Sunday, May 31st, 8:59 pm. I’m feeling resigned. Not to one specific thing, but to life itself. There are open loops about the week ahead, plans yet to be confirmed, and that’s not my preference; I’d rather have the week all planned out. But I sit with it anyway, and I write in the app: I’m learning to cultivate more flexibility. I know I’ll be okay no matter what, and it’ll all figure itself out one way or another.
That was the last entry of a thirty-day personal-growth challenge I set myself: track how I actually feel, three times a day minimum, using an app called How We Feel, and see what’s underneath the noise.
I run one of these every few months. Not because I’ve got it figured out, but because I don’t, and the checking in is the point. This time it was emotions, because I’d noticed something: I could tell you my sleep score, my training load, my step count. I could not reliably tell you what I felt at 3 pm on a Tuesday, or why.
Why I Started Here
Going in, I rated my own emotional regulation at 7.4 out of 10, a three-month average I’d been tracking anyway. I already had a rough list of what sets me off: uncertainty, feeling like I have no agency, physical discomfort eating into my patience, other people’s thoughtlessness. What I wanted to learn was underneath that list. Why do these triggers exist? Whether the way I’ve adapted to them still serves me. How I actually behave by default when they land, and what it costs. And how to self-regulate on purpose instead of by accident.
So: three check-ins a day, minimum, for thirty days. Morning, afternoon, evening, plus any time something hit hard enough to notice.
The Numbers Told Me Something Before the Reflections Did
In April, the month before the challenge, I’d logged 23 check-ins. In May, I logged 111. That gap is the whole challenge in one comparison, not because more data is automatically better, but because it meant I was actually stopping, multiple times a day, to ask a question most of us only ask when something’s already gone wrong: what am I feeling, right now, and why?
The practice changed shape as the month went on. Early check-ins were quick. By the second half, they got slower; I’d catch myself not wanting to rush a reflection, which sometimes meant putting myself back in the situation that triggered the feeling to actually understand it, rather than just naming it and moving on. The afternoon check-in drifted the most: a reminder would land at 1 pm, and I wouldn’t actually sit with it until hours later. That drift got more frequent as the month went on, alongside a real shift in my evenings: more unpleasant emotions, both high and low-energy, in the last two weeks than the first.
What I Actually Felt, Most Often
Tired, seventeen times. Ok, thirteen. Calm, twelve. Relaxed, eleven. Discomfort, ten. Apathetic, eight. Unhappy, fatigued, meh, resigned, five each.
Read that list back, and the pattern is obvious: my default is low-energy. Not dramatic, not high-energy unpleasant as described in How We Feel, just a quiet-tired-flat-meh that I live in more than I’d consciously realised. Mornings were the clearest example: about half the time, low-energy, tired despite having slept. Evenings looked similar: low-energy unpleasant about 41% of the time, versus only 2% high-energy pleasant. High-energy pleasant states, joy, awe, aliveness, barely showed up all month. The closest I get is eagerness, and even that tends to curdle fast into apprehension and nerves rather than staying pure.
The One That Actually Surprised Me
Early in the month, I wrote in my journal: low, unpleasant emotions have a calming energy to them, similar to low, pleasant emotions, and I’ve confused the two; it takes really feeling into it, going deeper, to notice the difference. That distinction turned out to matter more than almost anything else in the challenge. There’s a specific confusion I kept running into: mistaking sadness or unfulfilment for a sense of hollowness; the sense that something’s missing, without being able to say what. Calm and apathetic can look identical from the outside and feel completely different an inch below the surface. Working out which one I was actually in, most days, required going below the neck rather than trusting the first word that came to mind.
That’s also where the app’s own language was challenging sometimes. There isn’t a great low-energy word for “not sad, just off”; a couple of times through the month I logged the nearest-available emotion rather than the true one, or didn’t log anything at all because nothing fit. Which, in hindsight, is itself data: I don’t always have the vocabulary for what I’m feeling, and neither did How We Feel. Research on something called emotional granularity, how finely you can tell your feelings apart, backs this up: people who can distinguish more precisely between similar emotions show roughly 30% more flexibility in regulating them, and tend to need medical care less often. Naming the feeling, even imperfectly, appears to matter neurologically too; putting an emotion into words has been shown to quiet the brain’s threat response, the amygdala, even when the labelling is basic. So even the check-ins where I picked the “close enough” word weren’t wasted. The act of stopping to name something did some of the work by itself.
