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If you’re like me, you sometimes feel like you’re living in a fog, seeing the world with fuzzy edges and hearing conversations in muffled tones. When in this place of confusion, I rely on my journal to create direction out of the darkness.
Here are some basic tips to start of journaling from confusion to clarity.
Everyone gets stressed. Even rockstars, yogis, coaches and therapists (loving seeing therapists and rockstars in the same sentence). So grateful for celebrities like, Megan Thee Stallion for spotlighting mental health (see Bad Bitches Have Bad Days Too) and showing us that even the most together people one can imagine, can still have bad days. Anxiety, sadness, worry, insecurities…These feelings flare up for all of us and can steer us into a pit of gloom. My surefire way of steering clear, or shoveling myself out, is to write in my journal. I start with the truth as I know it, and then begin my inquiry. For example try this in your journal…
Meditation doesn’t have to be something formal, with rules and rights and wrongs. Give yourself the gift of the present, but just taking time to reside fully in the present. Giving yourself an opportunity to bring your attention to Now, helps energize and ground you. This is a great place to start a Journaling session. Ground yourself with these few deep breaths and this body awareness and answer the following,
Mortified is a worldwide storytelling event where adults tell stories about their lives by sharing their most mortifying childhood artifacts (diaries, letters, lyrics, poems, home movies)… in front of total strangers.
This past November 5th, I had the extreme honor of being chosen to bare my soul in pubescent prose in a room full of friends and stranger - though, after the raw reveal of reading my childhood diary pages, the supportive strangers truly felt like friends I just hadn’t met yet.
Think of your thoughts like a game of Where's Waldo. There are so many busy, colorful & distracting characters, it can be a challenge to know where to look for what's important. Journaling allows you to examine & sift through all the non-Waldos in the form of extraneous, or superficial thoughts, in order to focus on the heart of the matter, which may, or may not be a guy in a striped shirt & beanie.
Ruminating on the past, or worrying about a future that has yet to come, can keep us from being fully present with all of our energy and self love intact. Instead our attention and energy flow into experiences that have already passed and cannot be changed, or into prognosticating a future crafted by our worries.
Writing about our thoughts and feelings, plucks this anxious energy from the ether, forming it into a language we can comprehend. Labeling and defining the static of our buzzy inattention, allows us to ground ourselves in the now, harnessing our energy to fully experience the wonder of the present.
Life is hard enough, why do we have to be so hard on ourselves? If we’re generally pretty good at being kind to, and having compassionate for, others, what’s the deal with that mean inner monologue?
Scientists believe that one reason is due to our “negativity bias”, wherein we evolved to be constantly scanning our environment for danger, training us to orient to what is, or potentially will, go wrong. Retraining something at integral as evolutionary hardwiring is not easy.
To that end, it’s helpful to have a bunch of self-healing tools at the ready. Here are three tools that may come in handy.
You can’t necessarily judge your mental health by your emotional ups and downs. Feelings are important and definitely have a lot to tell us, but they are always colored by "the stories we tell" about our experiences. Mental health is about experiencing a full range of our emotions without denying, shaming, or becoming overwhelmed. Emotions are innocent, it’s what we do with them (i.e. "act-out") that can get us in trouble.
Want to get started writing in your journal? Here are 5 simple, yet effective methods you can try right away.
To celebrate the beginning of the process to write a comprehensive guide to journaling for “non-journalers”, I have started a new series on Instagram celebrating entries from my very first journal, beginning back in 1987. You can watch the series unfold here while I try not to cringe.
What is the Process Journal?
The process journal is the dynamic cousin of your high school diary. It is a creative, effective tool for self-growth and professional development - not just a landing pad for capturing the day’s events.
What does it do?
It acts as a powerful release valve for internal pressure. Amazingly, studies have shown, that just knowing that you have access to a trusted outlet, is enough to reduce anxiety. A regular practice provides even more benefit, like illuminating deeper insights and helping halt negative patterns.
