Throughout my life, I have been anxious about two things in particular:
1.Dwelling on the past (which ranges from little embarrassing moments to much bigger mistakes and regrets)
2.Worrying about the future (including things which I may come to regret down the road)
Over the last year in particular, I’ve begun to journal at a much more frequent rate, as many psychology experts agree that journaling is one of the most effective forms of anxiety-relief. While I’m happy to say that I’m at a much better place mentally now thanks to all the journaling I’ve done, up until very recently, something still felt like it was missing…
Part of my worrying of the future involves dwelling over the possibility that someday I may not be able to journal at all. I often find myself thinking about potential grim scenarios like ending up paralyzed, or something to that effect. I understand that the chances of such a thing ever happening are slim-to-none, but when you have a brain as anxious as mine, even the tiniest of possibilities need to be taken into account…
Because of this, I spent the last several days doing a deep-dive online into the psychology of journaling, to understand exactly why it’s proven to be effective for so many, including myself. My goal with this was to see if I could “reverse engineer” the psychological effects of journaling from the inside out, so that I could then figure out how to recreate the experience in a purely mental way, without having to worry about any physical limitations that the future may bring…
My research ultimately led me to stumbling upon a certain video just a few days ago (which I unfortunately forgot to save and can’t find again now), where the theory was stated that journaling works as well as it does because it allows us to literally and figuratively face our own negative thoughts, rather than constantly trying to distract ourselves from them. Distraction, while healthy in small doses, should never be seen as the ultimate “silver bullet solution” to something. You can only run away from your bad thoughts for so long. Eventually, you have to face them head-on. By transferring those thoughts into something tangible, like words, we are able to finally “detach” ourselves from said thoughts, and look at them from an outside perspective. With this new angle, we can then “attack” the thoughts, so to speak…
Obviously, certain bad thoughts are still gonna keep coming back in your brain, no matter how often your journal about them, but that’s not the point. Rather, the point is to just simply get yourself into the behavior of constantly turning trauma into something tangible, therefore assigning “meaning” to it, over and over. For what it’s worth, though, I’ve found that the more I “process” something, the less traumatic it feels in the long run, but I understand that there are outliers to this sort of circumstance…
So getting back to my initial question of the day: How do you recreate this experience in purely a mental way? After watching the aforementioned video, the answer became simple to me: You simply turn your thoughts into words in your head. For the last few days in particular, whenever I have a bad thought, I picture a standard word processor in my mind (white background with black ink) and then “type out a sentence” that summarizes whatever bad thought I’m having. Sometimes I just do a bullet point, rather than a complete sentence, or even just a singular word. Usually I imagine just one sentence at a time, but sometimes I imagine multiple at once (usually three at a time, cause it reminds me of haikus). My style of physical journaling is “bullet journaling” anyways, so envisioning things this way isn’t too far from what I do in reality.
Obviously, I’m still in the early days of applying this new technique, but thus far, it has proven to be quite effective. It’s my belief that, at least on a subconscious level, humans tend to associate the expression of thoughts with words in particular. If you think about, it makes sense. Humanity has been using the act of writing as our primary “expression tool” for so many generations now that it’s practically burned into our DNA/ instinct. So ultimately, the solution to “peace and acceptance” seems to be this: Turn feelings into words, and if you can’t do that in real life, do it in your head. I suppose some people would prefer to use symbols instead of words, depending on their culture, but ultimately, the principle is the same…
When it comes to mental health and self-improvement, I’ve been through this song and dance enough now to know that the journey is never gonna be linear. If my past is any indicator, this new method will probably work for me for a good while, and then I’ll burn out on it, like I do with everything else (I gradually write stories and poems less and less, for instance). That’s fine, though. Life is all about rotating back and forth between different stress-relievers anyways. The more techniques you gain along the way, the better. That said, I still felt the need to make this post cause this whole “literal words in your head” approach is something I don’t really see being talked about anywhere else online, and I feel like it’s a methodology that could probably help a lot of people…
Peace!
UPDATE: Something else I forgot to mention is that, at least in my experience, it’s a lot harder to burn out on journaling (be it real physical journaling or the “purely mental” journaling that I describe here) than it is to burn out on other hobbies. I think this is mainly because you can journal about literally anything, and humans are always having new, stream-of-conscious thoughts as is. Plus, as I said earlier in this post, it’s okay to revisit topics (especially traumatic stuff) every now and then when journaling. Basically, the key is to find something you can do under any circumstance, and never burn out on it. I see journaling (and mental journaling in particular) as ticking both of those boxes.
UPDATE 2: This is a bit embarrassing to admit, but another thing I do that’s sorta like mental journaling is pretend like I’m “livestreaming” in my head, if that makes sense, or pretend I’m being interviewed. Using my phone to make little reminders for things I wanna journal later also helps. Either way, phone notes or actual journal entries don’t have to make sense to anyone other than yourself.
UPDATE 3: Something else I didn’t think about before is that someone born blind wouldn’t be able to do this, unless they’re able to visualize brail in their head. I don’t know anyone born blind, so I guess I can’t say if that really works or not. Oh, well…
UPDATE 4: Rather than imagining a computer word processor, I’m starting to just imagine myself handwriting in cursive, like what I do in real life, or I alternate between the two.
UPDATE 5: I don’t really do this stuff anymore, but I’ll leave this post up in case anything here still helps anyone.
Related: Specific Tips for Journaling
Related: More About Mental Journaling
