Journaling Helps Combat Anxieties and Reorients Ourselves In Our Emotions
Unanswerable questions oftentimes leave us feeling powerless.
Do you constantly feel the void inside you even though everything seems well in life? Do you feel the anxious thoughts piling up in your mind out of blue some time? Are you consciously aware of the fact that we are not able to answer all the questions in our head and that leaves us feeling powerless and hopeless?
I do and I fully admit that there are so many questions in my mind that I would never find out answers for each of them. They are not simple and googleable.
I would never know if living in another city that is seemingly beautiful and safe will change the trajectory of my life in a better direction. I would never know if taking up a job that is overall promising and fairly reputable will truly make me fulfilled every single day. I would never know investing time and energy into some relationships in my life will certainly have a reward, or it is going to be like an overdoing sacrifice that will eventually leave me exhausted and wanting to see them no more.
Indeed, those questions can be somewhat answered and directed by suggestions of others, and depending on a certain amount of information, we can still make a fair and intellectual guess. However, at the bottom of our hearts, we know we want 100% correct answers.
Life is beautiful and interesting because of its unpredictability.
I believe what makes life beautiful and interesting is its unpredictability. What happened in the past doesn’t necessarily define how we are doing right now and what we are going to do in the future. Every single person’s life is a unique journey in its own way, so it is always interesting to listen to another person’s life story, isn’t it?
The nature of life is somewhat in between scary and surprising because no one knows how our life eventually turns out to be before we reach its very end.
In the midst of the pandemic crisis and career transitioning in life, I feel I need to start looking into my mental health. I want to know what I have been talking to myself with and how I have been doing for myself and to myself these days. I need to have a healthy way to express my overwhelming emotions.
Taking care of ourselves is as equally important as taking care of others.
I know that it is not to encourage myself to be self-centered, but instead, being mindful of my current mental state actually helps me better serve other people. From my own experience, only when I’m whole and well emotionally and physically, that I have the capacity to listen to and absorb other opinions, and am able to take up extra chores which will free other people’s hands.
To treat other people with kindness, I believe we need to start with treating ourselves with kindness first. And this is not just about a one-time thing. To keep us thriving to the future ahead of us because eventually the pandemic will be gone, we all need to learn how to cultivate our hearts like taking care of a garden in a sustainable way. We need to create a system that keeps our garden well planted and watered in order for it to flourish.
Journaling helps me clarify my emotions and be intentional about expressing my feeling to other people.
Journaling is the system I am currently applying and hopefully, it will encourage you to start incorporating it into your life or inspire you to find some other way to find other ways to re-center yourself in life.
It has some physical and mental benefits (mentioned in the referenced articles below). For me what I feel after starting to journal is that first of all, I am intentionally looking at my emotions, not ignoring or subduing them, so it won’t come out unexpectedly on my physical health or affect the way how I treat myself and people around me.
It also helps me break away from my obsessive thinking over any single matter. Putting down raging thoughts into words helps clarify emotions. This refining process helps us identify what could be the source of our emotions and eventually helps us seek help more precisely. Now I do feel more confident in terms of communicating my emotions to my friends because I know what words to describe how I feel after my soul-searching journaling time.
Journaling is the way how I consolidate my feelings and emotions into words, and then I push myself to the next level to publicly write about my journey on mental health.
I am learning and processing all different sources, and have found some of them indeed help improve my mental state tremendously. Journaling is one of them that has given me a medium to express my thoughts, to create which gives me fulfillment, and to connect with people to whoever and whenever encounter my words.
Journaling is a refining process and once there’s clarity in our own thoughts, we can regain our strength and hope for the future.
Whenever the emotions well up again, let’s fight with it together by asking for help and trying techniques like journaling, to mindfully process our current daunting mental state, to count all the blessings we currently have in life, and to create a vision for our future ahead.
Techniques are useful to some but not to others, but I believe there’s always something out there that can truly encourage us to believe our life has value, and our life is worth our fight.
To whoever is reading this, I want to encourage you, “No matter who I am and where I came from, I belong here and I can bring value to this space.”
Reference for you:
