State Control is very important. In fact, I would say it’s the most important skill you can learn (yes, controlling your state is a skill, not an inborn trait). The quality of yours states is the quality of your life. When you lay down on your pillow at night you judge your day by your states. The more good states you have, the better you judge your day and vice versa. It is also how you judge your relationships, your job or business and most importantly, yourself.

Yes, You Do Have Control Over Your Emotions

It's fucking depressing when you hear someone say "He made me do it!" as if someone stuck a hand up their ass and made them into their puppet. No one can "make" you do anything. The only person that has control over you, is YOU.

Don't buy into the myth of others having any control of your emotional states. You're the only one who can control yourself at any given moment in time.

What are States and What is State Control?

A state is how you experience the world at any given moment. Whether happy, sad, curious, angry, despondent, etc.

State Control is our ability to influence what states we're feeling through our mind or through our bodies. This can be done by imagining you're X, recalling a time when you were X, or shifting into the body language of X. I've found that the most effective way of changing my state is changing my physiology, aka my body language. (note: States are not just about emotions. You can have states like motivated or inspired and other things)

Now then, I’ve encountered 3 effective exercises that deal with state control and I will describe them below

Exercise 1: The Polarity Exercise

The polarity exercise is simple.

You get yourself into a very neutral, relaxed state of mind.

Then you identify two sets of opposing emotions (happiness/sadness, anger/calm, interested/disinterested, Motivated/Unmotivated) and shift into the positive state as far as you can (on a scale of 1-10 make it a 10). Then move back to the neutral state and move as far into the negative state as you can. Then go back into the neutral state and pick another pair of emotions to perform this exercise with.

For beginners I would recommend picking 3 sets of emotions to use each day.

The Circle of Excellence

You start in a neutral state and then imagine a circle on the floor in front of you. You step into the circle and begin to generate whatever state that you are trying to generate, we'll call it state X. So you step into the circle and begin to generate state X. As long as you are increasing or holding that state you stand in the circle, and as soon as it begins to drop you step out of the circle. Then you go back into the neutral state and step in and begin to generate it again. Once you are able to generate that emotion at a high level, and can do so on command, then it seems you're done with that emotion and can do another one.

Chaining the Circle of Excellence

Once you've mastered a set of emotions within the Circle of Excellence it's time to chain these states together. You lay down four circles in a sequence, so that as you are walking, each step puts you in another circle. So you start walking and your right foot comes into the X circle, and you change your state, and then your left foot comes into the Y circle and you change your state.

The goal is that as you are walking you're able to generate these states in a smooth and powerful way.

Uses of The Exercises

The exercises have many different uses and implications. My favorite is Chaining the Circle of Excellence because I generate emotions like sexually intrigued, playful, confident and then use them when I'm out approaching or in interactions. You can also do the exact same thing in regards to working or business, or going to the gym.

Chaining together motivated, present, focused and anything else that you can think of is very helpful in these scenarios.

A Warning Against Peak States

What we're trying to do with these exercises is to increase our natural range of emotions, and be able to flow into emotions more smoothly and powerfully. We're not trying to maintain the perfect 10s of the state, we're simply raising our baseline. Trying to maintain a Peak State in daily life is not useful at all because it is a very fragile state, uses a lot of resources and can come off as very creepy to people.