To understand Emotion Blindness, our second blindspot, imagine the following question: On a scale from 1 to 10, how happy are you with life these days? How would you go about answering this? Would you go with your gut, or would you thoughtfully consider the various factors in your life and made a more measured judgment? … According to Daniel Kahneman and other researchers, our brains secretly and simplistically morph the question from “How happy are you with life these days?” into “What mood am I in right now?” … According to Daniel Kahneman and other researchers, our brains secretly and simplistically morph the question from “How happy are you with life these days?” into “What mood am I in right now?”
“Insight” by Tasha Eurich
I’ve been doing a lot of mood check-ins lately, primarily in two places. First, in my Gyroscope app every couple of hours throughout the day. Second, with my counsellor on a daily basis.
Gyroscope has been providing some interesting insights because it’s regular check-ins throughout the year. It allows me to see patterns that exist as time flows from moment to moment. I think it also helps to address some of the emotion blindness because one can distinguish my current mood from how things are going overall.
Trying to gauge emotions with my counsellor seems like it will be interesting (we just started) because there’s someone there to check in with why I may be feeling a certain way. They can ask why I’m feeling a certain way, and point out if there are other things happening that I might not be focusing on (but perhaps, I should think more about those areas).
I’m also curious to look at this data come the end of the year. There have been many big changes in the past many months. The big changes are continuing to happen, but they seem like they’re starting to be changes for the better.
I don’t want to jinx anything now, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to talk more openly and concretely about these things come the beginning of February.
