11 Questions to Help You Control Your Horribly Unhelpful Emotions (So They Don’t Control You)

The following is adapted from a new best-selling book, The Habit Mechanic, by Dr. Jon Finn.

Many of us know what we want to do or achieve, but accomplishing it is a different story. To help you understand why, imagine you have a lighthouse in your brain. Two characters live there. The first is HUE (which stands for Horribly Unhelpful Emotions). The second is Willomenia Power, or Will Power for short. Will Power is HUE’s guide and mentor.

HUE works in the lighthouse’s control room. Its first instinct is to search for threats. Imagine HUE using a beam of light emitted from the lighthouse to mindlessly scan your thoughts, your feelings, and the environment around you. HUE’s second instinct is to find easy, new, and exciting things that make it feel good.

When HUE notices a problem, or a short-term gratification opportunity, it sometimes calls Will Power for help. When everything in your brain is working properly, Will Power guides HUE to solve the problem or manage unhelpful impulses.

When Will Power can do its job properly, your HUE will be calmer. It will be easier for you to successfully manage stress; build and maintain robust levels of confidence; be focused, productive, creative, and good at solving problems; be a better leader; and be a better team member.

Of course, as you already know, the modern world presents many challenges, and these challenges result in an unhelpful imbalance between HUE and Will Power. HUE can become overactivated, and Will Power can quickly get overwhelmed and exhausted. This makes it very difficult to be healthy, happy, and at your best.

That’s why, if you want to be your best, and help others do the same, your first job is to get HUE and Will Power working together efficiently and effectively, creating more balance between these two powerful assets.

HUE Versus Will Power

HUE operates the limbic regions of the brain. I call these areas the APE (Alive, Perceived, and Energy) Brain. The APE Brain makes us prioritize survival.

Will Power operates the prefrontal cortex, or the HAC (Helpful Attention Control) Brain (pronounced hack brain). We can use the HAC Brain to manage the APE Brain and build better habits.

This is important, because our habits dominate what we do and how we think. Our experience of the world is what we are in the habit of paying attention to.

For example, if we only pay attention to our failures in life and the setbacks we’ve experienced, that becomes our reality. Equally, if we only pay attention to how fantastic we think we are, and how nothing is ever our fault, that becomes our reality. Ultimately, some of our habits are helpful for us being at our best, and some are unhelpful.

We Are Designed to Survive

Homo sapiens have been around for about 300,000 years, and in that time, our APE Brain has focused on one job: helping us survive. To stay Alive, we prioritize all the things that are essential for doing that. Although for most people things like food, shelter, and warmth are a given in the modern world, notice how quickly the supermarket shelves emptied during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Closely connected to staying alive is our concern about how we are Perceived by other people who are important in our lives—think social status, peer pressure, and how social media is used. Our success in life can be closely connected to how we are viewed by people who are important in our lives. So, we often worry too much about what others think.

Finally, as food—our main source of energy—has not always been readily available, we make every effort to conserve Energy. This is why we sometimes prefer to sit and watch TV instead of exercising, and we avoid work that is mentally challenging. We even see this in our food preferences. Your brain knows that it is more energy efficient to eat a donut than an apple, so that’s what it gravitates to.

Developing Survival Habits

The collective APE result is what I call “survival habits.” Some examples of common survival habits include worrying too much, being unfairly self-critical or beating yourself up, giving in to temptation, easily getting distracted, procrastinating, giving up easily, jumping to conclusions, and easily becoming stressed.

Unfortunately, these types of habits are becoming increasingly problematic because of the challenges we face in our world. These unhelpful habits mean we can beat ourselves up too much or procrastinate on things that we really do need to get done. In fact, these habits are often the biggest waste of personal resources in any 24-hour period.

What does this mean? If we want to be at our best more often, individually and collectively, we need to learn how to build more new, helpful habits.

Engage in Intelligent Self-Watching

The first step in doing this is to start identifying some of your unhelpful survival habits. To do this, I want you to do some intelligent Self-Watching. This simply means thinking about yourself in a focused and systematic way, so that you can precisely identify your unhelpful behavior.

Of course, this can be difficult to do because you are designed to run on habits. So, to help you, I have created a short Self-Watching exercise (The APE Brain Test). There are no right or wrong answers. This is just about what you think about yourself right now.

The more you practice Self-Watching exercises like this, the better you will become at understanding yourself. I complete this type of test about once a month, because the more I practice intelligent Self-Watching, the better I get.

You could complete the test either from your own point of view, or on behalf of a person you want to help. Score each statement from 1 to 10, where 1 equals never and 10 equals always.

It doesn’t matter what your scores are. The important thing is that you are thinking about yourself and identifying your strengths and areas for improvement. Don’t overthink your scores; just go with your gut instinct.

The APE Brain Test

1. I reflect on my diet, exercise, and sleep, and plan to make daily improvements in these areas. Score: ____
2. At the end of the day, I always reflect and highlight what went well, and what I can improve tomorrow. Score: ____
3. At the end of every week, I reflect on what went well, and plan how I can improve next week. Score: ____
4. From time to time, I think about my future. I set long-, medium-, and short-term goals to focus my efforts and achieve major objectives. Score: ____
5. I regularly update my yearly and monthly calendar to add important work and life activities. Score: ____
6. I recognize when I’m stressed and successfully plan to reduce my stress. Score: ____
7. I monitor my confidence levels and successfully build up confidence in areas where it is low. Score: ____
8. I recognize when my emotions are unhelpful and can successfully keep them under control. Score: ____
9. I successfully plan to improve my productivity levels. Score: ____
10. I successfully plan to spend less time dwelling on unhelpful thoughts. Score: ____
11. I successfully plan to improve my performance as a leader. Score: ____

Adjust to Be Your Best

Once you’ve completed the exercise, circle the area that you think will be most helpful to make a small adjustment to today to help you be your best. Then, write down one small thing you will do differently to improve this area.

Be as specific as possible. For example, instead of writing, “Be less stressed,” you might write, “Practice a Daily Reflection at the end of the working day.”

Then, explain why taking this step will be helpful. For example, you might write, “It will make it easier to de-stress, switch off, sleep well, and be at my best tomorrow.”

By doing this exercise, you can identify the most significant challenge(s) or problem(s) your APE Brain poses in your life right now, then start to take steps to overcome that problem or challenge.

Create Your Me Power Wish List

Now, take it one step further, and begin creating what I call your Me Power Wish List. This is a list of all the small new helpful habits you would like to build and changes you would like to make based on your APE Brain Test results.

As you start to create your list, please remember it’s only realistically possible to make one tiny change/build one tiny new habit at a time. This is a wish list for a reason: nobody has the resources to make all the changes they want at once.

To help you build new habits, I have created a range of over 30 “Habit Mechanic Tools”. They are tried and tested in helping over 10,000 people to supercharge their motivation and build better habits in the following areas: sleep, diet and exercise; stress management; confidence; productivity and focus; performing under pressure; leadership; team performance. You can learn more about them in my new best-seller book, The Habit Mechanic.

For more advice on how to be your best and how to improve your work-life balance, you can find The Habit Mechanic here.