How To Control Your Emotions — The Movie Method
Watch your life like you watch a movie and detach from emotional turmoil
My favourite movie is Mary & Max.
It’s a weird film. Like really weird. About a xenephobic British girl who finds an autistic American penpal.
It’s also a bittersweet film.
It features extreme loneliness, attempted suicide, untimely death and worse.
And when you’re watching the movie, you vicariously experience all these “negative” emotions.
And yet, it’s still my favourite movie…
The same with most movies.
People love the hearbreak of Titanic, the terror of The Joker, the hopelessness of the Pursuit of Happyness.
We’re somehow able to enjoy these deeply negative emotions. Emotions & events that in our own lives would break our spirits and crush our souls, but on the big screen they can strangely be appreciated.
The Movie Method For Controlling Your Emotions
The last two weeks of my life have been terrible.
Launching a new business is always tough but this time around it really felt like getting kicked in the balls. Again and again and again.
Every breakthrough was met with a punch in the face of equal force and it felt impossible to get things going.
The tipping point was when we finally found a beautifully optimised Instagram ad, converting at ~15p/click.
And then our Instagram advertising account got banned. LOL.
Back to square one…
And yet despite everything, I’ve been having a gr8 time.
I’ve enjoyed the setbacks and difficulties and disappointments.
It was like I was watching my life as a movie.
Instead of getting caught up in the moment, swept away by emotion, I was able to zoom out and detach from the emotional swings.
The setbacks were just plot twists and not immovable obstacles.
Crushing disappoints have almost become laughable.
Of course this wasn’t going to work. That would’ve been way too easy!
When sh*t happens now, I first journal about the experience and then see where it fits into my “life movie”.
Ah yes, this is the part where the protagonist feels like giving up but needs to just keep going.
Let’s enjoy this difficult uphill struggle.
Movies are boring if we cut straight to the happy ending. Embrace the difficulties and setbacks and work out how it all fits into your life movie.
The Movie Method is part of my new series, Steroids For Your Brain 🧠
👉 Subscribe to the Steroids For Your Brain 🧠 Newsletter, and every week magic internet Ninjas will send you:
1. One new mental model or “lifehack” 🚀
2. Something to make you 🤔 thought experiments & deep questions
3. And one extremely interesting fact 🤓 like how squirrels use their tails as umbrellas:
