There is a simple check-in I like to use when I’m facilitating groups and coaching teams. Some of you may know it—it’s referred to as the Traffic Light Check-in. I picked the practice up from a Reboot Circle I was in many years ago, and they in turn learned it from one of their former colleagues. Beyond that, I am unsure of its origin.
The practice is simple. Authentically answer the question, “How are you?” Use one of the colors of the traffic light (red, yellow, green/blue) to express your state, along with any other context you care to share.
Here is how Ali Schultz describes each of the colors:
- Green means you feel safe, copasetic, or perhaps are in flow. You’re able to have eye-contact, creativity, play, humor. In a sense, all systems are go.
- Yellow is reactionary, meaning that the fight or flight impulse is present, as is perhaps some defensiveness.
- Red means your rational brain is offline, nervous system is shutting down such that you may or may not be present at all, or there may be a loss of trust.
So a check-in might go something like, “I’m pretty green. I slept well and feel excited about the day, but there is quite a lot to get done.” Or maybe you are yellow, and you share the color and say something like, “I’m concerned about some of the upcoming deadlines around the new product launch and feeling stretched thin.”
When running these check-ins with designers, I get Pantone colors, gradients, patterns, you name it. People get pretty creative with expressing how they are doing through color.
What I’ve always liked about the method is that it’s quick, it offers people a chance to check-in with themselves and bring awareness to how they are feeling, and provides psychological safety because they don’t have to share any additional details that may feel uncomfortable or unsafe.
It also gives people a chance to support each other. For the yellow check-in above, a few people might offer their time after the meeting to run through the concerns and see if anything needs to be adjusted or addressed. I once reported red in a meeting due to some stuff going on in my personal life, and the team rallied around me, volunteering to take on extra work so that I could take care of myself. And I didn’t have to share all the messy details, only that I was showing up as red.
The colors apparently map to the nervous system in the style of Polyvagal theory—green meaning you are in the rest and digest mode of the parasympathetic nervous system, yellow indicates sympathetic activation of the fight/flight response, and red is freeze, aka dorsal collapse.
Is it okay to be green?
I introduced this check-in to a group of deeply caring folks who work in a high-stress, high-stakes environment and who are feeling the impact of federal funding cuts for at-risk communities.
They picked up the color language immediately and pointed to a challenge inherent in their work—they were always yellow, all the time, by the very nature of what they did. Could they even be green?
As the conversation unfolded, something even more fundamental came to light. Many of these kind and capable people held a core belief that is not okay to be green in a world that is on fire (both literally and metaphorically for this Los Angeles based team).
I will note that when I teach the traffic light check-in, I describe green as being present and able to tend to what is needed in the moment. I do not talk about being copasetic or creativity, play, and humor. Yes, these things are all totally part of what can happen in green states, but they aren’t all that can happen.
What being green really means
Being green means that we have the capacity to be with whatever is showing up without getting so activated we can’t respond. It doesn’t necessarily mean we are in a great mood, joyful, and full of creative energy, though that is absolutely possible. It does mean that we are relaxed and open, responsive and present, and able to fully feel the feels.
Being green means being attuned to our emotions. The ones that lift us up into connected and creative states, and the ones that show up when we encounter a world that doesn’t align with our values.
The key to being green is being present and feeling what shows up, rather than fusing with emotions or suppressing them to the point they eat away at us from the inside. It is not the presence of a “negative” emotion that indicates yellow or red, but how we are with that emotion.
It is entirely possible to be green and sad. Or red and joyful.
Embodied Self-Awareness
To understand this, I want to briefly remap the definitions of the colors based on Alan Fogel’s research on Embodied Self-Awareness (ESA).
The basic idea (and I am over simplifying for the sake of brevity) behind ESA is that it is the ability feel ourselves as living, sensing beings that invokes the parasympathetic rest-and-digest response. When we think about ourselves conceptually we are invoking various neural networks in the brain that rely on the sympathetic nervous system. It is only when we can drop fully into the experiencing self that we can access the restorative qualities of emotions.
In this model, green is a restorative state in which we are able to fully embrace any felt experience—pleasure or pain, happiness or grief—that arises in the present moment without judgmental or censoring thoughts. This state involves complete presence with whatever we’re feeling, sustained long enough to create a lasting sense of relief, deeper breathing, or spreading warmth and relaxation.
