Dr Supatra Tovar: How Journaling Helped Me Be More Calm, Mindful And Resilient

An Interview With Heidi Sander

Journaling can increase your emotional intelligence and keeps you calm. When you take time to write down what you are feeling, you are slowing your immediate emotional response and becoming more thoughtful about what you feel and how to express that. In addition, the time it takes to write what you are feeling helps to calm you down. It is like counting to ten before responding to someone. You can then apply this in real life by reminding you to take a moment before responding to something in defensiveness and to be brave and vulnerable enough to express your emotions in a non-confrontational manner.

Journaling is a powerful tool to gain clarity and insight especially during challenging times of loss and uncertainty. Writing can cultivate a deeper connection with yourself and provide an outlet for calmness, resilience and mindfulness. When my mom passed on, I found writing to be cathartic. When I read through my journal years later, there were thoughts that I developed into poems, and others that simply provided a deeper insight into myself. In this series I’m speaking with people who use journaling to become more mindful and resilient.

As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Dr. Supatra Tovar

Dr. Supatra Tovar (PSY31949) is one of the few clinical psychologists in the world who is also a registered dietitian and fitness expert. Dr. Tovar’s unique background and integrated specializations allow her to provide holistic mind-body treatment for trauma, eating disorders, depression, anxiety, and more. Dr. Tovar obtained her Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology, her Masters in Nutritional Science from California State Los Angeles, and holds a certification in Pilates from Body Arts and Sciences International. She works in private practice in Pasadena.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! We really appreciate the courage it takes to publicly share your story of healing. Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your childhood backstory?

I was very fortunate to grow up in Boulder, Colorado, where I cultivated my love of fitness, health, and nutrition. When I look back at photos of myself growing up, I am usually outside, covered in mud, exploring the wilderness! I knew from an early age that science, health, and fitness would be an integral part of my life. In high school, one of the people closest to me developed an eating disorder. Being young and inexperienced, I had no way of helping her. Thankfully she is now fully recovered, but the experience propelled me on my path to working in health care. I first became a certified Pilates instructor, then a registered dietitian, and finally went on to completely round out my education as a Doctor of Clinical Psychology. Now I have the education and training to treat all people and I specialize in holistic mental health treatment for disordered eating, eating disorders, trauma, depression, and anxiety.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about journaling. Have you been writing in your journal for a long time or was there a challenging situation that prompted you to start journal writing? If you feel comfortable sharing the situation with us, it could help other readers.

I grew up journaling to fuel my creativity and to work out depressed and anxious thinking as a teenager. I would lock myself away in my room for hours, writing about my feelings and the drama of the day, as well as craft poems that sang to my creative heart. I do not remember what started me on this path, but I do remember being in love with my journals, the smell of their pages, and the beauty of their covers. I realize now what I did not know then: I was practicing mindfulness, I was regulating my emotions, I was healing my mind and my heart.

How did journaling help you heal, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?

I encourage journaling with all my clients because of how it helped me sort through my tangled emotions and led me toward healing myself and finding my voice. Journaling is essential to guiding you toward your highest self by helping you to tune into your intuition — that still, small voice deep inside that always knows what is best for you. When you journal, you often write about what is currently plaguing you, and when you allow yourself to write uncensored, you express your emotions and expel them, freeing yourself from the pain. Without censorship, you can allow your intuition to guide you toward the right solution, leading you on the path toward healing and finding better options for yourself.

Did journaling help you find more self-compassion and gratitude? Can you share a story about that?

I found my self-compassion and gratitude through my poetry. When I would write poetry, I would practice free-form writing. I would clear my mind to allow my intuition to “write for me.” What I realized in this practice was that my highest self was my most patient, wonderous, innocent, and grateful self. So, my poems and my writing always reflected this self. This showed me that my best self was my most compassionate and grateful self.

What kind of content goes into your journal? For example, do you free-write, write poems, doodle?

My journals are always a combination of free-writing, poems, and emotional rants and solutions.

How did you gain a different perspective on life and your emotions while writing in your journal? Can you please share a story about what you mean?

Often my writing focused on injustices, whether it was me witnessing or suffering unfair treatment in some way. There was always a social justice warrior inside of me and when I reflected on these pains and injustices, I found my highest and most compassionate self. For example, when I saw my friend struggling with bulimia nervosa, I would write about the behaviors I would see her engage in, I would lament her pain and struggles, I would express my frustration at not being able to help her, and I found a deepened sense of commitment to help others in similar struggles — all by simply writing and observing what I saw.

In my own journal writing, I ended up creating poems from some of the ideas and one of them won an award. Do you have plans with your journal content?

I do believe my journals are a private sacred place. I have very rarely shared my poems. This was partially because of some negative and hurtful feedback I got from an insensitive teacher from my past. Since then, I did show my poems to one of the people I most respect in life, and she was quite blown away by them. This helped me regain my confidence in my writing and relearn how to trust myself. I think it would be nice to share them someday, but I am too busy right now with my practice and helping people heal to focus on that for now. In the meantime, they are my creative outlet, and something I use to heal myself and grow.

Fantastic. Here is our main question. In my journaling program, I have found that journaling can help people to become more calm, mindful and resilient. Based on your experience and research, can you please share with our readers “five ways that journaling can help you to be more calm, mindful and resilient”?

1. Journaling helps you increase mindfulness by keeping you present. Mindfulness can be defined as being fully attuned and aware of the present moment in a non-judgmental, open-hearted manner. It is important to note that we are very rarely in the present moment in our minds. We are usually either in a state of depression about the past, anxiety about the future, or both — especially with today’s stressful and uncertain times. Mindfulness emphasizes noticing and accepting the present moment and can help change depressive ruminative thinking about the past or anxiety regarding the future by switching from what is termed as the “doing mind” to the “being mind.” Journaling is a tangible exercise that forces your mind to focus and concentrate only on the task at hand. When you free form write, you are not judging as you go, you are allowing your mind to “just be” in the present. When you are fully in the present moment, you are usually more calm, centered, and peaceful.
2. Journaling can increase your emotional intelligence and keeps you calm. When you take time to write down what you are feeling, you are slowing your immediate emotional response and becoming more thoughtful about what you feel and how to express that. In addition, the time it takes to write what you are feeling helps to calm you down. It is like counting to ten before responding to someone. You can then apply this in real life by reminding you to take a moment before responding to something in defensiveness and to be brave and vulnerable enough to express your emotions in a non-confrontational manner.
3. Journaling helps you become more resilient by building mental toughness. When you journal regularly you build mental toughness by learning how to trust your emotions and yourself. By finding your inner voice, you learn about your values and beliefs, and those can become pillars for your strength in knowing exactly who you are and what you are made of. This makes weathering through difficult times easier because, at the very least, you know you can rely on and trust yourself.
4. Journaling helps you practice gratitude and lifts your mood. I often give gratitude journaling exercises to clients because research has shown that shifting your focus from what you don’t have to what you do have can be an excellent pathway towards decreasing depression and anxiety. We live in a doom scrolling world and are constantly bombarded with images and stories of lack, need, disparity, and grief. But like Mr. Roger’s mom pointed out to him at a young age, you can either focus on tragedy, or you can focus on who is helping during the tragedy. If you shift your focus in this way, you can do wonders for your mental health.
5. Journaling increases your creativity by providing space to explore. A journal is the ultimate tabula rasa, or blank slate. Those blank pages can take you anywhere, and there are absolutely no rules to what you can or should write. This is freedom. This is a place to allow your mind to go wherever it wants without fear of criticism, ridicule, or shame. Where else can you get that kind of freedom in life? When we allow ourselves to be free to write whatever we want, I do believe we can truly surprise ourselves at the contents of our beautiful, unique, creative, and wonderful minds.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of peace to the greatest amount of people, what would that be?

I am very committed to helping people release themselves from the confines of diet culture. I do believe that so much suffering comes from both Lookism and Weightism biases, both which are rooted in white supremacy and classism. I have seen first-hand how diet culture harms all people and puts our society in a perpetual state of “never-enoughness.” This pursuit of being “perfect and thin” and abhorring fatness fuels constant depression and anxiety and sets most people on a course of endless dieting and wasting money on products to try to achieve this unachievable ideal. I want to create an anti-diet culture revolution! I am already working on that as most of my social media messaging seeks to counter diet culture and its insidious effects. If I can help people free their minds and guide them to trust themselves and their bodies first, I know I will have done a great thing to help heal the world and bring about inner peace.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them. :-)

If I could have lunch with anyone in the world it would have to be Michelle Obama. I have so much respect and admiration for her, not only for her intelligence and education, but her commitment to health and wellness for children, as well as her devotion to social justice and equality. She is simply my hero. Runners up would certainly be Barack Obama, Keanu Reeves, the Dalai Lama, and Selena Gomez.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I am very active on social media, sharing my latest thoughts and what I am learning from my clients in therapy. You can find my social channels and my latest media contributions on my website www.drsupatratovar.com. There you can find featured guest articles, podcast appearances, and the educational work I am doing.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued fulfillment and success with your writing!