Training exercise “Emotional diary. Unlocking an Interesting Life: Diary of Emotions

Recall a recent situation when you experienced strong emotions, whether it was irritation, anger, resentment, or admiration, joy, happiness. Surely, positive emotions have added strength, energy and self-confidence to you, as they say, “the world has smiled!”. What happens to you after a negative emotional wave? Does it happen that an attack of anger or irritation knocks out of the working rhythm and takes time to recover? Does it happen that feelings of guilt or resentment do not let go long after an unpleasant conversation or negative news? The conflict seems to have been settled, and the tense stressful situation is over, and the unpleasant emotional “aftertaste” spoils your mood and reduces your efficiency (We previously posted a case on how to resolve a conflict between leaders, you can read the Case here). I can imagine that each of us has a similar experience from time to time.

How to stop engaging in "afterburning" emotional situations? How to learn to “recycle” your unpleasant emotions in an environmentally friendly way? How to discover your own sources of self-motivation and internal energy? How to learn to tone up and concentrate in an emotionally difficult situation?

In the arsenal of emotional competence there is an excellent tool for answering these questions - the Emotion Diary.

An emotional diary is a technique for keeping track of your emotional state in order to improve self-understanding and self-control.

This technique is based on the basic principles of emotional competence:

• “Awareness leads to control.
• What we are not aware of controls us.

We are designed in such a way that we first feel, then we think. And this is one of the reasons why we rarely think about what kind of emotions we experience. While it is emotions that are the "keys" to our motives and needs, the sources of our energy or its leakage!

In this sense, emotional management can be applied famous quote Classical management: "You can't manage what you can't measure" (Deming).

Tasks of the Diary of Emotions:

• - get a real picture of your emotional state;
• - understand your leading (typically predominant) emotional background;
• - visually see the relationship and differences between emotions, needs and their intentions;
• - get a simple block diagram for introspection and self-control.

For Emotional Competence training participants and my coaching clients, I suggest working with the Emotion Diary for one to two weeks to solve these problems. To date, the form of the "Diary" looks like this (see an example of one characteristic entry):

Diary of emotions

You may be surprised to find out after a week of regular journaling of emotions how often you experience irritation, anger, fear, resentment and similar emotions, while considering yourself a generally positive and friendly person!

The best results with this technique come from regular practice. When I myself kept such a “Diary” a few years ago, I set a timer mobile phone in increments of 1 hour, and did brief notes by signal. Thus, at the end of the day, I had a complete “emotion map” of my working day. This version of the use of the "Diary" is good for working on self-understanding and concentration.

To develop self-control skills, you can try a different approach: fill out the "Diary" in the most emotionally charged situations of the day, immediately, in hot pursuit. In addition to introspection and awareness of what pissed you off, you get an immediate bonus: verbalizing emotions in itself relieves stress!

An option for "advanced" users of the Emotion Diary: try to trace the dynamics of your attitude towards your own emotions. Figuratively speaking, meta-emotions - what emotions do I feel about my own emotions? For example, do I accept myself as angry, hurt, cowardly? Or do I experience self-blame and condemnation in connection with this, creating even more stress for myself and closing the “vicious circle” of emotions?

This seemingly simple technique can give you a lot of practical information for understanding the reasons for your own inefficiency, sources of stress and finding personal resources. Of course, this requires deeper work with the coach. Often in coaching we work with a client on the following topics:

• - What situations in the "Diary" was easier for you to write about, and about which - more difficult?
• - What emotional states usually help you, and which ones would you like to get rid of?
• - Pay special attention to the situations in which you most often feel pity for yourself, self-accusation, fear? What do these situations tell you?
• - etc.

With regular maintenance of the "Emotion Diary", after some time (about a month), you develop the skill of self-understanding and emotional self-control. In addition, keeping such a “Diary” in itself makes your emotional state more stable and positive.

I wish you more inspiring emotions and high efficiency!

