brain will keep predicting anxiety when it feels that signal.
Automatically.
Quickly.
Without consulting you.
This is useful when the prediction is accurate.
It becomes a problem when the prediction is outdated.
When the body signal is actually excitement, but your brain predicts anxiety.
When the sensation is actually hunger, but your brain predicts dread.
When what your body is communicating is information about the present moment, but your brain is running an interpretation from fifteen years ago.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a renowned neuroscientist and psychologist specializing in the study of emotion and brain function, and the person behind The Theory of Constructed Emotions, describes this as “affective realism.”
Affective realism is the scientific word for your brain’s tendency to experience its predictions as facts.¹ You do not feel like you are making a prediction. You feel like you are having a reaction. The prediction is invisible. The emotion feels like the truth.
Which means that if the prediction is wrong, you will act on it as if it were right.
This is why so many people feel controlled by emotions they cannot explain.
Not because the emotions are irrational. Because the brain’s predictions are running on old data, and no one has taught them how to update the source.
What updates the prediction
This is the part of the science I built Color Mending on.
The brain updates its predictions when it receives clearer, more accurate interoceptive data.³ When the body signal is read accurately, not through the filter of old predictions, but as it actually is right now, the brain can revise its interpretation.
This is why interoception matters so much.
How strong your interoception is directly impacts the quality of the data your brain is working with.⁴
When interoception is underdeveloped, the body signal arrives noisy and unclear, and the brain defaults to its most practiced prediction.
When interoception is developed, the signal is cleaner. The brain has better data. Better data produces more accurate predictions. More accurate predictions produce emotions that are actually informative rather than habitual.
Emotions that tell you something true about what is happening right now.
Not emotions that are replaying what happened before.
Emotions as clues, not rules
This is the reframe that I come back to in everything Color Mending teaches.
If your emotions are predictions, if they are your brain’s best interpretation of a body signal, filtered through your history and context, then they are not directives. They are not commands. They are not facts about the world that you must act on immediately.
They are clues.
They are your brain’s attempt to make meaning from what your body is feeling. And like any interpretation, they can be more or less accurate. They can be updated. They can be refined.
An emotion that arrives as rage might be pointing to exhaustion underneath.
An emotion that arrives as anxiety might be pointing to excitement that the brain has not yet recategorized.
An emotion that arrives as shame might be pointing to grief.
The emotion is not wrong. It is the brain’s current best guess. Your job is not to obey the guess or suppress it.
Your job is to read the clue more accurately.
And to do that, you need access to the body signal the brain is working from.
That is interoception. That is the work.
What Color Mending does with this
Color Mending is designed to build exactly the capacity the theory above requires.
The first step of the Color Mending process is intuitive coloring.
Intuitive coloring begins with a body scan: finding the noisiest sensation in your body right now, before the brain has finished constructing a narrative around it. That is the raw signal, the data source the prediction is built from.
You then take that raw signal and color it out onto a piece of paper using any color and shape you want. You don’t overthink this step. You go with what colors and shapes your body wants to put onto the piece of paper.
It can be extremely simple, like one grey squiggly line. Or it can be incredibly complex, like 10 different colors used in a cross-hatching, zig-zag pattern around a house and a picket fence.
The key here is that you’re not coloring what the emotion looks like; you are coloring what the body sensation itself feels like.
Once your coloring feels complete, the second step is using the Color Mending Color and Shapes Charts to decode what you colored. Each color and shape is a clue. The charts are used as guides to help you translate those visual signals into an accurate interpretation of what the body is trying to communicate. Specifically, what emotion is present, what it is pointing toward, and what it actually means.
This is the practice of updating the prediction.
Of going to the source of the body signal, before the old interpretation runs, and giving your brain better data to work with.
This isn’t suppressing emotions or reframing thoughts. When practiced consistently, you’re training your brain to make better predictions by improving the interoceptive data that your brain is using to create the predictions.
Emotions are clues. And, interoception is the tool for reading them.
Ready to start building the skill of reading your body’s signals?
The Coloring Bet is a 21-day program where you learn how to guide yourself through the Color Mending process from start to finish, one day at a time, until reading your body’s signals begins to feel second nature.
→ Join The Coloring Bet and start putting the science into practice
New here? Start with learning more about interoception: What Is Interoception? The Body Sense That Shapes Every Emotion.
Frequently asked questions
If emotions are predictions, does that mean I can just choose to feel differently?
No! And this is such an important distinction.
Predictions happen automatically, below the level of conscious choice.
You cannot simply decide to feel differently any more than you can decide not to see an optical illusion once you know it is one.
What the science does say is that predictions can be updated over time, through new experiences, new data, and practices like interoceptive training that improve the quality of the body signal the brain is working from.
That is a slower, more honest process than choosing an emotion. But it is a real one that is more sustainable and addresses the issue at the root.
Doesn’t this mean emotions are not trustworthy?
It means emotions are informative but not infallible.
They are your brain’s best interpretation of what is happening, built from everything it knows. That interpretation is worth taking seriously. And it is also worth examining, particularly when a pattern keeps repeating or when the emotion feels out of proportion to the current situation.
Emotions are clues, not rules. Take the clue seriously. Follow it to the source. And most importantly, do not treat the first interpretation as the final word.
What is the difference between this and positive thinking?
There is a significant difference between the two.
Positive thinking asks you to override or replace an emotional experience with a more preferred one at the cognitive level.
The Theory of Constructed Emotions describes something that operates much earlier in the process: at the level of the body signal and the interoceptive data the brain is working from. Improving interoception does not require you to think differently. It requires you to understand yourself on both a metabolic level and cognitive level. It is through understanding how your body and mind work, as well as becoming familiar with how your body communicates to you through body signals, that improves the quality of information your brain has available before the thinking starts.
Is the Theory of Constructed Emotions scientifically accepted?
It is one of the most rigorously supported and widely discussed frameworks in contemporary affective neuroscience, developed by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett through decades of research at Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School.
Like all scientific theories, it has critics and ongoing debate.
But the core insights, that emotions are constructed rather than hardwired, that interoception is central to emotional experience, and that past experience shapes how body signals are interpreted, are supported by a substantial body of evidence across neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science.
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 explaining the Theory of Constructed Emotions in full — the most accessible entry point into the science of emotional prediction, interoception, and affective realism.) https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/
2. Barrett, L.F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23. (The peer-reviewed academic paper establishing that emotions are constructed from interoception, past experience, and context — the scientific foundation for the prediction framework described in this post.) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5390700/
3. Barrett, L.F. & Simmons, W.K. (2015). Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(7), 419–429. (Peer-reviewed paper introducing the Embodied Predictive Interoception Coding model — establishing interoception as the raw data source for the brain’s emotional predictions, and that improving interoceptive accuracy can update those predictions.) https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3950
4. Mahler, K. (2019). Interoception: The Eighth Sensory System. (The foundational resource establishing interoception as a trainable skill, and that improving interoceptive awareness improves emotional clarity and regulation.) https://www.kelly-mahler.com/what-is-interoception/
