# Can you train feelings like a muscle?

Momo Maximilian Feichtinger · Education · planted 2026-09-03, last grown 2026-09-05 · 7 min · https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/emotions-atem

**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.**

![An old video camera on a tripod in an empty room in front of a window, an empty chair before it, and a sheet of paper with four fields on the floor.](https://zukunftbilden.eu/assets/denken/emotions-atem.webp)

*The mental model: four modules, everyday life, training, energy and moment, and one single ordinary day in which they have to prove themselves.*

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.

## What ATEM stands for

*An interactive tool sits here on the page: https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/emotions-atem*

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](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/was-will-ein-gefuehl-sagen) 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.
>
> Momo in the course Emotions ATEM, 2016

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.

### What is left from 2016

- 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.

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?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/wenn-alles-schieflaeuft). A year later I wrote a book manuscript for teenagers out of the same material: [What do you write at twenty one for teenagers?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/unzerstoerbares-mojo). 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.

### Emotions ATEM (August 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

Two short videos that welcome you and show how the four modules build on each other.

1. [Welcome](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC2ZMH8xsu4) (4 min) · You get a first sense of what this course covers and why emotions are as fundamental as breathing.
2. [Your Journey Begins](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CFJO-ptgNE) (8 min) · You get an overview of the four modules ahead and see why the course leans on remembering rather than new information.

#### A · Everyday Life

How to consciously choose focus, meaning and posture to shape your emotional everyday life.

1. [How Do I Shape a New Emotional Everyday Life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzdA1uNgjDk) (12 min) · A writing exercise helps you map the feelings that currently run your days and sketch out your ideal emotional everyday life.
2. [The Most Important Thing for a New Emotional Everyday Life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj3JqRxN8D8) (5 min) · You learn that more conscious awareness is the real foundation for change, and write yourself a letter about it.
3. [Learning to Choose Your Focus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faU_sTvk3Oc) (10 min) · Through a personal story you see how asking different questions shifts your focus, and with it how you feel in a hard situation.
4. [Learning to Choose Your Focus, a Second Option](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1wZ2gYrFDM) (9 min) · You practice shifting your focus in the moment and write down which focus would strengthen you in a recurring situation.
5. [Meaning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_zskLPGb-Q) (5 min) · You practice describing the same situation twice, once as usual and once in words that give it an empowering meaning.
6. [How Are You Even Sitting, Physiology](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ2nCqv1ZHQ) (5 min) · You feel firsthand how posture and movement can shift your chemistry, and your mood, within seconds.

#### T · Training

Three practice drills, flooding, switching and anchoring, that train emotions like a skill.

1. [Emotions Training, New Skills, New Basis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IuApFHrSEs) (7 min) · You get the core idea of the training module, that emotional skills can be trained so you respond automatically in the moment that counts.
2. [Flooding](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-TQxjMsu7k) (7 min) · In a guided exercise you flood yourself with a feeling of your choice through memory, breath and words.
3. [Switching](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qUq7M3gCLk) (8 min) · You train switching faster and faster between two opposite emotional states, until the positive one becomes easier to reach.
4. [Anchoring](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHmtRBkn2R4) (5 min) · You set up your own triggers, objects, words or gestures, that call up a chosen feeling on demand.

#### E · Energy

How to sense and consciously direct where your energy comes from, where it goes and what quality it has.

1. [Energy, Kind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyzvqz_W81g) (7 min) · A hand exercise and a body scan let you consciously feel, maybe for the first time, where and how energy moves in you.
2. [Where From](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsmaKuw6zmg) (7 min) · You discover that the same feeling can come from very different sources, for example courage rooted in either fear or love.
3. [Direction of Energy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSqDlXqI2o8) (5 min) · You try consciously sending your energy in a direction, inward, outward, or all around you like a sphere.
4. [Quality of Energy and Module Wrap-Up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bdwqdOX_IY) (5 min) · To close the module you feel how the same source of energy can carry a completely different quality, and test that in a real conversation.

#### M · Moment

How to catch the tipping point of an emotion early and consciously let a difficult one go.

1. [Recognizing the Moment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeO-RAIGbNs) (5 min) · You practice sliding slowly from a good feeling into a slightly negative one, to notice the exact tipping point in your body.
2. [Body, Mind and Situation Cues](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0x4toOpZLI) (5 min) · You build a personal list of body, thought and meaning cues that let you spot the tipping point instantly from now on.
3. [Curiosity as the Way Out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX2IxeglrDk) (6 min) · You learn to step out of a negative emotion through curiosity instead of suppression, without simply ignoring it.
4. [Letting Go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDdzcuJyeC4) (4 min) · Using the image of a closed fist, you see the difference between having a feeling and identifying with it, and practice letting go.

At the end of the last episode I ask you to pick a description of yourself you want to live in. That is the earliest version of something I said differently ten years later, in the speech about [three keys](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/drei-schluessel): first your values, then the North Star. Watch an episode and you see a twenty year old trying something out and sounding quite certain. The certainty I would take out. The exercises I would keep.

### Sources and links

- [What is an uncomfortable feeling trying to tell you?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/was-will-ein-gefuehl-sagen) · The emotional compass as a tool, grown out of the same period.
- [What do you write at twenty one for teenagers?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/unzerstoerbares-mojo)
- [What do you do in the first five minutes when everything falls apart?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/wenn-alles-schieflaeuft)
- [The three keys](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/drei-schluessel) · The speech about values, North Star and joy.

## Margin notes

- **Randnotiz** How this came about back then: camera on a tripod, phone for the sound, and whenever the room got too tight I simply walked outside for an episode. I recorded the welcome twice, nearly identical. The first take stands here, I cut nothing back then.
- **Verknüpft**  [What is an uncomfortable feeling trying to tell you?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/was-will-ein-gefuehl-sagen), [What do you write at twenty one for teenagers?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/unzerstoerbares-mojo), [What do you do in the first five minutes when everything falls apart?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/wenn-alles-schieflaeuft), [The three keys](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/drei-schluessel)
- **Beleg** Own video course Emotions ATEM, 20 episodes (a second take of the welcome is left out), recorded in August 2016, unlisted on YouTube since September 2026. 120 minutes in total, single episodes between 2 and 12 minutes. The quote comes from the episode "How do I shape a new emotional everyday life" at 5:49 and is taken from the transcript.

## How this note grew

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

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