Beyond the Mood Meter

My son's school uses the RULER approach for their social-emtional development curriculum.   We went to one of the meetings at school the other night and they talked about the mood meter.  The mood meter is a cool tool where you plot your energy level against your mood.  There is even an app for this.  I downloaded it for $0.99 from moodmeterapp.com.

Red means high energy and low mood (generally angry).
Yellow means high energy and high mood (generally happy).

Green means low energy and high mood (generally peaceful).

Blue means low energy and low mood (generally sad).

Each point has an attached emotion.  The one below shows despair, the bottom corner point in the blue section.

The upper left corner is enraged.

There are other emotions that are more moderate, like serene and peaceful.  But I am not talking about those.  I am talking at times when our lives fall of the rails, when we are Beyond the Mood Meter.

Enraged is pretty mad.  Can someone be more than enraged?  I would argue there are different levels of enraged.  Someone lies to you about something important that impacts your job.  A special project you've been working on for years gets cut because of the budget was mismanaged by someone else.  You might be enraged.  You find your spouse isn't honest?  That is beyond the mood meter.

What about despair?  Someone could be in despair about losing a job.  No doubt that is bad.  That ranks high on many lists of things that cause loads of stress.  What about a child with cancer?  Or a baby who died?  Off the mood meter.  Or let's say you lost your job because someone you know lied about you.  You might feel both enraged and despair -- low energy and high energy duking it out for who gets top billing.