A processing device my therapist gave me a while ago, which I’m brushing off today, is an emotional budget.
She brought it up at the time in response to a session where I spent most of the time venting about external stressors. I think it seemed clear to her that I had too many emotional weights in my head, and that reduced me to just jumping between things endlessly. In other words, spiraling.
In retrospect, it’s obvious that you can’t get anything done if you’re spiraling like that. So, what do you do? You can’t ignore the stressors. They’ll just build up. No, you have to make room for them. You have to budget your attention.
Emotional (or attention) budgets work like this:
- Imagine a regular budget, or even take your own (if you’ve got one), and consider the different chunks of it. In most budgets, there’s rent/mortgage, bills, groceries, savings, and, for most of us, vehicles/transportation.
- Take a sheet of paper, and in one column, write those as a list.
- Figure out what percentage each has. 30% mortgage, 20% bills, 20% groceries, 20% vehicle, 10% savings, for example. Put the numbers in the middle of the sheet.
- Make a second column on the other side. In this second column, define the buckets of your emotional budget. This is the important stuff: family, friends, hobbies, recuperation, self-improvement, fun, etc.
- Where you put these is up to you. Everyone is in charge of their own priorities.
That’s your emotional budget. From here on out, you want to lock your attention into those things, and you want to ask yourself of anything that doesn’t seem to fit it: is this worth my time and attention? Is this worth stressing over?
If it isn’t worth stressing over, then guess what? You have permission to refocus your emotion and attention, and that’s okay.
(And if you feel like it challenges your budget, you can always re-budget. That’s okay, too.)
For someone like me, having a formal framework for the jumble of my thoughts is crucial. It gives me a neat little rulebook and that means I always have something to check to see what I should do, or not do.
Without it, guess what starts happening again? That’s right. I start to spiral, without even realizing it. I’ll spiral for days, weeks, or months without a moment of self-awareness to jog me from it.
It’s so useful for me that I’m jotting this down just in case it’s useful for anyone else.