There is a sentence that a lot of capable women have heard in one form or another, often early, often from someone who meant well. You feel things too much. It arrives as a verdict on temperament: the feeling is the problem, the volume is set wrong, the sensible thing would be to turn it down. And because the women MoMo is for tend to be conscientious, they take the note. They learn to treat the feeling that keeps interrupting as static on the line. Something to talk over. Something in the way of the clear thought underneath.

I want to make a different case, and I want to make it from the research rather than from sentiment. The case is not that feelings are good, or wise, or that they ought to run the show. It is narrower and, I think, more interesting. A feeling is not noise. It is structured. It carries content. The thing that keeps being called excessive is, in the technical sense, information.

Noise has no structure. Emotions do.

Begin with what the word noise actually means. Noise is the part of a signal that carries nothing: undifferentiated, patternless, the same static whatever the input. If feelings were noise, they would all feel roughly alike, a wash of arousal with a label stuck on afterward.

They don't, and there is now a fairly striking body of work showing it. A 2014 study in PNAS asked seven hundred people, across Western Europe and East Asia, to colour in a blank body outline according to where they felt each emotion in the moment they felt it.[2] The maps that came back were not vague. Anger lit up the chest and the hands. Fear concentrated in the chest. Sadness drained the limbs. Happiness filled nearly the whole body. The patterns were consistent enough that a statistical classifier, given only the map, could tell the emotions apart. That is the opposite of noise. Each emotion has a distinct, reproducible bodily signature.

A larger follow-up, in 2020, put the universality question to rest.[3] Nearly four thousand people from a hundred and one countries produced the same maps. The concordance across cultures ran above 0.82, and across the sexes above 0.80: agreement stronger than any cultural or demographic difference between the groups. Whatever these bodily maps are, they are not a Western habit or a personality quirk. They look like part of the biological equipment, carried across languages and continents in more or less the same shape.

So the first move the culture makes, treating the feeling as formless overflow, gets the physics wrong. A formless signal cannot be sorted by a classifier or reproduced across a hundred countries. This one can. It is not static. It has a shape.

Two feelings that look the same and mean opposite things

If emotions were merely negative or positive, a single dial from bad to good, then two difficult feelings should point you the same way. They don't, and the clearest demonstration is old enough to be a classic.

Lerner and Keltner, in 2001, looked at fear and anger.[4] Both are unpleasant. Both would be filed, casually, under negative emotion. If negativity were the whole message, they should shape judgment identically. Instead they did the opposite. Fear made people pessimistic and risk-averse: the world looked more dangerous, the safe option more appealing. Anger made people optimistic and risk-seeking: more confident, more willing to gamble. Same valence. Opposite information. The difference tracked how much certainty and control each emotion carried with it, not how bad it felt.

This is the part the popular version keeps flattening. The wellness frame likes to collapse all of this into trust your gut, one holistic signal you either heed or override. But the research does not describe a single gut. It describes a vocabulary. Fear says one thing, anger says another, and reading them as the same, just negative, just too much, loses the specific thing each was pointing at. The precision is the point.

Information about value, doing quiet work in the background

There is a broader version of this, gathered under an unglamorous name: the affect-as-information view. A 2007 review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences synthesises decades of it.[5] The core claim is that mood functions as information about the value of whatever is currently in mind. Positive states tend to validate the thoughts that are present and open up broad, associative processing. Negative states tend to prompt the opposite: closer, more careful, more detail-sensitive attention.

The elegant part is how the researchers proved it was information and not just chemistry. When people were shown that their mood came from an irrelevant source, the weather that day, say, the mood stopped shaping their judgment. Correct the source and the effect vanishes.[5] That is the fingerprint of a signal being read for meaning, not a mood pushing behaviour around blindly. The feeling was being consulted as information, which is why knowing where it came from changed what it was allowed to say. (I'll keep the frame honest here: this is a review of many studies rather than a single one, and one supporting reference, Trnka and Lorencova's information-theoretic model, is a theoretical proposal, not measured data.[1])

Set that beside the unsettled feeling you are told to resolve before you decide anything. The instruction assumes the feeling is interference to be cleared. The affect-as-information work suggests it may be doing something more like changing the resolution of your attention. That is not a reason to obey it. It is a reason to stop assuming it has nothing to say.

Before you handle a feeling, it means something

A quick boundary, because this is easy to misread. None of the above is about what to do with a feeling. That is a separate question, with a separate literature, and MoMo has written about it elsewhere: two ways the brain handles a hard feeling is about the routes for regulating one, and they are real. This is the step before that. Before a feeling is something to handle, it is something that carries content. The two questions get run together constantly, which is how a signal ends up being managed away before anyone reads what it said.

There is a thread here back to something MoMo wrote about stress and the brake: under pressure, the size of the feeling stays roughly stable, and what changes is our capacity to pause and read it. The signal is intact. The reception degrades. Which is worth holding onto, because it means the feeling that arrives at the worst-composed moment is not less informative. It is just harder to hear.

Where this lands

I am wary, as ever, of turning this into a technique. This is not an instruction to decode your feelings, to journal them into submission, or to treat every mood as a message that must be acted on. Plenty of feelings are worth noticing and setting down. The point is upstream of all that.

The point is only this: the thing that has been called excessive is not formless. The research on bodily maps shows it has structure, reproducible across a hundred countries. The research on fear and anger shows it is specific, carrying different content under the same unpleasant surface. A feeling is not the static you clear to reach the real thought. Sometimes it is the thought, arriving in a different form than the ones you were taught to trust.

You do not have to do anything with that. Noticing that a feeling might be carrying information, rather than only getting in the way, is enough. Holding those noticings across days, so the pattern of what your feelings keep pointing at becomes visible rather than mysterious, is part of what MoMo was built for. But that is a footnote. The argument is the signal. The signal has structure, and the structure is worth reading before you decide it was noise.

If any of this lands in a heavy or frightening way, or if you're in distress or crisis, please reach out: Mind Sweden 90101 | Samaritans UK 116 123 | your local crisis line.

References

Trnka, R., & Lorencova, R. (2020). The Information in Emotion Communication: A Quantitative Theory. arXiv preprint, arXiv:2002.08470.
Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari, R., & Hietanen, J. K. (2014). Bodily maps of emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., 111(2), 646–651. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1321664111. PMID: 24379370.
Volynets, S., Glerean, E., Hietanen, J. K., Hari, R., & Nummenmaa, L. (2020). Bodily maps of emotions are culturally universal. Emotion, 20(7), 1127–1136. DOI: 10.1037/emo0000624. PMID: 31259590.
Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2001). Fear, anger, and risk. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 146–159. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.81.1.146. PMID: 11474720.
Clore, G. L., & Huntsinger, J. R. (2007). How emotions inform judgment and regulate thought. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(9), 393–399. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.08.005. PMID: 17698405.