Emotional tracking and management

As I enter adulthood, and step out from protected environments such as schools and army camps, I would be thrown into a society that can be incomprehensible and stressful. In order to survive and thrive in life, which to me involves putting myself in an ever-changing environment, having a high emotional quotient is necessary, since it will allow me to better manage my emotions and make decisions that I will not regret later on.

When I was still in schooling, I had a hard time trying to be resilient in stressful situations because I struggled to deal with the uncomfortable emotions that were building up within me. In order to help myself grow and move on from my troubles, I found Youper, a smartphone application which acts as an emotional health assistant incorporating mindfulness, meditation and cognitive behaviour therapy techniques to help me navigate through my emotions and make myself feel better.

Sadly, I began to experience crashes while using this application in recent years, so I had quit using it and tried to find my own way of managing my own emotions. That was when I remembered reading about Ekman's Atlas of Emotions, which was a map commissioned by the Dalai Lama. It details the different types of emotions and how they are categorised based on scientific research, and presents us the whole process of feeling an emotion, from its trigger, to its symptoms, then to our responses to it. It gave me a methodology to start understanding my emotions better.

I decided to incorporate my experiences with the Youper app and Ekman's Atlas into my very own dashboard for tracking and managing my emotions. It looks like this:

Designing this dashboard (still a work in progress) in a spreadsheet allowed me to have more flexibility in analysing my own emotions. The emojis (which only worked on my smartphone) enabled me to visualise my emotions better so I can put whatever I feel into words faster. Also, the definition of each emotions and the management of different types of emotions were included inside too so that I can gain more insights from analysing my own emotions.

So far, reflecting on my emotions has allowed me to be able to stay rational in a range of situations and prevented me from getting sucked into my emotions. It allowed me to be able to find out what to improve and what to stay away with. However, this dashboard can be quite problematic in these areas:

• It is difficult for me to address my emotions if a few different emotions were experienced at the same time due to the same trigger.
• It can take quite a bit of time to fill out all the fields in this dashboard, discouraging me from updating it consistently.
• It is hard to pinpoint what kind of intensity my emotions are, and boxing emotions into a specific set of rules and countermeasures can remove the many nuances of feeling and responding to emotions.

Still, I will still choose to believe in this dashboard because it will allow me to gain a toolbox for managing a wide range of emotions and detach myself from my emotions more so that I would not run wild from uncomfortable emotions. But trying to update this on a consistent basis can be quite difficult. This is why I needed to find my purpose for doing this. By articulating the reason for tracking and managing my emotions clearly, like what I tried to do in the first paragraph for this post, I hope that I can find the strength to continue analysing my emotions and be in control of myself.