Yellow is a modulated state where we have the capacity to alternate between focused activity and brief moments of reconnecting with our felt experience. In this state, we can stay engaged with tasks and challenges while maintaining enough body awareness to know when we need to pause, breathe, or tend to what our body is telling us. Most of us live primarily in this state.
Red means we feel stuck and cannot modulate our felt experience, thoughts, or nervous system activation. There’s no space to breathe, no rest, no relief. We feel trapped in painful emotions, ruminative thoughts, or overwhelming sensations without the ability to shift or find perspective.
On sadness and joy
Let’s run through red, yellow, and green for sadness and joy, to get a sense of how this works.
Red sadness: In red states, it is common for feelings to be suppressed. Sadness often comes with the physiological counterpart of crying, which has a number of health benefits. When people suppress crying, the sadness is internalized and can fuel ongoing rumination about negative experiences, which leads to feelings of exhaustion and burnout. When crying does happen in a red state, it is the sympathetic nervous system that stays activated so the tears don’t have the soothing effect they would if sadness was experienced in a yellow or green state. This type of crying tends to be needy, self-centered, and manipulative.
Yellow sadness: Sadness in a yellow state frequently allows the tears to flow with the understanding that crying contains the possibility of alleviating some of the distress.
Green sadness: Sadness in a green state has a different quality. Crying brings relief and surrender. The tears that come contain certain proteins and stress hormones that flush stress-related chemicals and shift the body into a relaxation response. It is in this state that crying activates the parasympathetic nervous system and can bring in a sense of relief and restoration.
Red joy: In a red state, joy is usually found in things that can temporarily numb the pain. This can look like addiction, risk taking, lashing out, or being manic. These actions, while they do bring relief for short periods of time, do not activate the soothing side of the parasympathetic nervous system, often keeping someone in dorsal freeze or sympathetic activation.
Yellow joy: Joy in yellow states tends to center around high energy excitement that brings a sense of intensity, focus, and engagement. This is very typical of “flow” states experiences in sports, creative work, musical performances, etc. These states work in conjunction with sympathetic activation in the form of eustress, the positive kind of stress that stretches and challenges us. As opposed to distress which can push us into overwhelm and closer to red states.
Green joy: Joy in this state comes with a sense of deep okayness. The body relaxes and lets go of protective tension, there may be a sense of warmth and release, or the possibility for restoration and healing. People often feel qualities of presence like contentment, peace, and aliveness. Others share they experience total surrender, compassion, love, and receptivity. The face softens and people often appear younger and with bright, smiling eyes.
90 seconds
It is true that emotions generally take around 90 seconds to run their course. But that is ONLY if we are in a green state of presence. When we have the capacity to be with the emotion and fully feel it, without needing to analyze, control, or act it out, the emotion can find a path to show up, share its message with us, and then subside. But if we mess with it in any way, then that emotion is going to hang around for a lot longer.
I’ve spoken about my Kung Fu training in previous issues, and once again there are useful lessons that can be applied here. Being green is about being open, present, and relaxed. Aware and responsive to whatever might show up.
If I have my fist out in front of me and my arm tense, just waiting like for something to show that I can fight, by the time a real threat shows up my arm is going to be stiff, tired, and exhausted. I’ve wasted all my energy staying tense and waiting.
Instead, I practice staying relaxed, open, and present. If something shows up that needs attention, I am ready to respond with the right amount of energy and effort. I use timing and physics to keep myself safe and contain my opponent.
The same goes for being green.
On being green
So I want to say, to all those caring leaders out there, it is absolutely okay to be green.
We need you to be green. Be present and open. Feel the emotions that come through and let them flow. Not just the ones that alert you to what isn’t right in the world, but the ones that remind you of what is already right. The wonder of being alive, the love you have for special people in your life, the joy of connection and doing something meaningful.
Strong emotions, the ones typically classified as “negative” don’t have to keep you tense to the point of exhaustion—they have a restorative quality when felt in a state of being green. For example, restorative anger reminds us of what really matters and gives us the energy to take a stand for what we care about. It is entirely possible to wake up everyday and say “NO” without overwhelming your body with stress to the point of exhaustion.
If we stay tense and reactive, then we are easily knocked over. Our resources are always depleted and we don’t have enough to meet the moments that matter.
Green helps us connect to our emotions, we allow them all but we do this skillfully so that we can fully utilize the gifts of these emotions. If we do this unskillfully then we explode, collapse, or become lost in dogma. Such reactions aren’t in service of life and justice, and often they wind up perpetuating the status quo.
Being green is exactly how you show up in a world on fire.
