It's incredible how attuned horses are to our emotional state. They are able to sense, respond and remember human emotions with stunning accuracy. Their ability to read everything from micro-expressions to energy fields and understanding what they do with that information provides riders with an incredible opportunity predict when suboptimal performances are likely to occur and, with the ability to manage their emotions, turn it instead into an outstanding one.
When I work with horses I often call it polishing the mirror because horses reflect and amplify back to us how we are at that time. When we learn to recognize how horses are responding to us based on our emotions this can be a useful tool to understand in real time that we may need to adjust our emotional state in order to have a good training or performance ride with our partner.
The study of how horse are able to read human emotions is fascinating. One study showed that horses can remember human expressions in photographs and when they saw angry faces they had higher stress levels and elevated heart rates compared to when they saw happy faces in photographs. Remarkably, when the horses actually meet the person they had seen in the photographs they responded more readily to the people they had seen with happy faces in the photographs. But if you think you can simply hitch a smile on your face when you're having an emotionally off day in order to have your horse think everything is okay you had better think again.
It's not just our external clues that horses read but also our inner ones. Horses are able to hear at a distance the subtle changes in our heart rates and breathing that occur with emotional changes such as when we have faster heart rates and shallower breathing when we are stressed or afraid and they respond to that with a heightened sense of alertness. However, when their human partners display emotional calmness they relax and often will sychronize their heart rates (called 'cardiac coherence') with people they trust most.
Aside from micro facial expressions horses interpret body language such as subtle changes in our posture, gate and muscle tension that betray our true emotional state. When we are confident we move differently in our stride, hold our head and even our shoulders differently compared to when we feel a disempowering emotional state. Horses catalog all of these cues and use them to judge and even predict our emotional state. Their awareness is so advanced that they even know when we are about to move in a particular direction and see through our attempts to hide our emotions when we are feeling uncertain or try to project a confidence we don't really feel.
What's even more incredible is that science shows that horses sense emotional energy fields which emanate up to eight feet around our bodies. Our emotions change the electrical activity in our energy fields and horses are attuned to reading that. Our energy field is more coherent when we are calm and more chaotic when we are stressed and angry. A study showed that horses experience high states of agitation when they are near people in emotional turmoil even if the person is sitting quietly showing no outward signs of distress. Conversely, horses position themselves near people with calm, coherent energy fields or people who need emotional comfort which helps explain why horses are so effective in therapeutic healing.
Perhaps the most fascinating ability of horses when it comes to reading emotions is their ability to process multiple emotional layers simultaneously. What this means is that horses are aware of and can respond to the complex emotional cocktail that makes up our inner state. So, while they may read surface emotions such as displayed by our external body language and facial expression, they are also reading the deeper emotions underneath that may be different from how we appear on the outside. They respond to who we really are emotionally, not who we are pretending to be.
What that means for riders is that given their awareness of our true emotional state being aware of and managing our emotional state is critical to working well with our horse. We need to be aware that even little things can throw us off our emotional center such as getting up on the wrong side of the bed, or reading a social media post that criticizes us, to of course larger emotional issues such as those that are related to complexities of personal relationships or even how riders feel about their progress in training and competitions and how quickly, or not, they are advancing up the levels.
Setting up the patterns, behaviors and habits that allow you to more easily regulate and manage your emotions is critical to maintaining a calm state that provides your horse with the calmness and confidence you need in training and in your performances. All the scientific evidence shows that there's no sense in trying to hide how we feel from our horses. More often than not they know how we feel better than we do and show us how we need to adjust if we're willing to pay attention.