he first time I encountered the Abraham Hicks emotional scale, I did what most people do. I skimmed it, thought "okay, grief is lower than anger, got it," and moved on. It took me another year of practice before I understood that the scale isn't a ranking system. It's a navigation tool. And the difference between those two things is everything.
This is what I want to talk about today, friend.
The Scale Is Not a Report Card
The store has a small curated catalog of products that complement this kind of work, if you want tools alongside the reading.
Most people encounter the emotional scale and immediately start grading themselves. They wake up anxious, locate anxiety somewhere in the lower third, and feel bad about feeling bad. Which is, if you think about it, a spectacularly counterproductive response to a tool designed to help you move.
The scale that Abraham Hicks describes in Ask and It Is Given runs from joy and empowerment at the top down through enthusiasm, positive expectation, optimism, hopefulness, contentment, boredom, pessimism, frustration, overwhelm, disappointment, doubt, worry, blame, discouragement, anger, revenge, hatred, jealousy, insecurity, fear, grief, depression, despair, powerlessness at the bottom. Twenty-two distinct emotional states. The ordering matters. But the ordering is descriptive, not prescriptive.
What Abraham is saying is that emotions have a vibrational frequency, and that frequency either aligns you with what you want or distances you from it. The scale maps the distance. Grief sits far from joy. Anger, counterintuitively, sits closer to joy than grief does. Not because anger is a destination, but because anger contains more energy than despair. More movement. More possibility of upward motion.
Sit with that for a second.
If you are in grief or despair, anger is actually an improvement. This is the part that breaks people's brains when they first hear it. We have been taught, most of us, to avoid anger at all costs. To smooth it over, to apologize for it, to perform contentment we do not feel. But from the vantage point of the scale, moving from despair into anger is progress. Genuine progress.
What Actually Makes the Scale Useful
The scale becomes a daily tool the moment you stop asking "where should I be?" and start asking "where am I, and which direction is up from here?"
Those are two completely different questions.
The first question is about judgment. The second is about navigation. And navigation requires an honest read of your current position before it can give you useful direction.
Here's where I find it breaks down for people: they try to leap. They are at despair and they reach for joy. They are at worry and they try to force gratitude. And the forced state doesn't hold, so they conclude the whole thing is a lie and go back to scrolling. But the scale is not asking you to teleport. It is asking you to take one step.
From despair, can you access grief? From grief, can you find discouragement? From discouragement, can you land on blame? From blame, can you arrive at anger? Each of these is a small, achievable move. Strung together across a day, across a week, they constitute real upward movement.
Neville Goddard would say, in his own framing, that the state you occupy determines what you attract into your experience. The Abraham version of this is basically the same claim from a slightly different angle: your emotional frequency is the signal you are broadcasting, and the circumstances of your life are organized around that signal. What the scale does that Neville's work doesn't always make explicit is give you a map of the signal. Not just "assume the wish fulfilled" but here is where you currently are, and here is the next state that is actually reachable from where you're standing.
How I Actually Use It
I am not going to pretend I run a formal emotional inventory every morning with a clipboard. That is not how this works in practice. But I do have a version of this that is really part of how I move through a day.
When I notice I am off, I ask myself a question. Not "why do I feel this way" (that is a question designed to keep you in the feeling) but "what is this feeling?" Just the identification. Just the name. Because naming the emotional state is the first act of navigation. You cannot locate yourself on a map you refuse to look at.
After I name it, I ask: what's one step up? And I mean one step. If I am sitting in worry, I am not asking myself to feel hopeful. I am asking if I can find the edge of pessimism. Pessimism is still not good. But pessimism has more energy than worry. More motion. And motion is what I am looking for.
Beatriz, my friend who works in Bushwick and has been doing this kind of work longer than I have, described it once in a voice note that I've thought about a lot since. She said the scale is less like a ladder and more like a current. You don't climb it rung by rung through effort. You find the place where the current is moving and let it carry you. The effort is in releasing resistance, not in forcing elevation.
That landed for me in a way a lot of explanations hadn't.
What does that mean practically? For me, it means the move is usually through the body rather than through the mind. When I'm in worry, mental arguments about why I should feel better almost never work. They are the wrong tool. What tends to work is something physical: a walk in McCarren Park, making coffee slowly, sitting with Vesta for fifteen minutes without looking at my phone. The body discharges the emotional state that the mind is holding onto. Bessel van der Kolk's work on how trauma (and stress, and chronic emotional states) live in the body rather than in the narrative mind is relevant here. The nervous system has to be engaged, not just the intellect.
And once the body shifts even slightly, the emotional state is more moveable.
The Part Nobody Talks About
There is a version of working with the emotional scale that becomes its own trap. I want to name it because I have spent time in it and it is really unhelpful.
The trap is hyper-monitoring. Checking your emotional state constantly, grading every thought, getting anxious about whether you are anxious, which is its own special kind of recursive misery. You can end up more tightly wound than you were before you started, not because the tool is wrong but because you are applying it with the same grinding overcorrection that most high-achieving people apply to everything.
During those first months after the breakdown in March of 2022, when I was working 70-hour weeks and had hit a wall I couldn't push through anymore, the antidepressants were doing something important and I am not going to minimize that. But they were also numbing the signal. I could not read my emotional state with any accuracy because the range had been flattened. The scale is a tool for people who can feel the granular differences between states, and that requires a degree of nervous system access that is not always available when you are in survival mode.
This is not a cautionary tale about medication. It is a note about context. The scale works best when you are not in crisis. When you are in crisis, something else comes first. Stabilization. Safety. The basics. The scale is a refinement tool, not an emergency procedure.
For those of us who are past crisis and doing the daily maintenance work, though, this is where the scale earns its place. Used lightly, used as a compass rather than a report card, it is one of the more practically useful things I have encountered in four years of this practice.
If you are looking for other tools that complement this kind of work, the store has a small curated catalog that I'd point a friend toward.
Whatever you're going through, the store has a small curated catalog of products I'd point a friend toward.
Where to Start If You Haven't Before
If you are new to this and want to actually put the scale to work rather than just reading about it, here is the simplest possible version.
Pick one moment each day to check in. Not constantly, just once. Morning works. The transition between work and evening works. Whatever is a natural pause in your day. At that moment, name what you are feeling. Not why. Not what caused it. Just what it is. Locate it roughly on the scale: are you above or below contentment? Are you above or below worry?
Then ask: what is one step up from here that feels really reachable?
And then look for something in your immediate environment, a memory, an object, a sensation in your body, that evokes that slightly better feeling. Not joy if you're at despair. Just the next rung.
Do this for a week. The discipline is in the honesty of the initial read. That is the practice, really. Most of us lie to ourselves about how we feel because we have been trained to perform states we don't occupy. The scale only helps if you are willing to read where you actually are.
The version of you who already has what you're working toward did not get there by pretending. She got there by navigating.
