Learning How to Process Emotions
Why We Must Learn How to Process Our Emotions
During a typical day, we will feel hundreds, maybe thousands of emotions and feelings.
If you are like me and live in an urban setting, you will pass an adorable dog followed immediately by someone yelling something profane as they are caught in traffic.
These experiences can be separated by mere moments, but they will cause you to feel very different emotions. It can take lots of energy to process what we are feeling when we can feel so much in a short amount of time.
Research about how emotions affect our behavior and decision-making has exploded over the past decade. Daniel Khanamen and Amos Tversky researched and published a list of heuristics to help us understand how our emotions and experiences affect our thinking and behavior.
Recently, Khanamen co-wrote a book called Noise that showcased how federal judges have delivered more lenient or stricter sentences if:
- Their favorite sports team lost the night before (Harsher punishment)
- They just had lunch (Lighter punishment)
- They haven’t had lunch yet (Harsher punishment)
With this in mind, learning how to process our emotions is essential to understand them.
If individuals tasked to be fair and uphold the law cannot process how they are feeling (like hunger), we have many opportunities to improve in processing our emotions.
Fortunately, there is new (and free!) technology that can help us start this journey of learning how to process our emotions.
Process Your Emotions using the Mood Meter
Marc Brackett spent the last two decades helping establish K-12 school-based social-emotional learning programs. His team developed a model called the Mood Meter. This model offers a simple way to process how you are feeling by asking yourself two questions:
- How is your energy (high or low)?
- Is what you are feeling pleasant or unpleasant?
I highly recommend reading Brackett’s book, Permission To Feel, for more information on how the model was developed and for additional research. The model is now available as a mobile application that you can download on your phone.
You can see the model below with the simple questions listed on the x-axis and y-axis of the chart.
Using the chart below, ask yourself what emotions you are feeling.
The model is adept at helping someone describe their feelings because it provides a range of emotions.
Recognizing our feelings is the first step towards becoming more emotionally intelligent. It’s the first step in the Everything DiSC training program that focuses on Emotional Intelligence.
Process Your Emotions Using the Mobile App
Today, we use many apps to track our health data. Our emotional health finally has an application called How We Feel, which is built from the same model as the Mood Meter.
I took a screen recording of the application below so you can see how it works:
Logging your feelings and emotions is easy, and the app includes short videos and helpful tips on how to process better what you are feeling.
However, if you like data, the app also outlines how your emotions change over time and within specific categories.
Below, you can see the four buckets of emotions and how often I felt them throughout the month of November 2023. Overall, it’s great to see that a majority of my emotions are high energy and pleasant!
However, if I wanted to dig into my emotions and understand why I’m feeling more negative emotions, the app allows me to do that, too.
Below, you can see the different people I was with when I felt various emotions. We recently adopted a cute new dog named Birdie. While she is very cute, you can see she also taxes my emotions:
This year, I became more committed to focusing on my physical health because I know how much it helps with my mental health. This app also is able to tie the two metrics together. You can see how much I exercise and the emotions I’m feeling when compared to how often I exercise:
We receive no benefit from you using this tool. I think it would benefit anyone looking to improve their emotional intelligence.
I hope you try this app – what do you have to lose?