Welcome back to the Emotional Embracement series! This essay is Part 2 of a series where we explore the current state of productivity and shine a light on a new way of knowledge working.
In Part I, we introduced the idea of emotional embracement, the act of turning towards “negative” emotions that emerge while we’re working, and why we believe it’s the gateway to unlocking new levels of creativity and self-expression.
By bringing awareness to our body and processing emotions while we work, we can deepen our understanding of how we relate to work, creating more intentionality around how we spend our time.
When we tune into our emotional state, we’re giving ourselves the permission to feel the waves of discomfort and the negative sensations in our body we’ve been clenching. If you find yourself sitting down at your desk, only to feel a sense of dread, there are paths forward other than spiraling into procrastination. Where are you feeling the dread in your body? What is the procrastination trying to tell you?
While we’re not thefirst ones to talk about this concept, we haven’t found a comprehensive guide on how to apply it to work. This essay serves as our playbook for how to tactically integrate emotional embracement into your day-to-day work.
Through experimentation, we’ve identified four main steps to this approach:
Cultivate awareness 🧘
Bring awareness to your body and emotional state
Journal interstitially ✍️
Take notes on resistance and insights that arise
Process emotions 😮💨
Address and process emotions using your existing introspection practices (e.g., meditation, breathwork, Internal Family Systems (IFS) parts work)
Update approach 🔁
Integrate learnings from Steps 1-3 into your work routine
The ultimate goal of this process is tending to our work in a relaxed state with focused attention. The intention is to develop feelings of loving kindness and non-judgment towards our resistance to work. As with somatic and shadow work, it’s common to feel disdain for our “negative” thoughts and the uncomfortable sensations in our body. But, only by shining a light and putting a loving witness on what’s been suppressed can we begin to dissolve inner conflict and work more intentionally.
A note on personalizing your practice: As with most things in life, there’s no one “right” way to practice emotional embracement. The two of us have wildly different emotional working styles:
Cissy tends towards an anxious attachment to work. While she finds it easy to start working, under stress, she resists taking breaks even when she’s hit a wall and runs the risk of overdoing it. Her energy may be spent on smaller, inconsequential tasks to procrastinate the meaningful work.
Pranab tends towards an avoidance attachment to work. While he prioritizes a balanced approach to work, under stress, he resists exertion in the face of too many to dos, overthinking at the cost of getting things done. His energy may be spent seeking other things to do before starting work.
Yet, we have both experienced meaningful changes in our relationship with work as we’ve adopted this approach. Our hope is that by sharing the tactics we’ve found helpful, you can experiment and remix the toolkit to assemble your own emotional embracement practice.
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step 1: cultivate awareness 🧘
Start your work session by bringing your attention to your body via a brief meditation and body scan.
What are you currently feeling?
What emotions are most alive in you?
What sensations are you feeling throughout your body?
Think of Step 1 as a warm-up, priming your mind to bring a spacious awareness to your body. We’ve also likened it to tuning into your “inner weather report.”
The typical start to a work session may look something like this:
Open your laptop
Review your to do list or calendar
Attempt to jump right into a task while battling resistance or the urge to procrastinate
Rather than trying to brute force your way to progress, this step calls for 1) calming the mind and 2) accessing interoceptive awareness. We’re shifting from a cold start to a warm start.
calming the mind
The technique of calming the mind is rooted in shamatha practice, a core teaching found in popular meditation apps. We often think of concentration as a tight, clenched feeling. In emotional embracement, our aim is to cultivate a blend of ease, alertness, and collectedness.
accessing interoceptive awareness
Interoception, or internal awareness, is the ability to perceive and interpret signals from your body as they emerge — being in touch with what you’re feeling while you’re feeling it.
Our interoceptive palette includes:
Mental: racing thoughts or foggy vs calm and alert
Awareness: expanded and receptive vs narrow and protective
All of us have varying degrees of interoceptive capacity based on how often we tap into bodily sensations. For Cissy, it took about one year of actively working with and thawing the numbness she’d developed as a way to adapt to fast-paced work environments before she was able to acutely tune into the signals from her body.
Here are two examples of our inner weather report via interstitial journaling (more on journaling in Step 2):
The good news is that developing interoception comes with practice — the more intention you put into listening to your body and observing the initial numbness, the more sensory clarity you’ll build.
The goal is to create the conditions to allow any and all feelings to emerge, grow stronger, and eventually melt into the background. Approach Step 1 from a place of curiosity, acceptance, and kindness. As you tune into your emotions and bodily sensations, simply observe what subtle feelings are coming up without judgment. It’s natural to resist the emotions coming up, but gently turn your attention towards adopting equanimity.
step 2: journal ✍️
Open up a page in your favorite workspace (e.g., Notion, Obsidian, or Google Docs) and begin a running log of thoughts, feelings, and to dos that emerge as you work. Experiment with stream of conscious and reflective journaling.
