It’s time to really work on our mental health and get our mental fitness in top shape. And I want to talk about the tenet of self-awareness, which is really the foundation of that. I’m a board certified psychiatrist and psychotherapist. I’ve been in practice for over 25 years. And I love talking to people about self-awareness because it’s really where our journey of mental health starts. Also it’s an important every day, every week activity for us as we seek to understand our minds and build really great mental health and resilient mental fitness.
Self-awareness simply is our ability to notice what’s going on inside in our minds, in our bodies, and to observe it. That observational power, call it interoception, where we’re really sensing what’s going on. We’re used to that with our physical body where we feel something in our gut maybe, or we feel a little pain somewhere, you wonder what that is. The same thing happens with our mind. We have certain feelings or emotions and thoughts that get stuck. We have memories that come back to us. We have certain feelings that are associated with situations, maybe when we’re social or when we’re alone by ourselves. And so all of this and our ability to really cope and understand and deal with it hinges on this ability to harness self-awareness. I think of self-awareness a lot, just like a muscle. Our ability to really understand what’s going on and then to build the tools and resources that you need in times when you don’t know what’s going on to understand that.
As we’re building self-awareness, wanting to understand our feelings, our thoughts, our patterns and reactions, there’s a tool that stands out above the others that I like. It’s low cost. You have access to it right now. We all do. And that’s journaling. And a lot of times I think journaling gets a little poo-pooed by patients. I’ll bring it up and people say, “I’ve tried that” or “I don’t really like it.”
A lot of times it’s a similar thing I hear about therapy. And I have a theory about that. The reason is because it’s so hard for us to face some of these feelings and put words to them and it’s so easy for us to avoid them. Mental health and self-awareness is hard work. I think that’s one of the things that gets missed. The journal entry isn’t simply saying, dear diary, life’s going great. I look at a lot of my entries and usually in our journal entries, there’s some celebration and gratitude, but certainly it’s where a lot of us work out our struggles.
So how does journaling work? Well, it works similar to all talk therapies where we’re seeking to better understand our internal world using our words. There’s a difference between feeling lonely and feeling guilty and feeling sad with grief or sad with depression. There’s a big difference between the grief that you feel when you lose a pet or when you lose a loved one. Even in the joyfulness and delight that we feel at times, that gets really complex. Finding words for that complexity and really describing your internal experience in a detailed way is fundamental to all mental health work and fundamental to our mental fitness.
In our practice, one of our social workers, our lead therapist, Samantha, introduced me to this great PDF called the Feelings Wheel. It’s this graphic that has different adjectives that you can use to describe different feelings you’re having. I look at it and sometimes I think about it, it’s like a buffet of my emotional life. It has the spectrum of our feelings and there are lots of other words that we can use, but it’s a nice place to start if this is really challenging work.
How does journaling affect our mood and lead us to feeling good and feeling better? Well, the first is that you really quickly get a feeling of more mastery. Imagine that you’re in a dark room and you’re scared and you don’t know what’s there. You have no idea. Is it a dragon? Is it a monster? Is it some awful person from your past? Is it a ghost? And as soon as you know, you see what’s making that little noise, you settle down a little bit because you can then begin to plan and prepare.
Journaling helps us understand what’s there lurking in the dark. It gives it shape and form. It becomes something that we can address. It becomes a set of maybe goals that we can make. It allows you to have more of a sense of coming mastery. Once you know what’s in the dark and you can sit with it, you can observe it, you can describe it, you can begin to transcend your fear of it. And that’s really when the power of self-awareness and internal observation begins to pay off for us.
Another way that journaling is great is for improving our power of self-regulation. We’ve all had that experience, right? You wrote out that big email, all the agita, and you didn’t send it. Almost always we’re glad we didn’t send it. Maybe we just needed to kind of get it out there, but not really communicate that to the person. We needed to self-regulate. And writing down our feelings, honoring them, being angry, being rageful, being in love and putting it down there, it allows you again, to see it. And so this really helps us with our self regulation.
It’s a feeling we had, but feelings are a little bit like waves when you’re surfing. They come, they hit you, they’re powerful, and you’re kind of left in the wake. and then they’re gone. And a new set of feelings comes. So our self-regulation, our ability to surf in this analogy, our ability to feel some anxiety when you see a big wave coming, but go and position yourself well, paddle over it. That’s a really important way to think about self-regulation.
So that’s how journaling can help with self-regulation. It’s an extension of finding words for these feelings, observing what’s going on inside and describing it. And then the pattern of the slowing down and putting it down, bearing witness to it all helps us self-regulate.
Is there a right way to journal? People get all worried. You can journal in so many different ways. This is about getting your thoughts out. Sometimes I voice journal. I’ve got great voice memos, especially if I’m maybe driving along or sometimes when I’m traveling or pacing, I just love to kind of talk it out sometimes and you capture things about a certain moment that you’ll never remember. I have a traditional journal that I like to write in. This is I think an important aspect. I see a lot of people have small journals, bulky journals. I think it’s important to be efficient with your journal in my opinion. You can use anything, but it’s important to cherish it. I try to keep this mostly in my home or in my office. I’m hesitant to travel with it because it’s not so much that it’s private or personal, it’s more because it contains things that I want to be able to reflect back on.
