Tracking Your Thoughts Can Help You Unlock Productivity and Happiness
A previous article I wrote encouraged the practice of pausing throughout the day and identifying what emotion you’re feeling. Another good practice is to add context to those emotions. Your thoughts drive your actions as well as fuel your emotions. This is because our emotions have intelligence.
Emotions and Their Intelligence
For example, when I feel angry, I have a different driving force behind my thoughts than when I feel sad or grateful. When I’m angry, I have a sense of righteousness. When I’m sad, I focus on what I’m lacking. When I’m grateful, I focus on what I already have.
When I make decisions out of anger, I’m responding to that sense of righteousness. Unfortunately, I may not respond to the initial trigger. If I feel overworked, and I’m angry that I can’t get everything done in time, I may respond accordingly to other triggers — I may ignore a coworker pinging me with yet another question, or I may yell at my dog who’s whining to play. But if I felt grateful as I encounter those same triggers, I would respond much differently. If my coworker pings me, I am thankful that I’m on a team and I don’t have to do everything myself, so I readily answer his question. When I feel grateful, I’m happy that I have the unconditional love of my pet, so I give her a treat and promise to play later.
Reacting vs. Responding
How we can we use this emotional intelligence to our advantage? There is a significant difference between reacting to stressors and responding to them. Our stress response is triggered every time we perceive a threat. When we automatically react, our cortisol levels rise, which over time can cause chronic stress and maladaptive coping behaviors. This can lead to a complete breakdown. However, if we mindfully respond, our oxytocin levels rise instead. Oxytocin is also known as the “love hormone” and is released when we cuddle with our partner and empathize with others.
To mindfully respond to these external triggers, we must train our brains to pause and reflect. Studies show that we have over 6,000 thoughts a day. Count how many distinct thoughts you remember having today. Can you count them on one hand? It doesn’t feel anywhere near the thousands because studies show that 47% of our time is spent mind wandering. Mind wandering predicts subsequent unhappiness. During mind wandering, our thoughts are often on the past or future, neither of which we can control at the moment. If we can harness those resources towards mindful awareness of the present, we can more easily respond to the external stressors around us.
Improving Your Team’s Morale and Productivity
That helps us with our happiness levels and our own actions, but what about our productivity? Having conversations around these themes helps your team, manager, and leadership better understand what decisions to make moving forward. I know, it’s weird to talk about emotions at work, but it’s time to alter this stigma. If our environment and work culture supports emotional intelligence, imagine how productive and intelligent you would work as a collective. Once your team is collectively tracking emotions and the thoughts behind them, those triggers can bubble up into retrospective conversations. You’ll have concrete examples to speak to, and managers will better understand how to respond.
For example, if the team is feeling stressed as a whole, how does that show up if no one talks about it? Team members may be unresponsive or less productive, or employees may decide to leave the company. If you do speak to feeling overwhelmed or stressed at work, is it because you have too much on your plate, too many meetings, or do you struggle with the constant interruptions of email? Each of these examples inspires a different initiative for your manager to support! It’s incredibly important to be specific and the more you understand about your own triggers, and your coworkers understand about theirs, the more impactful the changes from your leadership will be on your day-to-day life.
The Takeaway
Journal your emotions and thoughts throughout the day. I recommend at least twice, once in the morning and once in the evening. Adding a couple more reflections during the day increases the data for your insights, so if you want to do more, please do so. Every week or so, look back at your entries and identify trends. Identify one area that you want to improve and/or one area that you are satisfied with. In negative moods, you can more easily re-route to a mindful response, and in positive moods, you can solidify and hold on to that feeling.
If you are up for it, I highly recommend sharing these insights with your peers and co-workers to build a supportive environment.
If you are interested in using a tool to track your emotions, you can use Quimby, a tool that allows you to track your emotions and team morale. It’s free for the first 30 days for your team. Visit https://www.quimbyapp.com/ to learn more.
Now go: release that oxytocin!
