I came across this wonderful phrase in Doris Lessings 'Walking in the Shade'.
She says that as she grew older, she 'became cleverer at managing my emotional economy.'
This caught my attention as we all deal with so many emotional issues that often leave us drained - a kind of expending all our emotions on everything that we see or hear or read or think about or say. Sometimes this happens when we are by ourselves, and sometimes when we are with others.
Combining the words emotional and economy, then, emotional economy would therefore refer to a saving up of our emotions for important issues that affect us, and cut back or be frugal in the expression of our emotions in situations that really don't touch us. This would certainly prevent us from wasting our emotions. There would be a simplicity in our emotional state when we realize the impermanence of things, and so we would cherish and protect only those emotions that would be elevating and enabling rather than those which are destructive and dissipative.