Emotional Monitoring: The 6 Signs You’re Doing It and Why Your Attachment Style Matters

Do you feel responsible for how other people feel, even at the expense of your own feelings? Are you constantly looking around the room to make sure everyone’s happy and on the lookout for anything that might disrupt their comfort? If this is you, you might be “emotional monitoring”.

Emotional monitoring is often an unconscious process, so you might not even know you’re doing it. It can sometimes be mistaken for empathy, but psychologists call it “empathy’s evil twin”. While it can seem altruistic, this self-sacrificing behavior can actually chip away at your emotional wellbeing and become a detriment to your relationships.

In this article, we’ll go into detail about what emotional monitoring actually is, what causes emotional monitoring (including whether it’s really a trauma response), and how to stop emotional monitoring.

The 6 Signs of Emotional Monitoring

Emotional monitoring isn’t a clinical term, so it’s not a diagnosis. It was first defined by Dr. Naomi Torres-Mackie to describe “the tendency to continually monitor the emotional states of others, while sacrificing attunement to one’s own emotional states.” [1]

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In other words, emotional monitoring is constantly checking how others feel and what they need while ignoring what you need. Since it’s not a recognized term yet, there’s no criteria to meet to determine whether you’re emotional monitoring – but the following signs could indicate that you are:

• You can’t relax in a social gathering unless you know everyone else is having a good time.
• You constantly check in to see if other people need anything.
• If someone’s not comfortable, you feel like it’s your job to fix it.
• You often notice when someone isn’t happy before they tell you.
• Social interactions feel draining because you can’t “switch off” around other people.
• You consider yourself a people-pleaser.

None of these signs on their own point to emotional monitoring necessarily, but together they start to illustrate a pattern of scanning for others’ emotions and ignoring your own. This hyperawareness of how other people feel can easily be mistaken for empathy, so it’s important to understand the difference.

Emotional Monitoring vs. Empathy

Unlike emotional monitoring, empathy is a common term in psychological literature. It can be defined in slightly different ways, but we usually think of empathy as the ability to understand how someone feels and feel our own emotions in response.

One literature review of the concept of empathy compiled 43 different definitions from existing research and came up with an overarching definition of empathy as [2]:

• An emotional response,
• Influenced by both your personality and the situation you’re in,
• An automatic unconscious process, but one we can purposefully modify,
• The emotion is similar to the one you perceive or understand the other person to be feeling, but not identical, and,
• You recognize that the emotion you’re feeling doesn’t come from yourself.

With this definition, emotional monitoring might invoke an empathy response, but emotional monitoring itself is like you’re constantly looking for something to respond to. Further, when you do respond, it might not align with how the other person is feeling at all – for example, they’re feeling down after a bad day, but you respond with anxiety because you feel responsible (even though you’re not).

Emotional monitoring also blurs the line between how you’re feeling and how the other person is feeling; emotional monitoring might sound more like “I feel like this because they feel like this”, instead of “I’m experiencing this feeling in response to how I think they might be feeling.”

Where Does This Pattern Come From?

Because emotional monitoring hasn’t been defined in psychological literature yet, we don’t have a lot of research on where it comes from. Dr. Torres-Mackie theorizes that people learn emotional monitoring as a way to stay safe, and notes that most of her clinical psychology clients who struggle with emotional monitoring are women from marginalized groups and/or who have experienced childhood trauma, and people who have grown up in a home where someone else’s needs far outweighed their own.

Childhood Origins

The things we learn about the world, our place in it, and how we interact with it are formed during childhood. If we learn that other people’s emotions are more important than ours – for example, if we have a parent with a short temper or a sibling who’s very unwell – we can theorize that we might unintentionally carry this into adulthood.

