 Covery Monday, we haven't done one of these in a long time. It's been a month, probably a month, because we just got done with the holiday break, so we had to skip one or two of them. Anyway, welcome back. Today we're gonna talk about journaling, and we're gonna answer the question, is journaling air quotes good for anxiety? So as usual, this is your first time to a Monday afternoon live stream. Welcome, let's put the chat overlay up so that you guys can talk to each other and I can see what's going on. Generally the way these go, and if you're watching on the replay, by the way, feel free to comment. You won't see the live chat comments, but feel free to comment on the replay if you're watching and I pop in once or twice a week to YouTube and check out all the comments and I try to answer as many as I can. So whether you're live in the chat today or you are watching on a replay, welcome. Feel free to comment, ask your questions. If you're happy to be watching on the live stream right now, new to chat, welcome Ian, good to see you. I'm just seeing the comments as they come in right now. Welcome everybody, Jade made a live. Welcome, I'm glad that you did. If you're here and you're digging it, maybe just hit like the thumbs up button. I'm trying to experiment here evidently. If you like the live stream while it's happening, it's good, I guess. Yes, and we're back. By the way, I watched the movie B and I figured it out. All the other characters are himself. He learns to love himself. Look at me being all grown up. Anyway, none of you get that except for one person in the room. So anyway, first time getting into a live, welcome guys and glad that you're here. We're gonna talk about journaling today. Who wants to talk about journaling? Who likes to journal? Pop it in the comments and we're gonna talk about it. Having joined one of these in a while. Welcome, Beth, hello, Samantha, how are you? GBG, what's up? Hello, Carol, happy new year to you too. Carol's in the UK. I recognize some names. This is good. Anyway, I'm glad you guys are back and I'm glad we get to hang out for a little while. We're gonna do about 40, 45 minutes. Generally the way these work is... Oh, the beloved coffee bean background. You're right, it's gone. Hey, let me see if I can get it back. What do I do here? I go here and oh, the coffee bean background is gone. Oh, well, what can I do? Anyway, let me go back to the chat. So we'll see what we got going on here. Let's see here, air hunger symptoms. Love to journal. Okay, fair enough. I love journaling, I love day planners. Oh, you know what? You guys that do like the day planning thing, who's a bullet journaler? Like you guys are way at another level here. Every once in a while I see what people do with their journals and bullet journals and bullet journals are pretty much like works of art. Are they journals or are they art? I don't get it. Anyway, some folks love to journal. That's totally fine. I'm not here to tell you that journaling is not good for anxiety, but we're gonna try to start to clarify things and see what it means to be good for anxiety. And in my opinion and my approach to anxiety and anxiety disorders, what some of the more helpful ways are to use the journaling activity as part of your recovery. And also we're gonna talk about some of the traps that people fall into in terms of journaling because some of the sort of the conventional wisdom or the common sense approach to journaling as a way to put down your feelings sometimes backfires in our community. So we're gonna talk about all that stuff. Let's see, huge fan of day planning and documenting each day, love lists and planners, but I don't journal. Journaling feels like too much work. Terry, I feel you on that, I get that. I'll tell you that I myself have never been a journaler for the past year and a half or so though I have been pretty regularly journaling and it has been really great. Part of my issue is I finally wound up agreeing to just use the day one app because it's on all of my devices. And if I try to journal by hand which seems super romantic and like that seems like the right way to journal. My brain is much faster than my hands. My handwriting is absolutely unintelligible even to me sometimes. I just get frustrated. So I journal in the day one app now. So yes, I am now a journaler. Not every day, but most every day I like it. Sometimes I feel for me that I have to take a break from journaling because it becomes almost a chore, something that I have to do or I'm supposed to do. So I take a little break. Anyway, let's see here. What else, what does everybody have to say? Handwritten journal is a time burner too. Yes, Tats and Cats, I love the name by the way. It is. If I sometimes I will write just to be mindful and slow myself down enough so that I can actually write legibly. Otherwise it's again, my hand doesn't keep it up with my head. So sometimes I use it as a mindfulness tool a little bit here and there. Journaling hasn't helped me unfortunately. We're gonna talk a little bit about that. I keep a diary every night, not much used to me because I can't understand my writing Carol. I get that you and me are in the same boat for sure. Sorry I'm being rude and looking over here but I'm looking at the comments. Journaling causes me anxiety. Okay, Melissa this, let's put this up real quick. Usually we don't put comments up on the screen until the end when we do questions, Q and A and stuff. But so this is actually pretty common. Journaling causes me anxiety. Let's get into that, right? So let's talk about that. Let's hide, where is that? Now I have to hide it. Here it is. I love journaling but in the end I think it's avoidance. I have a small whiteboard on my work bench where I list my goals for the day. That's cool. I tried but I'm even critical of my own writing. Some people get trapped and like a journal is supposed to look a certain way. We're gonna talk about all of those things. So let's get into it. Journaling is one of those things that I think is almost universally held up as this is a good idea like for mental health and wellness and emotional development and personal growth and all of those things, healing. Use whatever words you want. That's totally fine. Like there's nothing wrong with that advice. There's a reason why so many people default to telling you that you should be journaling because it is not a bad exercise. It's a decent exercise for wellness and growth and organization and dealing with your emotions and getting stuff out there instead of keeping it followed up. There's a lot of great reasons to journal but some of the more common advice that revolves around the use of journaling as a wellness activity or healing activity or growth activity isn't necessarily anxiety disorder informed which is a thing that phrase that we like to use a little bit more often in the last year or so because and the people giving you that advice aren't necessarily giving you bad advice. They don't know they maybe are giving you bad advice and maybe it's not even bad advice for you but if you are listening to people who try to teach you how to journal, especially when they are very prescriptive in the way you're supposed to journal for your mental health or for your anxiety and you find that it's not helping you or it's making it worse for you. It's backfiring a little bit. It could just be that they're not necessarily aware of the specific challenges that you are facing if you're dealing with things like GAD or OCD or Gorephobia or Panic Disorder or the things that we talk about here. So they probably don't mean to give you bad advice, you just might necessarily be specifically aware of your specific context that we're dealing with here. So sometimes the traps of journaling and I see some of them in the comments, I kind of dig it here because you guys are sort of saying things before I even have to today. And I think I'm supposed to put the cap. Am I supposed to caption up? Yeah, I'm gonna put the caption back up so that people know what they're looking at. Oh, by the way, before I keep going I'm gonna put this one up. On February 7th, I can't remember when it is. For those of you, and this kind of plays into the journaling and getting stuck on your thoughts and writing your thoughts down, Josh and I, Josh Fletcher and I are doing a workshop called Worry and Rumination Explained. It's a two hour thing. Any of you have been in any of my workshops before you get an idea of what it is. It's based on Zoom, it's done over Zoom and we're gonna talk for about two hours on the mechanics and worry and rumination, some of the theories behind it and how if you feel like you cannot escape your thoughts and escape worry and rumination, some ways that you could start to change that and back away from those habits. So if you are interested in that, you can go to the URL that's up on your screen right now. Of course, if you're watching after February 7th, I believe it is, it's available on a replay as well. So there's my plug for the day. Somebody, Charlie says, I call my journal Craig the Critic. Seriously though, it does help done right. Just don't take it so seriously. So some of the prescriptive advice that you find about journaling is keep a gratitude journal. There's nothing wrong with gratitude. It's fine, gratitude is okay, gratitude is not wrong, but some people immediately go to gratitude journaling, which is fine, but sometimes it's very, very difficult for somebody in the grips of an anxiety disorder who is trying desperately to find ways to create a specific way of feeling because that's sort of part of the gig for people in our community. I'm either anxious, I'm afraid, I'm uncertain, I feel vulnerable, I'm terrified, I'm shaking, I'm having physical sensations, I'm having thoughts on rapid fire. I repeat here that I don't like the very disturbing to me. And all I wanna do is find a magic way to create a specific state of feeling, knock this down and create happiness or peace or calmness. And often gratitude journaling is held up as a way to access that. So sometimes for folks in our community, there's nothing wrong with the suggestion for gratitude journaling. Sometimes it's really hard to access gratitude and then people in our community, especially if you're dealing with perfectionistic tendencies, if Gadd is your bag, you find that I can't gratitude journal correctly because I can't seem to find any gratitude right now, it's not working or I'm doing this and it's like bullets off a Superman, I'm still anxious, I'm still afraid, I'm still as uncomfortable I always have been, it's not working, it's not working. This is a thing that I hear a lot about suggestions like gratitude journaling or even journaling prompts that you're fed every day, which in the general public might make sense because they're designed to maybe connect you to what you're thinking and you're feeling, right? So in a lot of instances, people will hold up journaling as a way for people to get in touch with their thoughts or their emotions because especially in the West, we're pretty well known for like trying to blur those things out and blunt them and get numb to them by scrolling on our phones or eating or drinking or watching YouTube or like engaging in compulsive habitual type behaviors. And we try and drown out our thoughts and our emotions. That's true. So a lot of like generic journaling prompts generic journaling apps or workshops are meant to help you get in touch with what you're thinking and feeling. See where the problem can start to be though because for people in our community, all you care about is what you're thinking and feeling. You put a huge amount of importance on what you're thinking and feeling already. So people who are trying to give you good advice, who say, well, what are you thinking and feeling who tell you to write down your thoughts and everything you're experiencing in your journal could really be giving you accidentally bad advice because you are already so overly focused internally on your own internal experiences. You're judging them, you're evaluating them, you're afraid of them, you're trying to get away from them that you already know what you're thinking and feeling. You really do. I'm terrified. I'm having these symptoms. I'm having these thoughts. I keep having repetitive thoughts that I can't