I think that some people like to email and type. Some people feel that is putting too personal or private of information on the cloud. I think it’s also important that some people journal but it’s not always in the written word. There are a lot of people I work with who are very creative and their journaling is they’ll write a poem or visual artists might make something. When I work with clinicians and trying to help them in their clinical work. I’ll often note if they’re working with someone like a creative person, a dancer, a painter, a musician, just hearing about that process, it’s not exactly journaling in the conventional sense of putting words to feelings, sensing what’s going on, but it’s a form of expression, what’s going on inside.
So those are some of the different ways that I see people using this act of journaling. My other tip is get a pen that you love. I journal exclusively in these pens. I have them in a couple different colors, but it’s just what I find works the best for me, my hand, my pace. Have the pen you love, have a journal you love, and then creating space.
That’s the other thing I find people, you know, they schedule so much, schedule the gym, schedule date night, schedule our work obviously, but we don’t spend a lot of time scheduling space to sit with ourselves. It’s really the first thing to go. It’s one of the reasons that psychotherapy is often so powerful for people. People come back and and say “wow I haven’t been thinking about that really powerful, important thing going on in my life since last week when I saw you in session.” So the journal and having some protected time is helpful. It doesn’t have to be forever. Start with 15 minutes, fill one page, see what comes out.
And then I think the other tool that’s really important that people rarely bring to journaling, is people are really awful and mean to themselves about what they write down. They judge it, they critique it, they fear what people will think of it. This is a really natural part in early journaling, especially when you’re younger and it feels really consequential and you need to do something with this stuff. I write a lot, I publish, I want everything I write to be efficient and go out. But I don’t think like that for journaling stuff, that’s not what this is about. I think it’s much more about tuning and lubricating the machine, the engine, to keep it flowing and moving right. And then the stuff that you need to write what will come out.
That’s the part I like about journaling. It really allows me to keep getting back to those things that are true for me, like those values that I am either not enacting or I’m striving for but not reaching and to put it right down there. It’s almost just like a good therapist who will confront you gently, lovingly, but will confront you with the things that you’re doing to get in your own way.
How do you get started journaling? It’s so simple, but it feels daunting for people. Some of those feelings get in the way that are going to be exposed. You may worry people are going to find it, that you’re going to maybe not write the right words. This is a private document, not a lot of people are going to see it. The big challenge in journaling is getting it out. Journaling is definitely a place to put down our fear, or sad thoughts or loneliness or pain. But journaling is also an important place for us to recognize our triumphs, to really work on better expressing our gratitude.
A lot of times when people think about mental health work and inner work, they want to avoid it because it’s like all about the painful, awful stuff and what’s wrong with us. That’s a piece of it. But as I’ve learned from my patients and in my experience, the part that’s really great is also recognizing our joyfulness, our hedonism, our capacity for pleasure, of having gratitude for the things that fill us up.
For really like noting like you would mark it on a map. Wow, that’s a special spot. I want to make sure and get back there. You really need to do the same thing with our emotional lives. Wow, this connection is wonderful. I want to make sure and honor it. Wow, this trip was so great. Here are a few things that I want to make sure and remember, or I want to make sure and capture and carry forward.
So some of the prompts, things like what worked today or what was great today? I’m a psychiatrist. I like also getting into the feelings. How am I feeling right now? What’s been bothering me? What am I struggling with? I’ve been in a bunch of different workshops where some prompts ask people to think about their goals and things that are on the way and then some solutions.
Sometimes with journaling, I encourage people to have a little less form, to not have such a need for the structure, the productivity, the goal-driven behavior that drives so much of us. The idea that this needs to become a Pulitzer Prize winning journal of middle-aged male pain. It’s not what this is for. This is for helping self-regulate, helping to strive what’s going on, helping me become a better person, a better man, a better therapist, a better dad, a better husband. That’s the point of this journal.
Let’s look in Healing the Modern Brain for some great prompts. As I write in Healing the Modern Brain, self-awareness is at its most basic an act of self-discovery.
- Right now I feel the things I do best are
- The emotions I find hardest to accept
- My greatest strength is
These are all prompts that are in Healing the Modern Brain that sometimes help us get started when we look at that blank page and it feels maybe a little intimidating. Starting with a prompt is going to pull lots of great information about you. You can use these in Healing the Modern Brain, of course, as well as many, many others. It’s a great question for a friend who’s a journaler. “Hey, do you have a favorite prompt that you use?”
Mental fitness is the skills, the knowledge and the habits that give us a more fulfilling, a more insulated, happier life and allow us to deal with all of the mental health challenges that we’re going to encounter. The first tenet of mental fitness, how we take care of and build our mental health is self-awareness, our ability to understand what uniquely is going on inside of us, what we’re feeling, how we’re reacting to things, understanding more about our patterns in our emotional life.
Today, we’ve talked about journaling and it’s been such a treat to get to share with you some of my enthusiasm, but also my encouragement for you, some specific prompts and a request that you can really box out and make time for your internal process via journaling. It’s something a lot of people are doing more. I see it now on the plane. I’ll look over it. It’s not just me. We’ve got some fellow journalers. It’s a way of you understanding your internal experience of finding power in your words to describe what’s going on with you to really know that internal state. I hope this video helps you journal, helps you with your self-awareness, helps you build more mental fitness.