As another example, lots of women relate to the term “eldest daughter syndrome” – another pop-psychology term to explain how first-born daughters are sometimes given lots of responsibility in the home while growing up, leading them to feel responsible for how others feel as adults. This could involve parentification, where a child has to take on the role of a parent, leading to attachment disruptions and socioemotional difficulties that can continue into adulthood. [3]

More research is needed to confirm how childhood experiences could lead to emotional monitoring. The things we learn in childhood aren’t deterministic of how we think, feel, and behave as adults. This means that we can change – it can take effort, new experiences, and certainly time, but emotional monitoring tendencies aren’t set in stone.

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Trauma Response and Hypervigilance

Emotional monitoring could also be related to hypervigilance, which we might experience after a traumatic event. When this lasts a long time after the trauma, hypervigilance can be a symptom of PTSD (being hypervigilant or emotional monitoring doesn’t necessarily mean you have PTSD. Only a qualified mental health professional can make this diagnosis.) [4]

Hypervigilance describes a constant state of high alertness. This is occasionally helpful – when we’re in a situation that might be dangerous, we want to be on the lookout for any small change in the environment. However, we aren’t built to maintain this level of alertness all the time, and constant hyperalertness could be related to nervous system dysfunction [5].

Again, more research is needed to understand how hypervigilance might relate to emotional monitoring, but we could theorize that traumatic experiences – particularly long-term relational trauma – could lead to emotional monitoring. Remember, emotional monitoring could have lots of potential causes, and you don’t have to have had a traumatic experience to struggle with emotional monitoring.

Emotional Monitoring and Attachment Styles

Your attachment style plays into how you relate to others, so we could theorize that it also affects your emotional monitoring.

Anxious Attachment: Jumping to Conclusions?

If you have an anxious attachment style, you might already be more likely to be on the lookout for changes in other people’s mood and behavior. Your hyperactive attachment system leads you to look for attachment threats, and you might be tempted to people-please if any are detected.

One 2006 study based in Illinois found that people with attachment anxiety detected changes in facial expressions quicker than others – but this led them to be less accurate in perceiving which emotion was being expressed [6]. Jumping to conclusions meant that people with high attachment anxiety were not as successful at reading emotions as others, even though they were quicker to detect that something had changed.

For an anxious mind, this can easily spiral:

Rhea and Thomas have been living together for a year. They’re currently in a minor argument over who does more chores. After Thomas says that he walks the dog before Rhea gets up every morning, Rhea’s expression changes. Thomas quickly registers it as a look of disbelief and accuses Rhea of treating him unfairly. The argument escalates, with both partners now feeling defensive and unheard.

Later, when they talk through what happened, Thomas says that he felt upset because Rhea’s expression was skeptical when he talked about walking the dog. Rhea says that she wasn’t in disbelief and her actual emotion at the time was confusion, because she had been walking the dog when Thomas left for work. A simple misunderstanding spiralled because Thomas was too quick to judge Rhea’s change in emotion.

How to Hack Anxious Emotional Monitoring

The Illinois study above did find that when people were asked to judge an expression at the end of a video, instead of as soon as they detected it, people with anxious attachment styles were better at detecting the right emotion. In the example above, if Thomas had taken his time to make a judgement about Rhea’s expression, he might have realized that she felt confused rather than skeptical.

If you have high attachment anxiety, reading other people’s emotions can actually be a superpower – but you need to take your time to make the right call.

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Do People With Attachment Avoidance Use Emotional Monitoring?

The Illinois study found that attachment avoidance had no effect on either the speed or accuracy of emotional detection. Other studies have found that people with attachment avoidance might pay less attention to emotional displays when they’ve been exposed to something that provokes general anxiety, but not otherwise [7].

From this, we might conclude that people with higher attachment avoidance might be less likely to use emotional monitoring than people with high attachment anxiety, but not less likely than people with secure attachment styles – although they might actively pay less attention to other people’s emotional cues when their own negative feelings are heightened.

More research would be needed to understand the link between attachment styles and emotional monitoring.