My Body Was Keeping Score the Whole Time
The most physical insight of the month: my lower back. It’s a long-standing issue, confirmed by a physio as a structural imbalance, possibly anterior pelvic tilt, but the challenge made an emotional layer to it impossible to ignore. Prolonged unpleasant emotions, whether worry, unhappiness, unease, or sadness, reliably tracked with more back pain and discomfort. Worry and anxiety showed up in my chest. Anger, frustration, and indecision showed up in my forehead and face, almost like clockwork. I’d read Gabor Maté’s When the Body Says No before this, and going through the month with that lens active, I came out more convinced by it, not less. The research on this specific pattern, emotional suppression and chronic low back pain, isn’t hand-wavy either; one study found people who suppressed anger showed measurably more muscle tension and a stronger physical stress response during a subsequent difficult task than those who didn’t. It’s an interesting example of exactly what our True Health Is Holistic principle talks about: the domino effect between physical, mental, and emotional. This was playing out in my own spine.
Interestingly, the reverse also surprised me. In the first two weeks especially, I could be in real physical discomfort with my back, a high-energy unpleasant state, by How We Feel’s own definition, and still be calm, peaceful, or relaxed underneath it. Same with worry: I could be aware something was on my mind, sitting in the background, without being in a worried state about it. The body and the mind weren’t always telling the same story, even when I assumed they would be.
The Pattern Underneath the Pattern
If I zoom out beyond the individual triggers, there’s a bigger one connecting them: when I’m dysregulated, I get reactive, which makes me change my mind constantly, which lands me right back at indecision; one of my original triggers, now also a symptom. It’s circular. And underneath even that sits something I’d rather not have written down publicly, but the whole point of this challenge was not doing that anymore: a sense that life is happening to me, rather than the other way round. That something’s missing, and I’m not always sure what to do about where I’m at. It’s a quiet, ongoing undercurrent more than a crisis, but it’s real, and it’s probably closer to the root of things than any single trigger on my original list.
That fear shows up concretely in my career, where indecision isn’t neutral; it’s expensive. The logic runs: choosing wrong means wasted energy, so better not choose yet. Reactivity and decision paralysis aren’t separate problems. They’re the same one, wearing different clothes depending on the day.
Where Regulation Actually Worked and Where It Didn’t
May 27th, mid-heatwave, a morning workout that was going badly. I hit muscular failure faster than normal, the whole session felt terrible, and I was properly frustrated with myself, the kind of frustration that sits right underneath a belief that I’m not good enough, that I’ve failed. People close to me were around, asking if I was okay, which could easily have become the spark for snapping at someone who didn’t deserve it. Instead, mid-session, I let it out by shouting, just shouting, on my own, at nothing, and then I was able to calm down and adapt the rest of the workout. Not elegant. But it worked, and it didn’t land on anyone else.
Compare that to arriving home after a long walk. Sixty, ninety, sometimes a hundred and twenty minutes out, and I come back slightly dysregulated in a way I need a minute, just a minute, to decompress from. If I’m met at the door with a question before I’ve even got my shoes off, it can tip into a low mood that has nothing to do with the question and everything to do with not having had that minute. A loved one noticing I seemed low and gently asking about it, with the best intentions, once landed as my feelings aren’t helping. I remember saying, out loud: I’m allowed to feel my feelings. That’s stayed with me. The fix I know and don’t always use is simple: a breath before I open the front door, but “knowing” and “doing under pressure” are two different skills, and I’m still building the second one.
There’s a related discovery I didn’t expect to find so clearly: I have less patience with the people closest to me than with people one step further out. Most of the time it’s not really about them. It’s about me being mid-task, distracted, already stretched thin, and someone asking a reasonable question at the exact wrong second. My instinct is to plan and prepare; theirs is often to go with the flow. That mismatch creates friction that has very little to do with who’s right.
What I Do Differently Now
I check myself before I explain myself. That’s the short version. I’m more willing to sit with a difficult feeling without immediately reacting to it or filing it as good or bad. Every emotion, it turns out, has a reason; getting curious about it beats judging it, even when curiosity is the harder option in the moment. That’s not a constant win. It’s a direction, not a destination, and I’ve made peace with regulation being a lifelong practice rather than a box I tick once and never revisit.
On the 1-to-10 scale I started with, 7.4, I’d now put myself at an 8. Not because the triggers disappeared. Because I understand more of where they come from, even on the days I still don’t navigate them cleanly, especially when I’m tired, which makes everything harder.
