Emotions and Check Engine Lights

For the last nine months, our team of three has delved into the problem space of emotional intelligence. We are creating an app that helps to build emotional resilience over time by normalizing a full range of emotions. Throughout researching and building a product to help one understand their emotions I was invited into a new way of thinking about my own emotions and how I handle them. If anything, I am positive now that emotional intelligence is a foundational form of communication that affects all aspects of my life.

Now for an analogy. My car is a disaster. The service engine light has been on for the last year. The windshield has a precarious crack across it. The shocks are going out. This year I have been in grad school, so my car is really on the back burner and with one week to go till graduation, I’m just riding it as is.

I have always had a love/hate (but mostly hate) relationship with cars. For one, I don’t know anything about car maintenance. Second, it’s expensive. These two factors often lead me to avoid the situation altogether. I don’t know how to fix it and its expensive… I’ll pass.

I think this mirrors how many of us handle our emotions. We don’t really know how to go about “fixing” them and they are tolling, especially the negative ones. The thing is, like a check engine light, our emotions are always telling us something. Perhaps saying that something is actually wrong and needs attention.

In this mindset, whether it be a car or ourselves, we are waiting for a breakdown. And with anxiety and depression rates at their highest, it doesn’t feel like the smartest strategy to be taking.

Often emotions aren’t to be trusted or acted on. But why? Is it because we’ve avoided them and now have no idea how to allow them to surface without them being destructive?

By nature, I’m a very introspective person. But this year I didn’t have the time or capacity to really “check-in” with myself. In some ways that’s a good thing cause I have a tendency to ruminate. But grad school was a complete commitment and my mental health didn’t receive the attention it needed. My emotions weren’t sifted through, understood, and dealt with. They stagnated. The check engine light has been on the whole year.

One of the key insights we found when researching was that negative emotions often feel like failing. We live in a culture that celebrates happiness, maybe this is just human nature. But by equating positive emotions to success and achievement, we discourage people from two really important things. First, to embrace these negative emotions. And two, to admit them. Ultimately, this disallows us from managing our emotions as they come and learning from them.

One of the ways our app addresses this is by using social features in a way that doesn’t promote social comparison, rather by creating an empathic community by shedding a light on others working through similar emotions as your own. Allowing, say someone like a grad student, to realize that, “Other people have their check engine lights on. I’m not alone in this.” Because these emotions nor experiences are failing, they’re just a part of life and we can channel them in positive ways, even if it’s just letting others know that they are not alone.

Another way our app addresses these challenges is by providing strategies to channel emotions in positive ways. One of the primary asks from research participants was a tangible exercise to do that would help to channel an emotion. Each time a user “checks-in” on the app, specific mood tags and emotional intelligence factors are taken which play into an algorithm, driving the app’s tone and curated suggestions, creating a unique and personalized experience every time.

The app’s main goal is to help one understand their emotions and be given strategies to channel them, allowing one to truly learn from their experiences. As I have gone through a emotionally tolling year, I know that this problem is very real. As a twenty something, navigating these years seems to be one stressful event after another. What I could have used is something that allows me to understand my experiences, the emotions that come with them, and offer me strategies to learn from them. Something a lot like the app we designed.