Emotions are designed to draw your attention and control action — to make that action feel urgent and inevitable.

Once you learn to manage your emotions, you can harness this capacity to motivate sustained action toward your most important long-range goals. And you can regroup in the moment to foster the benevolent relationships and rewarding work processes that sustain a high level of day-by-day happiness.

As part of learning to manage emotions, you first need to learn to catch emotionalism whenever it appears, especially in its subtle forms.

What I mean by emotionalism

By emotionalism, I mean cases in which your current action is impelled by an emotion rather than guided by your rational decision.

If you keep saying you are going to do something and you never get to it, an emotion has taken over. If you settle down to concentrate on a top-priority task and let yourself get distracted by something else, an emotion has taken over. If you tell yourself you should stop scrolling or stop streaming or stop your particular something else, and you don’t, an emotion has taken over. If you find yourself awkward and unlike yourself in a social situation, an emotion has taken over. If you find yourself nagging, criticizing, or blaming your loved one rather than finding a constructive way to communicate, an emotion has taken over.

I consider all of the above to be common experiences. The healthy remedy for them is not an ironclad discipline and suppression of feeling, but a strong ability to manage and redirect emotions in a constructive direction.

The simple case to catch and redirect

In the examples I gave above, it’s easy to catch the problem. You reached a conscious conclusion about what would be good for you to do, and you are doing something else. A very small degree of self-awareness will suffice.

The next step is to ask yourself what you feel and why you feel it. This reveals the evaluation underlying the emotion. In the simple cases, that evaluation is false, you see it’s false, and the emotion loses its power immediately.

For example, suppose you are at your desk to start concentrated work, and you are suddenly distracted by the idea that you need to send an email to that college friend to whom you haven’t spoken in a year or so, because her birthday is coming up in two weeks and otherwise you might forget it again, so this is more important than work and you should do it right now.

This is the kind of rationale for an action that is easy to answer. Writing such an email would kill your concentration and indefinitely delay your top-priority task. Yes, you should write to your friend. Make a note to do it after you finish this task. It can be the first thing you do during your next break.

In short, when the action contradicts your stated intention, and the evaluation that underlies the emotion is false, it is relatively easy to catch and redirect your attention to what matters most.

But that evaluation is true!

It can be harder to catch emotionalism when the underlying evaluations are true. In these cases, it can be difficult to make a decision in the first place.

For example, a significant cause of indecision is fear of failure. If you set a big goal, you might fail. Or you might be criticized. Or you might wimp out and not follow through and feel guilty about it. It can be easy to believe you’re “thinking” about a decision when you’re really emoting about it.

It helps to realize that an evaluation may be true but not relevant to the decision. That is a distinct test you need to make regarding the underlying evaluation — is this relevant?

For example, I often coach people who are afraid to go after their dreams because it will be hard and they might not succeed on the time scale they have in mind. If the goal is ambitious — say, writing a novel — it likely will be hard and will take longer than they think. But this is a reason to develop a sustainable process that creates pride and confidence in the undertaking so that you can continue it until you succeed. It’s part of the challenge of writing a novel, not the argument against writing it. When you look at it this way, you then can decide whether you want to step up to that challenge or not. That’s the decision to make.

The opposite problem is possible, too — emotionally committing to something without fully considering the consequences. I sometimes find that I promise to do something because I think it will be easy and won’t take significant effort — say, make brownies for an event. And then, when push comes to shove, making brownies requires my full or partial attention for a 45-minute slice of time that I would rather have spent otherwise. It is not relevant that it is easy and doesn’t take much effort. Too many easy things can quickly overcomplicate one’s life.

There’s no substitute for monitoring for emotions, including emotions of excitement, to check to see if they are based on evaluations that are true and relevant.

Sometimes you need to go deeper

Often you need to go deeper in introspecting an emotion, beyond the first-level explanation.

For example, if you’re scrolling and resisting stopping even after you tell yourself you should, you probably haven’t gotten to the bottom of why you’re scrolling. The superficial explanation is often something like, “I couldn’t concentrate, so I need a break, then I’ll go back to it when I’ve had enough of a break. But I’m not ready yet.”

Let’s stipulate that it’s true you needed a break and your intention to go back to work is genuine. It remains to be established that scrolling is an appropriate break, especially if it goes on longer than you intended.

This is why I find it is necessary to identify the deep rational value at stake that is causing the emotion. Your starting place is the underlying evaluation. Then you need to ask deeper questions. (See my article on this.)

It may be that you need a break because you are physically depleted and need re-energizing — in which case scrolling is not a good fit. You need a nap or a walk in fresh air or some physical shift.

On the other hand, you may need a break because the work you were doing was going badly, and you were excoriating yourself for all of the problems, and you’re burned out emotionally for now. Scrolling won’t help this either — you need to give yourself some compassion and re-look at what’s going badly to find a constructive way forward without the self-flagellation.

It is often the case that the superficial form of an emotion obfuscates what is important in the situation. Scrolling is unimportant, but if it has a pull, you need to explain the intensity of the emotion and see if that is relevant. Going deeper requires that you identify the value at stake — the deep rational value that gave rise to the emotion. Then you can decide how that relates to your purpose.

The intensity and duration of an emotion is caused by the importance of the underlying value at stake. If the emotion doesn’t make sense, you haven’t yet identified its fundamental cause.

I discuss elsewhere why it is so important for your long-term happiness to manage emotions rather than suppress them. In some cases, you may discover that your conscious conclusion was mistaken.

But more importantly, you learn that when you catch yourself dropping into emotionalism, there is always something to learn about yourself and your deepest values. And that self-awareness will strengthen your emotional resilience and enable you to activate motivation consistent with your rational self-interest.

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This is the kind of thing we frequently discuss in coaching calls in the Thinking Lab.