The habits staying with me: the twice-daily minimum check-in, with a third whenever something strong shows up, is now just how I operate. I’ll keep doing the app’s Seasonal Snapshot every three months and its Weekly Review every Monday. And the broader toolkit that actually moved the needle this month: walks in nature, journaling, meditation, movement, a sauna or hot bath when I can get one, talking things out with someone rather than sitting on it, and a wider mindfulness practice through the day, not just at the edges of it. Journaling in particular earns its place beyond just being a habit I like; a review of decades of research on expressive writing found consistent emotional and physical health benefits from putting difficult experiences into words on the page, which tracks with what the evenings spent writing through this challenge actually felt like from the inside.
There wasn’t a day I wanted to quit. There were plenty of moments where checking in felt inconvenient, because the feeling was uncomfortable and stopping to name it meant actually feeling it, or because I didn’t have the two minutes. Next time, my approach is different: log something, even a word, in the moment, then go back and go deeper later, usually in the evening when I’m journaling anyway. The resistance was never really about time. It was about not wanting to feel the thing I was about to feel.
If You’re Reading This Wondering Whether to Try It
This one’s especially for anyone, and in my experience that’s often men, who hasn’t had much practice feeling things below the neck, noticing a feeling in the body before it becomes a thought about the feeling. You don’t need thirty days and three alarms to start. You need one honest check-in: what am I actually feeling right now, and where do I notice it in my body? How We Feel is free, and it’s a good starting point if you want a structure for this rather than building one from scratch.
You don’t have to do this alone, either. Navigating your emotional world is easier alongside people who are doing the same thing; that’s a large part of why we built the AWMS community the way we did: a place to be honest about the low-energy Tuesdays, not just the wins.
TL;DR
I tracked my emotions three times a day for thirty days using the How We Feel app, 111 check-ins, up from 23 the month before. My default emotional state turned out to be low-energy (tired, ok, calm, apathetic) far more than I’d consciously realised, and I kept confusing flatness with sadness until I learned to feel below the neck for the difference. My lower back pain tracks almost exactly with prolonged unpleasant emotion; the mind-body connection isn’t abstract, it’s real in my own spine. Underneath my specific triggers sits one bigger pattern: a sense that life happens to me, which shows up as reactivity, indecision, and, in my career, decision paralysis. I went from a self-rated 7.4 to an 8 out of 10, not because the triggers vanished, but because I understand more of where they come from. The check-ins are staying. If you’ve never really asked yourself what you’re feeling and why, that’s the whole challenge, in one question.
Key Takeaways on 30-Day Emotion Tracking
- Increase Check-In Frequency: Pausing multiple times daily to identify how you feel brings subtle emotional habits to light before problems build up.
- Recognise Low-Energy Defaults: You might discover your baseline mood leans toward quiet fatigue or calm rather than high peaks of joy or intense frustration.
- Develop Emotional Granularity: Learning to name exact feelings helps quiet your brain stress response and prevents you from confusing apathy with sadness.
- Notice Mind-Body Connections: Your physical body often reflects your emotional state, showing up as back tightness or facial strain during prolonged distress.
- Uncover Deep Patterns: Tracing your daily triggers helps you spot deeper tendencies, such as indecision or feeling passive in your daily life.
- Build Sustainable Habits: Consistent tools like journaling, walks, and brief daily check-ins strengthen your emotional regulation over time.
FAQs for I Tracked My Emotions for 30 Days. Here’s What I Found
How can daily emotional tracking benefit you?
Tracking your feelings helps you notice quiet patterns, identify physical stress signals, and manage daily triggers with greater ease.
What is emotional granularity and why does it matter for you?
Emotional granularity is your ability to distinguish between precise feelings, like separating tiredness from sadness. Specific naming calms your brain’s stress response and supports better emotional choices.
How does emotional stress affect your physical body?
Unprocessed feelings often trigger physical discomfort. You might feel worry in your chest, frustration in your face, or prolonged unease in your lower back.
What tools help you build better emotional regulation?
Simple habits such as twice-daily check-ins, reflective journaling, nature walks, and mindful breathing before transitions can help you stay grounded.
How can AWMS Learn Library | Feel Better. Live Healthier. Thrive. support your growth?
Connecting with resources like AWMS Learn Library gives you practical guidance and community support as you explore your emotional well-being.
I’m not a therapist or a medical professional. This is my own experience with my own emotional patterns, and what worked for me won’t map onto everyone. If anything here resonates and stirs something bigger, please bring it to a qualified professional.
