Can you train feelings like a muscle?

Yes, within limits. What you can train is the access to a feeling: focus, meaning, posture, breath. Those are handles, and handles get more reliable through repetition. Practice the switch between two states fifty times and the next one comes faster. What none of that moves is the situation someone is really in, or anything that needs treatment. At twenty I recorded a whole video course about the first part and named the second too rarely. Today I name it first. The course is called Emotions ATEM. I recorded it in August 2016, across a few days, with a phone and a camera on a tripod. Twenty episodes, two hours in total. The initial letters of the four modules spell ATEM, the German word for breath, and that was meant as more than wordplay. Emotions run alongside you as continuously as breathing, and you normally notice neither. Two short videos come before the four modules and explain the structure. One thing in them still holds. The course appeals to remembering. If the sentence I know this already shows up while you watch, look closely right there, I say in the introduction. The whole difference sits between knowing and doing, and the exercises close it.

What ATEM stands for

Two short videos come before the four modules and explain the structure. One thing in them still holds. The course appeals to remembering. If the sentence I know this already shows up while you watch, look closely right there, I say in the introduction. The whole difference sits between knowing and doing, and the exercises close it.

A stands for Alltag, everyday life. Six episodes, and the first one is a writing exercise. You write down which feelings actually run your days, the same ones week after week, and sketch the emotional everyday life you want next to them. Then come the three handles that move that sketch: where you point your focus, what meaning you give a situation, and how you are standing or sitting right now. The episode on physiology is the shortest and changes something fastest.

T stands for Training. This is where the question in the title lives. Three drills. Flooding means bringing yourself into a feeling on purpose, through memory, breath and language. Switching means jumping back and forth between two opposite states, faster and faster, until the way into the good one gets shorter. Anchoring means giving yourself an object, a word or a gesture that calls the feeling up later. That is practice in the literal sense, many small repetitions, no audience. The principle of small steps now sits in the school handbook as kaizen.

E stands for Energie, energy. Three questions: what kind, where from, in which direction. The episode I still like best is called Where From. It shows that two people can draw the same feeling from very different sources. Courage out of fear and courage out of love look identical from the outside and last differently. The exercises here are the softest in the course: hands held together, a journey through the body, energy sent inward or outward. They describe a perception, and they are not physics.

M stands for Moment. Four episodes about the tipping point. You practice sliding very slowly from a good feeling into a mildly unpleasant one and noticing exactly where it tips. Then you build a list of cues: what the body does, what the head is thinking, what just happened around you. The way out runs through curiosity. You ask what is going on, and the question pulls you out a little while the message stays intact. The last episode is called Letting Go. I hold a pen in a closed fist and ask what it would be like to hold it for a month. At some point you stop holding it and become the person who holds it. Letting go is the opening of the hand.

How old this is and what I say differently today

August 2016, I was twenty. The camera stood on a tripod, the phone picked up the sound, and for several episodes I simply walked outside. I recorded the first everyday life episode next to a playground, because that is where the people sit who handle feelings better than I do. I recorded the welcome twice, the first take stands here, uncut.

The scaffold is mine. I put the four modules, their order and the exercises together myself that summer, out of what I had tried on myself in the years before. It was my second attempt in front of a camera. The first was the emotion compass from January of the same year, recorded at the place of a friend who helped me with it, and that one went back to a book by Tony Robbins. Emotions ATEM came half a year later, around my visit to Munich. The visit motivated me to finally record the whole scaffold. What stayed with me from Robbins is written in the compass note. What stands here is the part I built myself.

Three passages I would take out today. In the training module I say that only ten years earlier had anyone found out that the brain keeps changing through life. That is how my books put it back then, and it is not that simple. In the energy module I explain the feeling that a room seems cold or open with a passing reference to pheromones, with no source for it. And the course stayed unfinished in places, the two welcome takes being the clearest example.

If you do not know what your emotional everyday life is, you will not be able to shape a new one.

Back then I sold it as a program, with a sales video and a webinar in front. Ten years later it would be strange to charge for this. The recordings are old, the picture quality is old, my sentences are old. So they sit here in full and free of charge, with the year on top, and everybody can decide what is still usable.

What holds

Four things from the course are still in use.

The last one carried furthest. The question of what a feeling wants to say already stood in the emotion compass from January of the same year. Here it got its place in the scaffold, and out of it grew the action signal that sits in the tool today. A few months later the Moment module turned into four actions for the first five minutes of a crisis: What do you do in the first five minutes when everything falls apart?. A year later I wrote a book manuscript for teenagers out of the same material: What do you write at twenty one for teenagers?. And the line from the first episode, that this belongs in every school, is part of paideia today.

Here is the whole course, twenty episodes, each one loads only after you click.

  • Choosing focus, meaning and posture on purpose changes how a situation feels. The most reliable part of the course.
  • Treating emotional abilities as skills you practice, so that they are available when it counts.
  • Noticing the physical tipping point early, while the thing is still small.
  • Walking into a hard feeling with curiosity and taking its message along.

Emotions ATEM (2016)

My own scaffold, recorded at twenty. The camera stood on a tripod, for some episodes I walked outside. Much of it I would say differently today, some of it exactly the same. Because the recordings are this old, they sit here open and free.

  • Introduction: Welcome, 4 min
  • Introduction: Your Journey Begins, 8 min
  • Everyday Life: How Do I Shape a New Emotional Everyday Life, 12 min
  • Everyday Life: The Most Important Thing for a New Emotional Everyday Life, 5 min
  • Everyday Life: Learning to Choose Your Focus, 10 min
  • Everyday Life: Learning to Choose Your Focus, a Second Option, 9 min
  • Everyday Life: Meaning, 5 min
  • Everyday Life: How Are You Even Sitting, Physiology, 5 min
  • Training: Emotions Training, New Skills, New Basis, 7 min
  • Training: Flooding, 7 min
  • Training: Switching, 8 min
  • Training: Anchoring, 5 min
  • Energy: Energy, Kind, 7 min
  • Energy: Where From, 7 min
  • Energy: Direction of Energy, 5 min
  • Energy: Quality of Energy and Module Wrap-Up, 5 min
  • Moment: Recognizing the Moment, 5 min
  • Moment: Body, Mind and Situation Cues, 5 min
  • Moment: Curiosity as the Way Out, 6 min
  • Moment: Letting Go, 4 min

This note keeps growing

2026-09-03: Planted from the course Emotions ATEM, August 2016.

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