How To Use The MOOD METER To Improve Your Emotional Intelligence + 5 Helpful Practices

Today I’m sharing something called the mood meter. This is a great tool to help you recognize and understand your emotions. 

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The first thing people ask is, what’s a mood meter? A mood meter is a way to determine and improve your emotional state and it shows we all have a variety of emotions. Emotions can range from happy to sad, stressed to encouraged… and it’s all good, because emotions are communication. All emotions are valid. 

The mood meter has four colored quadrants that represent emotions from high to low energy and a positive to negative quality.

...Now, again, all emotions are valid, but for the sake of the four quadrants, we're going to talk about negative and positive emotional states. If we're talking about a low energy, emotional state in the negative zone, we're talking about emotions like despair, loneliness, feeling apathetic or exhausted. 

Moving into the high energy range on the negative side, you’ll find emotions like anger, irritation, feeling furious, or enraged. I think you kind of get the idea that an emotional state has a certain quality in our bodies, we sort of feel certain things that affect our behavior.Anger can absolutely motivate us to make changes when we get upset about something that's going on in our life, or even the world. We can feel motivated by anger to make some changes.

And then let's take a look at the positive, low energy side of the mood meter. Here you’ll find emotions like serenity, calmness, peacefulness, and gratitude. And then the high energy, positive side is ecstatic, motivated, lively. Reviewing the mood meter can help you better relate to your emotions. This is part of becoming more emotional intelligence, and it’s a hot topic right now. There’s lots of studies and articles talking about the power of emotional regulation and emotional intelligence. 

I'm going to explain the difference between emotions and feelings a bit further in the article, because it’s an important thing to know. 

The mood meter is helpful, isn't it? It's helpful to recognize that your emotions are valid, because many of us might have grown up in a situation where we couldn't really express how we were feeling, or we would express our feelings and they got dismissed. Come back to your emotions, my friend. Come back to your emotions and let them communicate what's going on in your life. When you get more introspective, you can uncover things that are ready to be healed. 

I also love sharing Robert Plutchick’s Emotion Wheel with my clients. It’s a wonderful tool that illustrates our complex, emotional life. There are primary, secondary and tertiary emotional levels that most people aren’t even aware of, so using it to help you build your emotional vocabulary is powerful. Awareness is the precursor to change.

Now, here's the difference between an emotion and a feeling. An emotion creates a certain quality or experience, which are feelings.  For instance, the emotion of excitement for me feels sparkly on the inside. I feel lighter, more elevated. I might feel a warm feeling in my stomach. And then the opposite, like sadness, can have a completely different experience in my mind and body. That's the difference between emotions and feelings. 

People use the terms interchangeably…and that's okay. Just know that each emotional state has a certain contextual experience. It’s also important to note that when you’re experiencing an emotion you can be visualizing something. You might be saying something to yourself. You might be recalling memories. It’s all a part of the total experience of the emotion. 

So…the big question is, how are you feeling today? That's a question you can ask yourself each day, several times a day. Just noticed your emotional state.

You can say, “Oh, I'm noticing the emotion of anger, or frustration coming up. Hmm? What is anger and/or frustration trying to tell me?” Or…”I'm feeling super excited. Wow, what’s the emotion telling me? Oh, I'm moving in the direction of what I’m meant to do in the world. Wow. Okay, that emotion is communicating purpose.”  So ask yourself often… “How am I feeling today? Noticing is a great way to become more emotionally intelligent. 

Here are some of the practices to build your emotional intelligence skills: 

1. First and foremost, notice, just notice. How are you feeling, or what are you experiencing in your body? Again, feelings represent an emotional state, so what emotion is coming up for you?
2. Sit with yourself and allow. Remember, emotions are communication. 
3. Accept ALL your emotions. All emotions are valid. It's the behavior that you’ll want to pay attention to, based on how you’re feeling, or what emotion you’re experiencing. Throw in some self-love and self-compassion, too. 
4. Journal. Writing down how you're feeling is very cathartic and actually very healing, because then you can begin to process through writing, you’ll discover what's triggering you and begin to make positive changes.
5. Rehearse. If you want to respond differently next time, because you didn’t like the way you responded in a certain situation, here's where emotional intelligence comes in. For example, you responded/behaved in a way you didn’t like, and you want to respond differently next time, then begin to rehearse, or what's called future pacing. Imagine how you’d like to respond next time. Write it down in your journal and say something like, “Next time, when this happens, I'm going to…” and then rehearse it in your mind. 

Our imagination is powerful. In fact, our mind doesn't know the difference between real and imagined. So begin to rehearse the new behavior that you wish to bring into the world and you’ll find yourself behaving more as you’ve rehearsed. 

And that's it, my friend. That's The mood meter and how to use it to understand your emotions. 

Your Self-Care Coach,

Lorie

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