Step 2 is about untangling ourselves from our thoughts and feelings. An underlying principle in meditation and therapy is internalizing the fact that we are not our thoughts, we are not our feelings. Journaling allows us to see our thoughts objectively on paper (or screen), freeing ourselves from the deliberations that take up much of our headspace.
Imagine one giant, tangled up monochrome ball of anxieties, questions, and to dos — that’s our mind pre-journaling. The act of brain dumping our thoughts allows us to bring awareness to the giant ball and sort through each thread to begin unwinding that big blob into smaller, tidier, color-coordinated balls. These smaller balls are far easier to tackle and serve as lights illuminating the path forward.
By bringing awareness to the subconscious through journaling, we can begin to name what emotions are alive in us, feel an emotion through fully, and get under why we’re actually feeling a certain way.
The practice of journaling has a wide range of positive impacts on mental health: from processing emotions to reducing stress to increasing self-awareness, journaling has the power to help us navigate intense emotions with a level of safety that may be difficult to access elsewhere.
level 1: interstitial journaling
How might you begin to apply journaling to support your work (even if you don’t currently journal)?
Begin with interstitial journaling, a technique created by Tony Stubblebine (coach turned CEO of Medium). The purpose of this form of writing is to use breaks intentionally. By creating space between when you pause for a break and your next action, you’re making room to tune into your internal landscape before you instinctively reach for your phone or click open a new tab.
The basic idea of interstitial journaling is to write a few lines every time you take a break, and to track the exact time you are taking these notes. For instance:
Notice the mix of intention setting (finish the first draft), self-awareness (feeling a bit anxious), reflection (made good progress), and to dos (call Anna) in Anne-Laure’s example.
For the purpose of emotional embracement, we expand the scope of interstitial journaling to beyond breaks. Writing out loud what’s happening internally and externally allows us to proactively bring emotions forward before they begin to fester or become suppressed. Write whenever you feel a dip in momentum whether that’s while working, on a break, or throughout the day.
Journaling is particularly helpful in certain contexts including:
Navigating emotionally challenging tasks (e.g., high stakes work)
Moving through self-directed work
Working through tasks that require high context switching
Working while experiencing personally challenging situations
Transitioning roles and responsibilities
level 2: publishing to a public feed
Once you’ve started interstitial journaling on your own, you can experiment with bringing friends along for the ride by journaling to a public “feed.”
There is an online community that I’m in that has an unusual but powerful social technology for asynchronous communication, colloquially called “feeds,” inspired by old-school Facebook walls and RSS feeds.
Think of feeds like old school RSS feeds, but integrated into your existing digital spaces like Slack and Discord. We’ve found that digital spaces with feeds lower the bar for engaging vulnerably. The ability to scroll through others’ feeds and emoji react allows for passively popping into a friend’s train of thought and see how they’re doing.
Feeds can be just as useful in-person as digitally. During co-working sessions, it’s common to feel conflicted between spending time talking to the friend you’re working with or focusing on the task at hand. The magic of working in a feed alongside others is that it allows for more meaningful connection and deeper focus. If you choose to set up a public feed that others can view, the structure allows for communication that doesn’t interrupt others when you share your thoughts live — your friends can simply scroll through your feed as desired. At the end of co-working sessions, you don’t have to catch someone up on how it went — you see how they’re doing, often in greater detail, allowing for a deeper sense of connection (especially when you see what most resonated through their emoji reacts and comments).
In our experience, scanning friends’ feeds during co-working sessions helped us realize that the waves of “negative” emotions we feel throughout a work session are not unique to us. The reality is we all feel resistance in one form or another — it’s the second derivative feelings of shame and guilt that keep us from moving forward, blocking us from accessing flow when we’re urgently grasping for it.
Here are examples of our feeds in Slack:
step 3: process emotions 😮💨
As emotions emerge from Steps 1 and 2, lean on the introspection practices that are most resonant with you to address and process these feelings.
Practices may include meditation, breathwork, IFS parts work, shadow work, etc.
There’s a growing awareness of the importance of therapy, the power of somatic coaching, and the role of acceptance of our parts via IFS and shadow work. But much of that wisdom is locked up in the practice itself (e.g., a morning meditation) rather than embedded throughout our work day.
For the purpose of emotional embracement, we define practice broadly — any type of awareness-enhancing activity, framework, or spiritual belief that you identify with.
What works well during that practice?
How can you apply it to Step 3?
How can you deepen your practice from the lens of emotional embracement?
