How to Mind Map Emotions
Being emotionally trapped and stifled is a terrible feeling. All you know is that you’re sad, you’re angry, you’re anxious, you’re overwhelmed. But somehow, you just can’t seem to verbalize how you feel. At times, it seems so hard to keep our heads above water and nearly impossible to separate ourselves from our emotions - we literally become whatever it is we’re feeling.
Trust me, I’ve been there.
In the past, one of my biggest challenges was not being able to express how I feel. This was especially painful in relationships where I would be hurting yet I would just sit there paralyzed, drowning in my fear, anger, and sadness without any way to communicate what was going on inside. This would eventually lead to unhealthy outlets like sulking, aggression, over working, over eating, and overall creating a negative spiral that led to painful breakups or, in my career, burnout and quitting.
I knew something needed to change. It was during a particularly dark period in my life that I started using mind maps to dissect my own inner workings instead of just using it to organize external chaos.
One of the most useful things about mind mapping is that it forces slow us down enough to methodically parse through the complexities of our lives. Today I will share with you one of my most powerful techniques to intentionally define and analyze how we feel using a combination of mind mapping and the human emotion wheel.
Identifying Our Emotions
First of all, why is it important to identify and define how we feel? Simply put, if we can’t put a face to our emotions, it’s easy to become them. And when we become our emotions, it’s very hard to deal with them effectively.
It’s the equivalent of being carried away by a raging river without anything to hold on to. While this might be fun for positive emotions like love and joy, the opposite is also true with negative feelings like fear, anger and sadness. When that happens, it’s hard to keep our heads above water and in the worst scenarios, feel like we’re drowning in it.
On the other hand, when we’re able to define and map out our emotions, it’s as if we’re on a floatation device. We’re still experiencing the currents, but we’re able to breathe and see where we’re going.
If you’re into meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, read Stoic philosophy, or even journal on a regular basis, this concept will be familiar to you because all these practices help extract ourselves from our emotions so that we can think clearly.
The framework that we’ll be using is what I call EFM. It stands for Events, Feelings, and Mindsets. The relationship between these three elements is illustrated below:
You’ll notice that it’s a feedback loop: Events generate Feelings, which shapes Mindsets, which in turn influences our perception of future Events. It also shifts between the literal and the abstract. Generally the more literal something is, the easier it is to define.
Feelings, such as emotions and sensations (sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch) sit in the center of this spectrum, and acts as a bridge to our subconscious Mindsets. By mapping our Feelings, we not only develop our emotional literacy, but actually uncover a lot about our hidden Mindsets.
To help us define our feelings, we’re going to use the Human Emotion Wheel.
The Human Emotions Wheel
The original human emotions wheel was developed by the clinical psychologist Dr. Robert Pluthik. In the 1980’s he came up with a framework of eight primary emotions which included anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust and joy. These are often depicted as a flower-like diagram with contrasting emotions at opposite ends. For example, anger is the opposite of fear whereas joy is the opposite of sadness. The intensity of the emotion also matters with stronger emotions closer to the center of the wheel. Finally there’s also blending of primary emotions, forming new ones like love, a combination of joy and trust, or contempt, a hybrid of anger and disgust.
Pluthik was a psychoevolutionary theorist which means he saw emotions as a survival mechanism that kept our ancestors alive. Even though we no longer have to fear lions and tigers, I think our emotions still help us navigate the modern world.
Sadness, for example, can be an important teacher, and as my favorite poet Rilke wrote, a harbinger of change, a sign that we can no longer stay in the same place. Even anger, an emotion that’s most shunned by Stoics and eastern philosophers alike, can be source for new insights and a powerful motivator for change. So rather than antagonizing our feelings, I prefer to note them and try to harness them instead.
For our purposes, we’ll be using the Junto Institute’s emotion wheel. I like this version because it has a more thorough collection of emotions organized in a logical and easy to find way. There are also only six primary emotions instead of eight, so we can quickly scan through the whole wheel to determine how we’re feeling. We’ll refer to these primary emotions as 1st level and their “child” emotions as 2nd and 3rd levels.
Mind Mapping Our Emotions
When we map our emotions, we can either start with Events or Feelings. I’ve done both ways and prefer beginning with Feelings because sometimes we don’t actually know what exactly is causing our feelings - we just know we feel a certain way.
