Kyle Morris

Managing Emotions

note: This is my journey being more conscious about emotional health

2 years ago I began tracking emotions in roamresearch via tags

i have 100s of emotion logs

For example

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>90% of my emotion fit into 10 tags

#focused #unfocused #tired #irritable #stressed #anxious #energized #happy #angry #impatient

And I had 2 strategies to work with emotions

focused / happy/ confident /motivated → work

anything else → workout more, journal, sleep more

There are apparently 6 types of basic emotions, and 100s when you drill in

Among the 6 basic types, I report almost always feeling “sad, angry, or happy”

I do most of my best work when happy

I get some work done when angry but burnout after being in overdrive too long

I get very little done when sad

I do less when sad or angry yet >80% of the time I’m sad or angry

That seems unideal

Why is this?

there are over 100 emotions, i hit < 20 ever

i bet since I have broad emotional categories, my solutions are broad

so if I’m more granular i can have more specific improvements

Getting granular

Trying out this app @https://howwefeel.org/

It breaks emotions into 4 categories

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And within it gets more granular /w 100s of emotions + gives you options to categorize

I used this for 2 weeks and the trend surfaced again

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I’m sad or angry 68% of the time based on my last 40 checkins

I suspect it’s lower on this app because it asks me when to track

Whereas previously I wrote down my feelings when I chose to

And I probably choose to write feelings more often when angry or sad

So.. A more refined stat from 2 sources: 68-80% of the time i’m sad/angry

Still unideal given I work best when happy

Becoming an emotion scientist not an emotion judge

I used to demonize “bad” emotions

I’m shifting this mindset of judging emotions to observing and studying them

And shifting from “eliminating bad emotions” to functioning better with all emotions

now I’m tracking

  • how I feel >3x times per day
  • for each feeling
    • what’s on my mind at the time?
    • what’s going on in my physical environment?
    • what else may have caused this?
    • what is my best guess on how to work with this feeling?
  • if i try something and it radically changes my emotion I’ll note it

I’ll document what works and what doesn’t over time

hopefully having a broader view of emotions to update this regularly