As mentioned in Part 1, the idea of emotional embracement was born from Pranab’s experience booking time with an emotional coach who supported him while he completed a difficult task. While successful, it isn’t sustainable and is excessive for daily work. Drawing inspiration from facilitated emotional work can help you integrate insights to manage emotional reactions throughout the work day.
Here’s an example of Pranab processing feelings of shame and overwhelm, triggered by a colleague asking about a task in progress:
scale of emotional intensity
As you read this, you may think How will I ever get anything done if I’m processing emotions all day? or What emotions?
The purpose of this approach is not to be a substitute for therapy or somatic coaching — it’s to serve as an extension of your existing practices and invite you to apply what you’re learning about yourself outside of work to work.
On a scale from 1-10, the processing happening in emotional embracement should sit between a 1 and 6. There will certainly be times when you’re experiencing an intense emotion during work, but feeling insufficiently resourced or under time pressure. In those cases, acknowledge the feeling, process what you can, then importantly, gently set it aside with the promise to revisit it later in the day or week.
step 4: update your approach 🔁
Once you’ve moved through a few cycles of Steps 1-3, take a step back to reflect on what you’ve learned. Think back to your body scans and read through your entries.
What learnings can you integrate into your workflow to improve your current experience?
Here are two examples from our community:
Energy, movement, and creativity
Since committing more of her energy to writing, Cissy has found more inspiration and flow writing first thing in the morning. After a few months of writing consistently, she found herself pushing back morning workouts for fear of “breaking” flow despite hitting a wall some days.
As she adopted emotional embracement, rather than forcing herself to write through the morning, she’s experimented with aligning her writing schedule with how her body is feeling. Now, she sets an intention to get outside by noon, heading out for a walk or run depending on how she’s feeling vs brute forcing her way through a writing session.
Boredom, time, and value
Recently, Panashe was working on a repetitive task, covering for a colleague. He noticed that the task was incredibly boring, but didn’t feel like it justified an investment in automating it.
When he took a moment to tune into the resistance and boredom, he asked himself, “What’s the value of doing this task?” Asking himself this question rather than continuing to chip away made him realize that he’d spent enough time on it. He didn’t need to continue to invest any more time or energy into it, allowing him to check it off his list and preserve his energy for more stimulating work.
blend your practice with the best of traditional productivity advice
While we’re advocating for upgrading our collective approach to productivity via emotional embracement, we recognize this framework may not work for everyone. We encourage you to experiment with blending emotional embracement with traditional approaches to productivity. From “eating that frog” and doing the most emotionally challenging tasks first, to managing energy based on certain times of the day, to tuning into how your body feels under the pressure of time blocks, there are endless ways to upgrade your relationship with flow.
The intention is to direct your attention to how traditional advice plays out for you and tweak the techniques to intuitively guide you by integrating emotional work rather than simply adopting it at the intellectual level.
Feel tension and numbness in your body. Subtle. Big. In your toes. In your scalp. Try to check in with all of it. You don't need to understand it. Don't force understanding. Do express it: let it shake and move you. Give it the right sounds.
If you're grounded in that, start to work. Each pomodoro ends after the set time or when you lose track of your body, grow tense or numb and can't find your way back to soft & supple, surf or flow.
Break out the explicit next step in tackling these most intense to dos
Complete as much of the task as you can in 5 minutes then stop
The idea is to deploy a series of 5-minute dashes to get over the hurdle of starting and build enough self-trust that you return to the task to close the loop vs continuing to avoid it.
This method is part of his larger project, Meta Productivity, which aims to integrate task and knowledge management practices with a philosophical approach to understanding oneself. He shares various strategies and tools that align with emotional embracement.
Thanks for reading! We hope this playbook helps you bring this way of approaching knowledge work to life. If you experiment with emotional embracement or recommend a protocol that would fit into this approach, let us know in the comments.
Stay tuned for Part 3 where we share why emotional embracement matters. We’ll discuss how to strengthen your emotional fluidity, become friends with your inner critic, and draw motivation from “clean” fuel sources — all in support of helping you find meaningful work that’s deeply aligned with your fullest self-expression and upgrading your livelihood. Our final essay of the series will drop in the new year.
Subscribe for Part 3: emotional fluidity, inner hype wo(man), and “clean” sources of motivation
Currently, we’re beta testing emotional embracement co-working sessions (virtual and in-person) with our communities. We’re gauging interest more broadly as we roll out new ways to experiment and get involved. If you’re interested in learning more and joining us for co-working sessions, sign up below (separate from subscribing to the Substack). We’ll be in touch!
Thanks to Ryan, Dennis Xiao, and Panashe Fundira for helping us shape this essay and to many others for joining us as we experiment with bringing emotional embracement to life.
Interstitial journaling sounds so unintimidating and totally doable! Will give this a go :)