The task of the exercise is to develop the ability to identify (define) your feelings and emotions, differentiate (separate) them and develop a stable connection with emotional sphere without which it is impossible to either learn to let go of negative emotions or manage them.

Period: minimum 15 days.

Materials: notebook, pen (it is possible to use electronic means, but writing is better because the kinesthetic modality of perception is involved).

Recommended:
1. those who want to learn how to manage emotions, who experience stress, depression, emotional experiences (longing, loss, fear), but cannot determine the causes
2. people with a childish subconscious attitude “to show emotions is not normal” (do not roar, do not be afraid, laughter for no reason is a sign of a fool, boys do not cry, pull yourself together, stop being capricious, etc.). The presence of an attitude can be traced by the thoughts “I don’t allow myself to be weak”, “it’s uncomfortable to cry”, “you will laugh a lot, you will cry a lot”, etc.
3. who is undergoing psychotherapeutic sessions with a psychologist,
4. who wants to develop their emotional intelligence, “turn on” a creative approach to life and problem solving

Task: during the day you make 3-12 notes about the emotions you experience according to the following scheme:
1. When.. (something happened)…
2. I felt …. ( physical sensations in the body and localization)
3. and felt ... (name of emotion).
4. After recording, say to yourself aloud (according to the situation, in case of impossibility - to yourself): “I feel .. (name of emotion)”.

One entry must fit into one sentence.

For example,
- When my husband yelled at me about dinner, I felt a hot lump in my throat and a rush of heat to my eyes and felt hurt (we say "I feel hurt").
- When I lost the keys, I felt a strong excitement in the chest area and tension like a lump in my stomach and felt fear and anxiety (we say "I feel fear").
- When I saw Marina crying, I felt an emptiness in my chest and pain in the back of my head and felt ... I can’t call this emotion, but I would call it hopelessness (we say “I feel hopelessness”).

Don't focus on too much detailed description more attention to feelings and emotions.
Both positive and negative emotions and impressions.

The sensations in the body are described as:
- where in the body (stomach, legs, arms, chest, neck, throat, head, etc.)_
- tense-relaxed, hard-light, cold-warm, dark-light, free-shackled, etc.
Feelings can be formulated as images: “like a stone on the heart with a sharp end”, “like cold mucus in the hands”.

If you can't name an emotion, ask yourself, "If I could name it, what would I name it?" Do not try to guess or understand how it should be objectively called. Name how you feel it - this will be the correct answer. Analyze less, listen more to yourself. The answers will come from within.

On the last page of the diary, you write down what emotions you know and gradually add to the list. Note that "quiet sadness" is different from "sadness" and "bright sadness". Learn to catch subtleties in sensations. Look for a list of emotions on the site in the "Useful" section

The purpose of the diary is NOT to analyze your dominant emotional state. This is a secondary issue. The first is to learn to identify your feelings and emotions and name them.

Leave questions and feedback about the exercise in the comments.

Be happy!

PS To get rid of negative emotions and transform subconscious children's attitudes, go through the video training "Liberation from negative emotions." You can get a description of the training and order it at [email protected]

The key point in the practice of self-knowledge and psychological self-help is the development of awareness in the sphere of emotions and feelings. In I have already written about the importance of observing how you feel throughout the day. Today I want to talk about one simple but effective technique for independent work with emotions and feelings - an emotion diary.

Why do we need such a diary?

• You will learn to track and recognize your emotions
• You will be able to see which ones prevail during the day
• You will track what exactly makes you feel certain. Perhaps note the impact on your emotional state of certain situations from the past and be able to correct your behavior
• By recognizing your emotional reactions, you can connect with your needs. Thus, you can add to your life what is really important and necessary for you and free it from the "ballast"
• You will be more sensitive to manipulation in your address. You will be able to respond in a timely manner to attempts to force you to do something that you do not want at all.

How to keep a diary of emotions?

