The Emotional Fluidity Ladder
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Hudson's staged model of how people relate to emotion, and how to move up it. His premise is that emotions are running constantly — there is no waking moment without one — and that logic is used mainly to predict how a decision will feel. Emotions we could not safely feel get compartmentalised, which takes muscular holding and shows up as overwhelm, stuckness, passive aggression or low-grade depression. The stages run: identification, management, labelling, expression, and finally falling in love with the experience, which is what produces fluidity. He pictures each emotion as a tube that gets kinked by resistance; unkinked anger is not rage but Gandhi, King, a clear boundary held with love. The end state is loving every emotional experience while not being controlled by any of them.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Identify that an emotion is present at all
Start from the premise that something is always being felt. Hudson's live test: try to stop feeling right now, and notice you have to constrict a muscle to do it. That constriction is the evidence, and it burns energy continuously if it is habitual.
Pro tip Ask 'what am I doing not to feel?' rather than 'what am I feeling?' — the doing is easier to catch.
- 2
Find where it is being held in the body
Hudson tells Ali to watch specifically for a held jaw or a tight throat, where a lot of emotion gets stored. Ali reports vibration in his jaw and under one side of the rib cage during his first breath work session that morning.
Pro tip Breath work is a reliable on-ramp for people who cannot access feeling by introspection.
Watch out Meditation can go either way — Hudson notes it can be used to feel emotions or to repress them.
- 3
Notice the management stage, and stop managing
The middle of the journey is deliberate control: having watched someone be oppressive with anger, sadness or guilt, you decide you will never do that, and start repressing, compartmentalising and pushing down. Hudson says people leave this stage only when it stops working — depression, stuckness, a body cost.
Watch out Repressed anger, in Hudson's account, is what shows up later as depression, passive aggression and feeling stuck.
- 4
Label it if you cannot name it
Hudson includes labelling as an explicit stage, needed by some people depending on their particular history. Ali's version of the problem is going blank when asked how he feels, and scoring near zero on both positive and negative affect.
- 5
Express it — but never at someone
Expression is the faster route than waiting to integrate. Hudson distinguishes moving anger from doing anger at a person: yelling at someone, being sad at someone or scared at someone is an attempt to control them and produces shame, which stagnates the emotion instead of moving it. Move it fully, then land somewhere you feel loved so no shame attaches.
Pro tip Expect the emotion to increase in frequency at first — Hudson got sadder before the pile cleared.
Watch out Shame is the mechanism that keeps the emotion stuck. Any expression that generates shame has failed.
- 6
Do it inside loving attention, breathing, in small doses
Hudson's prescription for Ali reading negative reviews: have your girlfriend physically hold you while you read, with no attempt to make you feel better — just 'I love you, you can be sad; I love you, you can be angry.' Your job is to keep breathing so you don't constrict. And do not blow out your nervous system; go to the edge, stop, come back later.
Pro tip When the mind says 'if I'm sad I'll be sad forever', answer: I've listened to you for thirty years, I'm listening to the emotions for twenty minutes.
Watch out Reassurance invalidates. Someone telling you it's okay is telling you your emotions are making them uncomfortable.
- 7
Fall in love with the experience
The final stage, and the one Hudson says people find hardest to grasp: enjoying helplessness, sadness, anger. On the backside of helplessness is empowerment, of sadness relief, of anger clarity. He is explicit that enjoyment comes first — you cannot unkink the pipe and then enjoy it; the enjoyment is what unkinks it.
Pro tip Decisions improve directly: Hudson used to avoid options with a 50% chance of sadness, and now takes them if they are right.
In the wild
Hudson's parents took crying as evidence they were bad parents, so they mocked him when he cried and put photographs of him crying in an album. At about twenty-four he found the album, realised why he hadn't cried in years, put the photo on his desk and decided to learn. Months later nothing had happened, so he decided to fake it. Living in Los Angeles, he hiked to around ten thousand feet and went off trail so nobody would hear him, because it felt shameful, and fake-cried once or twice a week. One day real tears came. He cried for four days — he could have stopped and chose not to.
→ Four days of crying, and by his account his life was dramatically better afterwards; the held weight came off.
Ali took the standard advice that authors shouldn't read reviews, then glanced at Goodreads before launch, saw two- and three-star advance-reader reviews, and started avoiding them entirely — to the point of not wanting to see the star count when the Amazon page came up. Over dinner two days earlier, Hudson and a friend suggested reading the negative ones deliberately. Hudson's read: Ali has not yet learned to enjoy the emotional experiences underneath, so avoidance is doing the work. His prescription is not stoic exposure but held exposure — read them inside someone's loving attention, keep breathing, watch the jaw, and stop before the nervous system floods.
→ The avoidance is reframed as an unfelt emotion rather than sensible author hygiene; the fix is dosed exposure with support.
Hudson's image for how emotion becomes distorted: take a tube and call it anger. Twist it one way and you get 'I'm not angry.' Twist it another and you get an outburst. Twist it a third way and you get the passive-aggressive compliment. Untwisted, the same tube is Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa — a clear boundary bound with love. His reasoning is that we don't get angry about anything we don't care about, so there is always care, love and a boundary inside anger; resistance is what kinks it into something else.
→ Anger stops being a thing to eliminate and becomes a thing to unkink — its clean form is boundary-setting with an open heart.
Common mistakes
Expressing an emotion at someone
Yelling at, being sad at, or being scared at a person is using emotion to control them. Hudson says this creates shame and does not move the emotion — the point is to move it fully without doing it at anybody.
Using meditation as sophisticated repression
Hudson names meditation as a way to start feeling emotions and a way to repress them. He spent years meditating seven hours a day and says that if he only learned to meditate he could fool himself all day long.
Flooding your nervous system in one go
His explicit correction to Ali: don't go out of regulation. You will recover, but it is far quicker to feel it to the point of 'that's enough', stop, and return. He says he has done the blowout version many times.
From the transcript
“the end of emotional fluidity is I I love having every emotional experience and they move through me with ease but I don't feel controlled…”
“on the back side of helplessness is the feeling of empowerment on the back side of sadness is the feeling of relief on the back…”
“you can't unkink the pipes without enjoying the enjoyment happens first enjoyment is the thing”
From the episode
Success Beyond Money: Joe Hudson
Success Beyond Money