Review the day following your feelings

Walk back through the day in sequence, tracking the emotional quality of each moment.

Why it works

Ignatius prescribed reviewing the day through felt movements — consolations (feelings of life, connection, alignment) and desolations (feelings of flatness, isolation, or being drawn away from what matters) — rather than purely through events. Emotions carry information about value-alignment that event-recall alone misses: what energized or deflated you reveals what genuinely matters, not just what happened. This is an affective-information approach to self-knowledge, consistent with the idea that feelings are signals rather than noise.

How to do it

1. Move through the day roughly in sequence, hour by hour or episode by episode.
2. At each moment, notice the feeling tone: did this bring life and alignment, or flatness and distance?
3. Do not yet evaluate or judge — just map the emotional topography of the day.
4. Pay special attention to moments that still carry a charge: these typically contain the most relevant information.

Evidence

Affect as information — the principle that emotional responses reliably signal value-relevance — is well-grounded in psychological theory and consistent with affect-labeling research, which shows that naming emotions reduces their intensity and increases self-clarity. The Ignatian consolation/desolation taxonomy is a spiritual framework, not an empirical one. (mechanistic)

The broader "affect as information" literature supports tracking feelings as a route to self-knowledge; the specific Ignatian categories are a devotional framework, not a psychological taxonomy.

Sources

• Schwarz & Clore (1983), mood, misattribution and judgments of well-being, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Common mistake

Reviewing events and actions rather than feelings — this produces a behavioral ledger rather than self-knowledge. The feelings are where the information about alignment lives.