• You can use any notebook or notepad, a text editor on a computer or even a notebook on a smartphone
• You can write during the day in free mode or take time to fill in the diary every hour
• Write down the situation and your emotional response to it.
• For those who are not in the habit of tracking their emotional reactions, it can be difficult at first. If you find it difficult to recognize what you feel in this moment, refer to your bodily sensations - perhaps you feel tension in your shoulders or dryness in your mouth, maybe it's something like "trembling in the knees", etc. Gradually, you will learn to recognize what feelings are behind it.
• In order to learn to recognize what emotions are behind your bodily reactions, you can do the following. In those moments when you know exactly what kind of emotion you are experiencing, write down in a diary the physical sensations that accompany it. Later, if you feel something similar, you will be able to match your reaction and recognize the feeling that is hiding behind it.
• In addition to emotions and sensations, you can write down in a separate column the thoughts that arise at this moment. This will help you learn to separate what you FEEL from what you THINK.
• Keeping a diary makes sense until you learn to track your emotional reactions, to separate them from thoughts and feelings at any given time. This is quite a laborious task, but it is worth the effort. If you keep a diary for a long time, for example, for several months, you will be able to trace the repetitive response patterns that you have. By tracking down what triggers them, you can consciously change habitual patterns, which will allow you to go beyond and become more flexible in your daily life.

An example of how you can keep such a diary.

“What does it mean to live interestingly?” In my opinion, this question is not only about what to do in life, but also how to perceive it, from what position to relate to it.

Living interestingly is a certain ability. The ability to live moment by moment as fully and richly as possible. It gives life a special quality. The fact that opportunities open up and goals are realized is a pleasant side effect.

From this point of view, the question is relevant: “How to develop the ability to live interestingly?”. And it looks like the whole space of this log is a lot of possible answers to this question. But I want to ask this question in a different way: "How to eliminate the blocks, obstacles between a person and his ability to live interestingly?"

What prevents us from enjoying life? Most often - our own internal blocking.
Photo Source: Unsplash

What stops you from being interesting?

What exactly are the blocks? It seems to me that the answer to this question is the key point. Let's take for example one of the states in which the ability to "live interestingly" is blocked, and consider how it works.

Based on my professional and personal experience, I can say that depression can be attributed to such conditions. I must say right away that everyone who has encountered it experiences it in their own way. It is possible that in my description you will find something that matches your experience. Or doesn't match.

In trying to understand how depression works, I rely heavily on the model adopted in cognitive therapy. From this point of view, the loss of interest and the ability to enjoy activities that you previously liked plays an important role in experiencing a depressive state.

At the same time, the ability to direct attention changes in a person. It seems to “get stuck” on negative points. And not so much on the negative of the present, but on the painful or nostalgic memories of the past. To them are added images from the future, with which any fears are associated, plus bodily discomfort from chronic fatigue, muscle clamps. All together leads to the fact that it is very difficult for a person suffering from depression to stay in the present moment.

The central puzzle of this picture is the feeling: "Take me out of here, I'm so tired of it all, I can no longer feel it, think these thoughts." It is a desire to shut oneself off from life, to escape from what is happening here and now, in one form or another of “killing time”.

This feeling is not so much a reflection of reality as the result of running impressions through a certain mental filter. Events take place in the external world, we perceive them through the body - impressions arise. Our mind approaches them with its own "measurement ruler" and evaluates the correspondence of the received impressions to its ideas about "due". And most often it detects this or that inconsistency, perceives it as a problem and starts looking for a solution.

If in our experience situations have already occurred when a solution was not found, our mind concludes that we are incompetent in this matter. And our disability. Extrapolates the absence of a solution into the future and makes a prediction: if the problem is not solved, everything will be bad ...

Emotions and feelings (for example, irritation, disappointment, despondency, despair) already arise as a general conclusion from all these constructions.

This mental activity is manifested not only in isolation from the initial impression of an event from the outside world, but also in isolation from what happened in the world and in the body after that...

