Tag: negative emotions

The power of journaling

On By queeenvkIn Health, Inspiration, self helpLeave a comment

What is journaling?

The basic idea is that you record your thoughts, emotions and experiences. Normally this is done daily in a book. The act of writing things down encourages the information to be stored more effectively in your memory.

Why journal? Is it right for you?

Writing down your thoughts right before sleep can help to release your brain from the noise of the day. Or you might like to keep record of exciting or happy memories. For example, I have a memory that I wrote in 3 separate journals because it was so exciting at the time. At the age of 10 I watched a dog give birth to a litter of puppies. In my first 10 years of life that was the most amazing thing I had ever experienced and I needed to record it. Eventually my young mind started worrying I would forget my memories and made sure to journal all my family holidays and various events in my life. Now in my 30s I gladly live mindfully in the moment without fear of forgetting the past. We do not need to be attached to our past in a way that affects our mental health negatively.

Writing things down can help you to let some difficult emotions go. Once the thoughts and fears are set out on the page in front of you they don’t seem so big and overwhelming. And bonus, you don’t feel the pressure to keep the thoughts and memories in your head because they’re recorded for you already. That takes a lot of stress off your brain.

According to various articles from psychological research there are positive and negative outcomes to journaling. It can either help you understand yourself in relation to others or it can hinder your self discovery journey if you only concentrate on “yourself in isolation”. The results of a collection of research articles include the following positive and negative outcomes of journaling.

The pros of journaling

  • Encourages you to evaluate your reactions and emotions
    • Identify action vs reaction. Reaction is what we do with our “monkey brain” when we act on impulse without consideration.
  • Allows you to find resolutions to open issues
    • You can see all aspects of a problem when it’s written out in front of you.
  • Clarifies your views and motivations.
  • Focuses your negative energy into creativity and positivity.
  • Increases your tolerance of change and unpredictable or unexpected situations.
  • Improves mental health by making you feel more connected to the world around you.
  • Helps you define your goals and encourages action through motivation.

The cons of journaling

  • Causes negative rumination
    • You live within your own negative thoughts.
  • Prevents you from living in the moment
    • You begin to focus on how you’ll record your life events instead of experiencing them.
  • Makes you become egocentric and obsessed with your needs.
  • Allows you to blame the situations around you but not come to any positive conclusions.
  • Prevent resilience by encouraging thoughts to remain on negative experiences.

Maintaining the habit of journaling regularly can be a challenge. Although it becomes easy once it becomes part of your daily routine. Encourage yourself to keep at it by making it a fun and rewarding experience. Use different coloured pens and highlighters to really engage with your journal pages. I have an old sticker collection from my youth that I’m re-purposing in my journals, cards, labels and craft. Some are those holographic stickers from the 90s, they really jazz up a sparse journal page.

Thanks so much for reading! Comment below with your journal experiences. Or share your tips and hints to make the most of our journaling journey.

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How thankful are you?

On By queeenvkIn Health, Help, Inspiration1 Comment

Practicing gratitude can be challenging on those days you want to curl up and completely shun the world. Sometimes it takes a boost of gratitude to help you get out of a slump. Gratitude for yourself, for others, for the world. Yes, even gratitude for your enemies.

Gratitude meditation can be considered one of the most simple ways to meditate. You can try it at any time and anywhere. All you need to do is reflect on all of the people and things that you are grateful for.

As Jack Kornfield says:

Open the meditation to include neutral people, difficult people, and even enemies- until you extend sympathetic joy to all beings everywhere, young and old, near and far.”

Benefits of Gratitude Meditation

You may be skeptical but there are many benefits to invoking feelings of gratitude.

  • Decreased levels of depression(Sirois, 2017 Gratitude Uniquely Predicts Lower Depression in Chronic Illness Populations)
  • Greater feelings of well-being (Nezlek, 2017 A daily diary study of relationships between feelings of gratitude and well-being)
  • Trust in social situations with strangers (Drążkowski, 2017 Gratitude pays: A weekly gratitude intervention influences monetary decisions, physiological responses, and emotional experiences during a trust-related social interaction)
  • Greater sleep quality (Jackowska, 2016: The impact of a brief gratitude intervention on subjective well-being, biology, and sleep)
  • Reduced levels of stress and increased happiness (Kyeong, 2018 Effects of Gratitude Meditation on Neural Network Functional Connectivity and Brain-Heart Coupling)

 

Here is an easy 10 minute meditation to wake up with which will help you start your day in a more positive way.

 

This guided gratitude meditation is just over 10 minutes long and you can listen to it wherever you like whether you’re on the train or bus on the way to work or just beginning your day.

 

How are gratitude and mindfulness linked?

Mindfulness is all about being aware without judgement of your thoughts. Try to observe your surroundings and also your internal mental state with compassion, without judgement.

I found it very useful to treat mindfulness as brain training. You can train your brain to stop reacting to negative situations with irritation and frustration. Expressing irritation and frustration will always lead to negative outcomes. Consider all of the times you showed irritation and how it worsened the situation. If we train ourselves to react with compassion and acceptance those negative moments become so much more bearable.

As written by Williams and Penman (2012), mindfulness can prevent the relapse of depression and I have definitely felt this in my personal experience. My depression and anxiety has become manageable and bearable thanks to the brain training towards a mindfulness mentality.

Feelings of sadness and pain are part of the normal human experience. However, our mental health is affected by the frustration with which we reaction to that sadness and pain. Sadness can cause a person to react with frustration. That frustration leads to more sadness. That sadness brings about more feelings of frustration that feeds the negative spiral downwards into depression.

The downward depression spiral can be stopped! There is hope. If we don’t react to negative emotions with irritation and frustration, but instead with compassion and acceptance, we can stop spiralling and become more productive.

“Once you’ve felt [negative emotions], acknowledge their existence and let go of the tendency to explain or get rid of them, they are much more likely to vanish naturally, like the mist on a spring morning.” -Williams and Penman, 2012

Acknowledge and accept the existence of your sadness and anger; then let them fade away. It’s just a moment in the span of your existence. Moments of pleasure don’t last just as moments of sadness don’t last. As long as you don’t feed them.

Happiness isn’t a life free of irritation and negativity. Happiness is a life where negativity and irritation aren’t fed and strengthened, they are acknowledged and accepted with humility.

“You can’t stop the triggering of unhappy memories, negative self-talk and judgmental ways of thinking -but what you can stop is what happens next. You can stop the vicious circle from feeding off itself and triggering the next spiral of negative thoughts.” -Williams and Penman, 2012

The next time you feel negativity bubbling up during a moment of vulnerability or desperation, do not get frustrated at yourself or at external factors, just take a deep breath and patiently acknowledge the experience, observe it as it simply fades away.

Gratitude makes it possible to notice the positive blessings around us and removes our thoughts from the difficulties we’re facing in this life. Mindfulness helps us react to our misfortunes with acceptance and humility.

Life is difficult enough for all of us, let’s not make it harder.