Grab some paper and write down 10 positive emotions. Don’t worry if you feel like you’re writing down similar emotions, just try and get 10 different ones down.
Then write down 10 negative emotions. Once again you may feel like some of them blur into the same emotion, but try and notice the differences in intensities as you write them down (i.e. anger vs rage).
Now that you’ve got your lists of emotions, it’s time to reflect. Next to each emotion, write down a recent experience where you felt this way. Some of these will come easily, while others may require a bit more thinking. Some emotions may even share the same situation, perhaps something happened that gave you a feeling of despair which then later turned into sadness.
Going through this process for each of the emotions will start to get us thinking about the different levels of emotion that we experience and, importantly, how we then react to those emotions.