Most of us most often do not realize this and continue to operate "on autopilot". Which, as a rule, is instructions drawn up in the past. Most of the time, not us. While our attention is occupied by looking at pictures from past experiences and dramatic scenarios offered by the imagination.

We stop being open to new experiences from moment to moment because of the negative feelings we experience. These feelings, in turn, are the result of certain habits in the workings of the mind - habits that we are not aware of. We do not enter into direct interaction with the world, because we transfer control of our actions to the “autopilot”. By the way, this is typical for most people, and not just for those who are in a depressed state. Just on the example of depression, these blocks between a person and his ability to “live interestingly” are perhaps the most noticeable.

Practicing Mindfulness

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the practice of mindfulness around the world. Many hundreds of years ago, it originated as part of the Buddhist tradition. Now it is used by those who do not consider themselves believers. Or committed to other religions and philosophies.

Mindfulness practice aims to turn off the autopilot and learn to address experience—any experience with benevolent interest. And make decisions based on that.

The practice of mindfulness is a way to study the daily workings of one's own mind and develop an awareness that is not identified with any mental processes: “There are thoughts, feelings and sensations. They arise and pass like clouds passing through the sky. I am the sky, not the clouds." It allows you to see the habits of the mind (at least some) as a filter of perception and get in touch with the sensations and impressions of what is happening at the moment, without subjecting them to interpretation and without building dramatic scenarios around them.

This gives the experience of a greater fullness of life. The ability to not identify with one's own thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations gives great freedom. It becomes possible to consciously and voluntarily dive into the flow of experience to the depth you want.

The practice of mindfulness is now considered to be a recognized "non-specific factor in the effectiveness" of psychotherapy. On its basis, therapeutic programs for individual and group work are created. They are used for patients suffering from pain and other consequences. physical injury, chronic diseases, depression, etc.

If you are interested in learning more about them, I recommend these books:

• M. Williams, J. Teasdale, Z. Segal, J. Kabat-Zinn The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (2007)
• J. Kabat-Zinn Full Catastrophe Living:Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Pain,Stress and Illness(reissued in 2013)

In Russian there is a book of Tik Nat Khana "Miracle Mindfulness"(or The Miracle of Mindfulness, depending on the translation).

Diary of emotions

The study of the workings of one's own mind is more effective when accompanied by written practices. They are used in the mindfulness-based therapeutic programs I mentioned.

In this article, I want to offer you two options for writing practice for exploring emotions.

The first option is used in the depression cognitive therapy program. Participants are encouraged to keep a record of positive emotions daily for a week. Then another week to write down negative emotions. In both cases, it is proposed to keep records according to the same scheme. It is convenient to use a table for this:

Using this writing practice, you can keep track of what is easier for you to write about, what is more difficult, and in what situations it is easier not to write down the event and the experience associated with it at all.

If you manage to write about two or three sufficiently vivid experiences every day for a week, you will get enough material to draw some conclusions for yourself. If it takes only two or three days, there will be less material, but it's better than nothing.

I used an emotion diary in my first dissertation. At that time I was studying the dynamics of people's attitudes towards their own emotions under the influence of observing negative experiences and exploring them. Subsequently, switching to another topic, I gave the research materials to Tatyana Lapshina, and she developed her own version of the diary of emotions, which I will give below. It consists of nine questions:

• What situation triggered an emotional response in you? Describe it briefly.

• What feelings/emotions did you experience?

• If emotion could talk, what would it tell you? Or what did it encourage you to do?

• What thoughts arose after the experienced emotions?

• How did you express your emotions?

• Could emotions be expressed differently? Describe how.

• How did others react to your behavior?

• What from your experience can you attribute to the positive consequences of the situation?

• What experience can you relate to negative consequences situations?

If you have time and desire, try first one version of the diary of emotions, then another. See how the results of observation differ depending on whether we focus on bodily experiences or on the role of emotions in interaction with other people.