What does it mean that the check-in question?

Is this my emotion or did I absorb it from someone else — ask regularly.

Example: A product manager started asking "Is this mine?" after every meeting, every news scroll, and every difficult phone call. Within a week she realized that roughly a third of the emotions she had been processing each day — the dread after a team standup, the outrage after checking headlines, the sadness after a friend vented — did not originate from her own experience. She had been spending hours regulating emotions that were never hers to regulate. When she stopped processing the absorbed ones and simply released them, her evenings felt lighter, her sleep improved, and her actual emotions became clearer because they were no longer competing with a crowd of imports.

Try this: For the next three days, set three daily alarms — morning, midday, and evening. When each alarm fires, pause for sixty seconds and ask: "What am I feeling right now, and is it mine?" Write down the emotion, its probable source (self, a specific person, media, environment), and your confidence in that attribution. Also ask the question after every significant social interaction — a meeting, a phone call, a meal with someone, a scroll through social media. At the end of the three days, review your log. Calculate the rough percentage of emotions you attributed to absorption versus endogenous origin. For every absorbed emotion you identified, note whether you attempted to release it and what happened when you did.