This 100%. I can feel when I'm distracted, unmotivated, and so many other things. If you spend enough time "talking" to your subconscious, you begin to know how you feel about what you're doing and not merely how you might rationalize what you're doing. To use a programming analogy, paying attention to your emotional state and guiding it are kind of like writing assembly code for your mind ... all the dumb shit you're doing isn't hidden/abstracted away. It's right there staring you in the face.

Tangent ... but I frequently describe joyously doing hard things as a dance with my subconscious, ie how can I get "me" to do what I consciously want to do when "me" is only partially conscious ... I give it what I think it wants.