Emotional Intelligence: What Are Your Top 5 Emotions?
I’m still going strong with the Noom app, which I’m having trouble believing. Our life is full of stress right now (we are moving this week!). But I’m continuing to walk nearly 10,000 steps a day, log all my meals, weigh myself each day, and stay under my daily calorie allotment. I was never this consistent with WeightWatchers or MyFitness Pal. I think one of the reasons relates to the daily activities in Noom that require you to think in new ways and learn more about psychology. Last week, my activities focused on Emotional Intelligence.
What are your Top 5 Emotions?
One of the activities they had us do was answer this question: What are the top five emotions you experience the most frequently? And what’s the intensity/frequency with which you experience them on a daily basis?
I find this question fascinating! So fascinating that I might make it part of my Annual Reflection & Rejuvenation process! It seems like an important self-improvement goal to monitor which emotions make it into my Top Five and make sure I’m okay with how it’s going in my life?
Before I share mine, do you want to make your own list? If so, stop here before coming back! I’m heading into the part of the post where I reveal my list.
Here we go…
Emotional Intelligence: My Top Five Emotions
- Joy. At a level 8. I’m relieved that Joy is my top emotion! (Spoiler Alert: 60% of my top emotions are negative and only 40% are positive. Oy.)
- Anger/Frustration. At a level 7. Ew, this one makes me cringe! But I gotta be honest. I get mad a lot! I mainly get mad at other people and their ways of doing things. Like I get mad at Matt when I’m showing contractors around our house and he lets out the dog who then starts jumping on the contractors. What?!? Why would he not have connected the dots to keep the dog in the room while the contractors were in the house? (My anger seems unnecessary and dumb as I lay it all out here, but it is what it is!).
- Impatience. At a level 6. This one dovetails with the anger/frustration one. I get impatient with my children a lot! And with Matt because he’s a really slow eater. (Again, dumb, I know.)
- Boredom. At a level 5. I told my therapist that I generally find parenting really boring, and he said that’s how most of us feel. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but it definitely made me feel better!
- Gratitude. At a level 4. Phew! I’m so glad this emotion made the Top 5 List! I don’t feel this emotion nearly as much as the others ones, but when I feel it, I really feel it. Hooray!
Reflection
I’m not sure what to do about the anger/frustration. Even though I love the SmilingMind app, I don’t feel like meditation is rewiring how I experience anger/frustration. Maybe I’ll start taking a prescription dose of folic acid like my children do? We all have issues with our MTHFR gene (Matt, me, Henry, and Tate). It means our bodies don’t process folic acid the way they are supposed to, which impairs the production of dopamine and serotonin. Maybe I’ll try it as an experiment to see if it makes me feel any different.
Maybe I will try to use my metacognition to notice when I’m feeling impatient and replace it with gratitude instead? That could be a really cool way to decrease the impatience and increase the gratitude!
And I already feel like I’m working on the boredom one.
What a fascinating activity!
I would love for you to chime in with your top five (ideally in order with the intensity/frequency number next to it). I am fascinated by how my emotions compare to others!
6 Comments
Breanne
Have you considered why you are considering some emotions to be positive or negative? Emotion are emotions. Positive and negative aren’t good and bad. I’ve read your blog for years, and without knowing you I see that your frustration spurs action and your impatience means you build big, hard things fast! Consider that you wouldn’t experience such high levels of joy, if you did not experience such high levels of anger. You feel big things–all the things! The alternative isn’t all positive emotions on high, but usually less emotion all around. This means less anger and impatience, sure, but then also less joy and gratitude.
How we act on our emotions can be problematic. Thanking others to the point you make them nervous or others don’t trust you, acting like you are at a amusement park when you are at a funeral… these are “positive” emotions you listed that can be acted out problematically. How you respond to Matt’s slow eating is more important than the fact you are impatient with it. (And seriously, there are things to do besides stare at someone eating all day!) The feelings you have are genuine and make sense.
Sara Cotner
This comment is so profound, Breanne! Thank you for the free therapy! You’ve truly given me a new paradigm for thinking about my emotions. I really appreciate it.
Heather
I’m curious what test was done to discover the MTHFR issue. If you are willing to share I would love to hear about it!
Sara Cotner
I’m sorry for my delay with responding to this, Heather! You are always welcome to ask anything. Here’s a little more about the test:
https://feedingthesoil.com/2017/01/17/mthfr-genetic-testing/
As a result, Henry is on a prescription-dose of mentholated folic acid. It hasn’t “cured” his impulse-control issues, explosiveness, or anxiety, but it has helped a TON (although it is scary reading about the long-term risk of high-dosage supplementation: https://www.merrittwellness.com/mthfr-folate-myth-doctor-isnt-telling/).
If you are interested in exploring it, I recommend that you look for a functional medicine doctor in your area. I’ve really appreciated their well-rounded, roots-not-symptoms-oriented approach (although they tend to be very expensive).
Let me know if you have more questions!
Sara
Katie Zaback
Wow Breanne, I so needed to hear that today! Thank you for a great post, Sarah, I too have been doing Noom, but I’ve also been doing a lot of work on emotional intelligence over the last 9 months. I’ve tried meditation and Yoga for years. Yoga typically works but meditation never has. . . until I started the emotions work. I realized I’m so bad a working all the way through my emotions and really feeling them but working on it has been really hard and also so liberating.
My emotions are not that far off from yours, although I don’t feel bored with parenting I feel completely overwhelmed at having to make so many decisions every day that I really don’t care about. In general, I prefer for people to just take responsibility for themselves and making smart decisions (which I realize is completely rediculous to expect of 3 and 6 year olds. . . )
What an amazing community you’ve created! Thank you.
Sara Cotner
Thanks for chiming in, Katie! I was talking to one of my fellow INTJ friends, and I asked him what his top five emotions are. He said, “I don’t think much about my emotions at all.” It was such a classic INTJ response! I’ve been reflecting on this as I work through the emotional intelligence section in Noom. I’m so much less engaged in it than I was in the other sections. I’m really trying to unpack what that means for me. For a while, I went to a somatic therapist who really helped me pay attention to how emotions felt in my body. I appreciated it. I want to delve in more to emotional intelligence.