Emotional Intelligence - Journal Prompts

Mindfulness is Emotional Intelligence. They both benefit by taking time before you react to life.

I was talking on Wednesday about how emotions can get the best of us, especially those of us with ADHD. It seems like a good time to explore emotional intelligence, or try to figure out our patterns. This is similar to the distraction journaling of last week, so might be less self exploration and more self forgiveness. Let’s look the things that trigger us, how we respond and how we can respond better.

Take 15–30 minutes and explore these questions. Be thoughtful and deliberate as you consider your writing.

---

In the past two weeks, think of any time when you had a more dramatic reaction than you would expect, based on the circumstances.

• Did you find yourself unexpectedly sad about your life?

• Did you get upset about something you might normally consider ‘mundane’?

• Did you find yourself swinging from excited to sad, or vice versa, over the course of the day?

In any of these circumstances, can you identify any triggers? Something that set off the emotion or put you into a mindset that evolved into the emotion?

• What time of day did it happen?

• Were you interacting with other people or working with something inanimate?

• Did you expect the emotional reaction that you had?

• How did you feel afterward? Shamed? Frustrated? Confused?

Once the emotion kicked in, how did you respond, and how did it resolve itself? Was it lengthy or short?

• Did you lash out at other people or create any unexpected conflict because of the outburst?

• Did it ruin your day, or was everything fine after a short period?

• Did you see the emotion building before it happened? Was it a slow burn, or a flash fire?

---

Managing emotions can be challenging when you’re ‘in the moment’ but sometimes you can either prepare yourself in advance, or even trigger a different perspective that might help you steer clear of the undesired emotional outburst when it would normally happen.

If you can start to see how you arrive at an emotion, the conditions or the environment or the people, then you can start to build systems to manage it better.

Working in quiet places. Find a way to be isolated from people or external variables. Turn off distractions.

See if you can see any patterns and how you can mitigate them.

The more emotionally intelligent you become, the more readily you can manage emotions, then they rise up and excuse yourself when you need to.