For this exercise, I recommend using a tablet app or have erasable pens in three colors handy. In my example, I’m using blue for Feelings, red for Events, and green for Annotations (notes, observations, connections, and insights). Below is the template.
Here is how I mapped my negative emotions.
Instructions:
1. First start with the central topic of “How am I feeling?”. Draw the main nodes by referring to the Emotion Wheel and grab the main Emotion that best describes how you feel.
2. Expand the main node with 2nd and 3rd level emotions. Look up the dictionary definitions if you’re uncertain or confused by the terms. I needed to do this for several words. Remember, we’re training our emotional literacy, and just like learning any new language, don’t be afraid to look stuff up.
In my example, I was primarily feeling Angry and Sad. Under Angry, I identified Irritable, Jealous, and Disgusted. I then further narrowed Irritable down to Aggravated. This was where I had to look up the difference between Aggravated and Annoyed, the two child emotions of Irritable. A quick Google search yielded:
I liked the second definition, which implied that Aggravation is persistent or multiple instances of Annoyance. That’s exactly how I felt!
3. Map the Events associated with your Emotion, which can be Episodes, People, or Circumstances. Continue to unpack and map out what exactly is causing your feeling.
In my case, it was a person, my partner Olivia. She has severe allergies that worsen with stress, and the fact that she wasn’t addressing it was aggravating me.
4. Fully expand anything you can think of. Now we’re going to put on our Systems Thinking caps on and consider what are the factors that’s contributing to the Events that we’ve identified.
For Olivia it was because of her work. Not only does the stress directly worsen her allergies, she also lacks the time to get it checked out by a doctor. So I link “Work” to Allergies and expand Work into “No time”. Second, her nature might also contribute to the problem, which is that she’s gotten used to the severity of her condition to the point of nonchalance, has difficulty with time management, and will let the matter sit until she can’t take it anymore.
5. Identify and draw connections with any other Emotions that are could be driving why you feel a certain way. The power of mind maps is that you can expand these complexities without losing track of your train of thought or the larger picture.
I realized that I wasn’t Aggravated at Olivia as a person, but rather at her condition and circumstance. The Anger then comes from a place of Fear, specifically I was Scared and felt Helpless to improve the condition of someone that I love.
Turning Mind Maps into Insights & Actions
Do you see how complex and multilayered our emotions can be? Without mapping this out, I wouldn’t have been able to identify these important details. In a single mind map branch, I was able to connect the dots between three major emotions of Anger, Fear, and Love, as well as separate the person from the issue, which means I can now address the issue rather than direct my emotions at the person.
This has huge implications for how I would approach and communicate the issue. Instead of fuming at Olivia, I can now tell her that I’m afraid for her health and that I’m angry and aggravated at feeling helpless to do anything about it. I could then suggest that we sit down some time to discuss how we can address this issue together and where I can possibly help. This is much more effective and well received than if I just said, “hey I’m annoyed at you rubbing your eyes all the time”.
After mapping the full extent of my anger and sadness, I zoomed out to examine the bigger picture and I came upon some interesting patterns.
If you can’t read my chicken scratch writing here are my insights with some elaboration:
Anger
Anger is my dominant negative emotion.
It’s also a “hot” emotion that tends to drown out positive emotions like joy and love.
Fear
Fear is blended into Anger and is sometimes the driver (secondary emotion).
In the past, I’ve overcome fear with:
Love, which leads to security
Selflessness, leading to service to others and causes beyond just myself
Feeling small and unimportant in the face of grand scale like nature and time. I talk about this in “What 10,000 Years Taught Me About Life” (video here). Rather than making me depressed, it makes me content and appreciative of where I am and the connections I have.
I should be aware of when I engage in negative self talk or exposed to negative, fear-based outside influences.
Doubt leads to fear for self and others
Scarcity mindset makes me shrink back from pursuing my dreams
Toxic or unproductive expectations leading to or arising from social comparison
Prioritization & Acceptance
I need to accept that I’m in a “low social”, productive build & launch mode right now (making Mind Map Nation!), which contributes to low social stamina. And that’s okay. No one ever achieves their dreams without sacrifices.
This is just scratching the surface of how to use emotion mind maps because every person and every emotion is different, so the exercise will result in different insights. In the following two-part YouTube series, I’ll go through all the examples plus how I map positive emotions and address social comparison, anxiety, and guilt.
