Does anyone have any tips to help me better access my own feelings in this way? After I have left the house, how do I determine if I feel better? If I don't get the job, how do I determine if I feel bad about it? Etc.

Focusing. Learn to locate feelings in your body and learn to put labels on emotions.

Having QS rituals where you put down an estamation of your internal state every day. I for example write down my dominating mood for the last 24 hours and a few numbers.

As a weekly ritual it's also possible to fill out longer questionaires such as http://www.connections-therapy-center.com/upload/burns_anxiety_inventory.pdf .

It's like a muscle. If you train to assess your internal state you get better.

I find that playing the piano is a particularly useful technique for gauging my emotions, when they are suppressed/muted. This works better when I'm just making stuff up by ear than it does when I'm playing something I know or reading music. (And learning to make stuff up is a lot easier than learning to read music if you don't already play.) Playing the piano does not help me feel the emotions any more strongly, but it does let me hear them -- I can tell that music is sad, happy, or angry regardless of its impact on my affect. Most people can.

Something that I don't do that I think would work (based partially on what Ariely says in The Upside of Irrationality, partially on what Norman says in Emotional Design, and partially on anecdotal experience) is to do something challenging/frustrating and see how long it takes for you to give up or get angry. If you can do it for a while without getting frustrated, you're probably in a positive state of mind. If you give up feeling like it's futile, you're sad, and if you start feeling an impulse to break something, you're frustrated/angry. The shorter it takes you to give up or angry the stronger that emotion is. The huge downside to this approach is that it results in exacerbating negative emotions (temporarily) in order to gauge what you were feeling and how strongly.

Hi!

1) If I understood Julia correctly "easily answerable questions" correspond not to areas where you are good at predicting, but to areas where answer space is known to you: "Can I toss the ball through the hoop?" - Yes\No vs. "What is the best present for a teenage girl?" ??\??\money??\puppy??

2) If you have difficulties with associating common groups with your feelings or even percieve feelings that is really confusing and it would be good not to jump to the conclusions, but to add to other commenters: you could probably start by asking outside observer (i.e body language "comfort\defensiveness" "happy\sad")

Hm.
Are there any contexts in which you do have reliable insight into your own mood?