The Psychological Toll of Emotional Monitoring

Thomas and Rhea’s example shows us one way emotional monitoring can be detrimental to our relationships with each other – but what about your relationship with yourself?

If you’re always looking out for other people’s emotional states but neglecting your own, you can slowly become fatigued, drained, and even resentful of the people around you. When this resentment builds, this too can become a source of tension and conflict in your relationships.

When you’re emotional monitoring, you never get a chance to switch off unless you’re alone. This can make social interactions feel exhausting, which might lead to you avoid them altogether, potentially leading to isolation and loneliness.

Studies have linked people pleasing with lower self-worth and higher anxiety, but we need more research on emotional monitoring specifically to understand its implications [8].

How to Stop Emotional Monitoring

Emotional monitoring is an automatic, unconscious process, so it can be difficult to turn it off. However, you can gradually learn different patterns of behavior over time.

Some people would find it helpful to understand why they’re emotional monitoring to get to the root of the problem. Others would find it more helpful to focus on the here and now and change current ways of thinking. In either scenario, professional support from a mental health practitioner can help you to stop emotional monitoring.

For example, psychodynamic therapy could help you to understand how your past shapes your present, while cognitive-behavioral therapy could help you to understand the current links between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

An important aspect of overcoming emotional monitoring is attending to your own needs. This can feel uncomfortable at first, especially if emotional monitoring is helping you to avoid your own emotions, so start small – what can you do right now to look after yourself? Maybe you need a glass of water, a snack, or a screen break. Practicing listening and attending to your own needs while you’re alone could help you to notice your needs more easily when others are around.

Conclusion

Emotional monitoring is an unconscious process in which we constantly scan the people around us for changes in their mood. This leads us to put other people’s needs before our own, and can lead to resentment, social and emotional exhaustion, and conflict in our relationships. It’s easily confused with empathy, but has actually been referred to as “empathy’s evil twin”.

Emotional monitoring isn’t a clinical term, so it’s not something that can be diagnosed, but the idea was suggested by clinical psychologist Dr. Naomi Torres-Mackie based on her own clinical experience. Dr. Torres-Mackie suggests that childhood experiences of trauma or family member’s needs taking priority are at the root of emotional monitoring.

High attachment anxiety could make you more likely to use emotional monitoring, but attachment avoidance doesn’t seem to have an impact. We need more research on emotional monitoring to draw more confident conclusions.

Overcoming emotional monitoring is possible with time and practice attending to your own needs. It can be helpful to use a mental health professional’s support to guide you through the process.

Find out if your attachment style might be linked to your emotional monitoring – take our free attachment style quiz.

FAQs

What is the difference between empathy and emotional monitoring?

When we feel empathy, we’re responding directly to someone’s emotions with a similar but not identical emotion, and we understand that how we feel comes from an external source. When we’re emotional monitoring, we’re constantly scanning for changes in someone’s emotions rather than just reacting to them, our resulting emotions might not match the actual emotional changes we notice, and there might not be a healthy separation between the other person’s emotions and our own emotional response.

Is emotional monitoring a trauma response?

It’s suggested that emotional monitoring could be caused by a number of things including trauma, but we need more research to understand what causes emotional monitoring. Using emotional monitoring doesn’t necessarily mean that you are experiencing a trauma response.

How do I stop monitoring my partner’s emotions?

Understanding the relationship between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can help you to change behavioral patterns like emotional monitoring. Therapies like cognitive-behavioral therapy focus on this. Practicing identifying your own needs and emotions, including when you’re by yourself, can help you to stop emotional monitoring.

Why do anxiously attached people monitor more?

People with anxious attachment styles might use emotional monitoring more because they’re hypervigilant to attachment threats, which include changes in someone’s mood or behavior. Studies have found that people with high attachment anxiety notice emotional changes quicker, but are less likely to accurately judge the emotion. However, they are more likely to judge an emotion accurately when everybody has to take the same amount of time to decide.

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