My 3-step thought and emotion management system

In her course on processing emotions, Emma, a licensed therapist and founder of Therapy in a Nutshell, shared an accurate analogy for this process.

It goes as follows.

A fish processing plant receives freshly caught fish daily. Upon arrival, the fish is sorted based on species, size, quality and intended use. The bad fish are discarded, and the remaining ones are cleaned, filleted, packaged, and prepared for further distribution via processing lines.

One day, though, the fish delivery is much larger than usual. The plant's capacity is maxed out and the processing lines get overwhelmed, leading to the breakdown of all sorts of machines and leaving the plant dysfunctional.

Despite this incident, new deliveries continue to roll in, creating a massive backlog of unprocessed fish that is beginning to go bad. The issue is being ignored, and the longer this continues, the more challenging it becomes to address.

Eventually, someone takes the initiative to make the plant functional again, repair the machinery and clear the mess from the past weeks. Obviously, the task is unpleasant but necessary.

I think the lesson from this analogy is clear: just as the fish should be sorted as it arrives, so should we process our emotions as they arise. Leaving them unattended for too long will make dealing with them much more difficult in the long term.

In this spirit, I systematised the main takeaways from Emma's course into a thought and emotion management system, which I use whenever unpleasant things come up.

Before I implemented this system into my daily routine, I tried multiple tools for dealing with how I feel, from distracting myself with Netflix and food all the way to exercise, meditation and stream-of-consciousness journalling.

While the latter might seem like a great strategy for dealing with all the incoming stuff, it wasn't until I had built a structured system for managing my feelings that I truly started to feel better.

This is mainly because not all thoughts and emotions can be addressed by sitting in silence or sweating things out. As Emma explains, emotions may serve a specific purpose and signal that you need to take a particular action - a conclusion that is difficult to reach without a structured approach.

With this system in place, I no longer feel that there is this one massive cloud of 'feeling bad'. Instead, I can isolate each troubling thought or emotion, look at it critically and run it through a set of questions, which usually leads me to productive conclusions - and yes, sometimes the conclusion is to sit in silence or head to the gym.

Before we get into the system, there are two things I want to highlight:

One, this system is something that has worked for me and I don't know whether it would be suitable for you. I am not a therapist, and if you need support, you should speak to a doctor.
Two, this is by no means a substitute for the How to Process Your Emotions course. Instead, I see it as something complementary to Emma's course, something that has helped me integrate her advice into my daily routine. I highly recommend you take her course, where she shares valuable information and context. The course is around 150-200 USD but it has paid back many times over.

Okay, now let's dive into the thought and emotion management system. It's made of 3 steps: 1) Collect, 2) Process and 3)Review.

Collect

This is the step where you capture thoughts, emotions or situations that have made you uncomfortable.

You may find there are certain situational triggers that bring up these emotions. There might have been a certain vibe, someone said something, something happened, or you did something that was frowned upon. But as these things happen, there is often no time to reflect on how you feel about them in the moment, which is why it is important to capture the experience for later processing.

When I started using this system, I recorded these things throughout the day because many uncomfortable emotions were popping up regularly. Analogous to the fish processing factory, it was a time of sorting through stuff that had been there for too long and showed up in tiny ways throughout the day.

Now, I rarely capture things throughout the day because I no longer need to. Instead, I combine the 'collect' and 'process' steps, which we will get to in a second.

If you decide to try this process out, I suggest you capture your feelings as they occur before you get the hang of it.

Process

The Process step is where the good stuff happens - here, you run each Collect entry through a set of questions.

This step involves understanding your emotions, determining how you'll respond, and deciding on the best next action.

The questions I refer to are based on the How to Process Your Emotions course. Here they are:

1) What are you feeling?

This question is quite self-explanatory: it is about naming your emotions. To expand on the limited vocab we often have for our feelings, I use an emotion wheel to pinpoint exactly how I feel.

2) Did anything trigger this feeling? Do any thoughts accompany the feeling?

This is where I describe how I feel in detail and list the potential reasons for feeling this way. I often do it in a stream-of-consciousness way before I summarise it into the main points.

It might look something like this:

Emotion 1

Reason 1
Reason 2
Reason 3

3) How does it feel?

Next, I direct my attention towards my body and navigate where and how the emotion shows up. For example, it could be a clench in my throat, heaviness in my chest or tightness in my jaw. Once I acknowledge the physical sensations, I can purposefully relax these muscles, which helps calm my mind.

4) Does it serve a purpose?

I find this question very powerful because it allows me to look at uncomfortable stuff through a different lens. Instead of seeing it as 'bad', I can appreciate that each emotion might carry an insight I am currently blind to.

Let's take feeling hopeless as an example. In the HPYE course, Emma explained that feeling hopeless could indicate that your current strategy is ineffective and that you may need to try a different approach. Instead of banging your head against the wall repeatedly, hopelessness is a very useful emotion that can help you get on a more productive path.

Whether an emotion carries a message or not is up to you to decide, but seeing emotions as your support system rather than an enemy can be very helpful in allowing them to be and deciding on your next steps.

5) Am I creating this emotion myself

Another very helpful question from Emma - this one helps me figure out if my thoughts or emotions are based on assumptions, i.e. am I making shit up.

When I get upset, it is often because of my interpretation of events rather than facts. Looking at each thought and emotion that upsets you gives you room to question it and assess it much more soberly.

You may or may not conclude that someone/something was indeed upsetting, in which case you can speak to them about it, but looking at your interpretation of events first gives you a chance to think through it and sometimes resolve the issue yourself.

6) What is in my control and what is not in my control

There's not much to say here - what can or can't you influence? If there's nothing you can do about it, that's when acceptance and meditation practice come in very handy.

7) What can you do about it

Last but not least, a question that prompts you to consolidate everything into tangible actions.

Taking the example from above, it could look something like this:

Emotion 1:

Reason 1
- Conclusion and/or action: I might be making this up. There are multiple other explanations for why person X might have acted this way. It probably wasn't personal.
Reason 2
- Conclusion and/or action: I made a mistake and should have done XYZ. To avoid this in the future, I will (action 1) and (action 2).
Reason 3
- Conclusion and/or action: Since I cannot do anything about this, I will leave it at that.

Going through these questions can completely transform my mood and give a positive spin to every emotion because there is always a productive conclusion or lesson to be derived.

The section wouldn't be complete if I didn't mention the tools I use to support the process:

One of them and my go-to is Daylio, where I have a template with the above questions, which I can easily plug into a new diary entry and fill out whenever I feel off.
The second one is Excel. Yes, Excel. The reason is that when I don't attend to my thoughts and emotions for too long, too many threads will accumulate, and I need a tool to help me visually separate them. And Excel is great for that purpose: each column is a thought/emotion/situation, and each row is a question from my Daylio template.

Review

Lastly, we have the Review step, which is about going through previous entries and taking note of conclusions you want to keep for future reference.

As I was collecting my Daylio entries, I noticed patterns in the stuff coming up and the conclusions I was reaching.

I started capturing the most uplifting conclusions in one place if I would ever feel similar in the future. I grouped them into common themes and it is now a lift-me-up kind of repository that I fall back on when I don't feel great.

For example, if I was feeling stressed at work or could not fall asleep, I now have a backlog of conclusions I came up with when I was in a similar situation.

The beauty of this repository is that it is a compilation of my own conclusions rather than generic advice I could find on the Internet, making it much more relevant and convincing.

So now, roughly once per month, I review my Daylio/Excel entries and extract my favourite conclusions for future use.

And that would be all for this week.