stop. Getting in touch with what you're thinking and feeling is not a problem for people in our community. It actually is the problem if you know what I mean. So be careful of journaling prompts. And again, this is not cut and dry, black and white, absolute advice. But keep in mind that if you are being told to journal as a feelings dump or an emotions dump, some people will say, well, that's because you have to get underneath the anxiety to find the emotions that are driving it. That's a different approach to anxiety disorders. You know that I'm not that guy necessarily. But if you find that journaling has become nothing but a habit that you do anyway, you force yourself to do because you're told that it's supposed to be good for you. And all it is, is you repeating to yourself, writing or typing or speaking how you feel, how I feel, how I feel, how I feel, then it starts to become like a merry-go-round of torture for some people. So I know that there have even been instances where people in our community, our friends have been told by therapists and counselors that they should make time every night to talk about in their journal, private journal, how they felt that day. What did you feel today? What did you experience that day? And they wind up a week and a half into it, recognizing that what they're doing is every night they sit down and pretty much make their anxious feelings and thoughts the most important thing in their life, which is the problem. That's why they went to the therapist or counselor to begin with. So we have to be mindful of those sort of things. Some people in our community can benefit from that kind of work. So only you know what's right for you or not, but if you're trying that type of journaling where you sit down and you just try to connect to every thought and feeling and sensation you have and I got to get it out on the page. For some people, they find that cathartic, it puts it on the page and they can walk away from it. Cool, but if you feel that it puts you on a treadmill of anxiety because all you do is just focus again and again on how it felt. And then you look back at your journal entries and they're the same, you know, virtually the same for weeks and weeks on end, that could certainly be problematic. Another issue sometimes with journaling, and again, I'm not picking on journaling on an absolute sense. I journal myself, as I said at the beginning of the thing, I'm just talking about within the context of our problem that we're dealing with here together in this community, these are the red flags that you really probably have to look for. Another issue that sometimes with journaling is, it's sometimes journaling apps or journaling experts or journaling advice that you see or journaling tips that you find online will be very prescriptive in not just what you're supposed to put in your journal, but how you're supposed to journal. So by sort of show of hands in the room, how many people get sucked into journaling imagery, right? So journaling seems like a thing that you would like to do or maybe you used to journal a lot and you used to love it but now you're having a hard time and it's a struggle for you and you can't and you get really enticed by the romantic imagery of journaling. The thumbnail on YouTube for today's live stream has a cup of coffee or a latte, you know, in a very well lit on the white, you know, the white cup on the white desk with a notebook and a pen and it's carefully posed. We see that journaling imagery all the time. The pensive woman posing by her window with her cup in her hand and she's writing in a beautiful like leather bound journal or some sort of impressive, very, you know, a book or journal or notebook and it's very romantic looking, right? So sometimes or it's bullet journaling and the bullet journal has to look a certain way and you wind up spending so much time trying to journal correctly that you forget the reason why you're journaling to begin with. So this is a thing that I have heard people say over and over and over. I spend so much time trying to set up my journaling experience where I make sure I have my coffee and the right cup and like it's almost being, it's almost performative in a way that could be problematic too. Again, especially if you are a little bit compulsive about it and if you are a perfectionist and you're struggling with those kinds of things or trying to get things just right or this isn't going to be good for my recovery unless I do it right and it looks like an Instagram photo that becomes problematic with journaling. Frankly, from where I sit, if you like literally grabbed a crayon held it in the wrong hand like an ape and scrolled on a paper bag, that's a journal but you would never see people say that, right? Some people might say it's fine to do it that way but generally speaking, social media really romanticizes sort of the aesthetic of journaling and that can start to become problematic for people in our community. So those are some of the kind of common red flags or pitfalls or traps that you might find around journaling. Another sort of trap around journaling would be the idea that if you journal, it makes your anxiety go away. Like so, in the title of this live stream is journaling good for anxiety which is a little bit tongue in cheek. Those of you who have been following along with my content or reading my books, listening to the podcast know that generally speaking, the phrase good for anxiety is a thing that I tend to use in a tongue in cheek kind of way, almost a condescending kind of way. Or we look, what does even good for anxiety mean? Sometimes you get trapped into like, oh journaling will calm me down or journaling will make my anxiety go away or if I could journal about my panic attacks then they'll stop happening. It's, that isn't necessarily true. In fact, for most people that journal, most people in our community that are dealing with a disordered state of chronic anxiety who try to use journaling to make it go away wind up frustrated. And then they get down in themselves and the whole Craig the critic thing pops in, right? Cause like, I'm not doing it right. Oh, can you guys hear if I do that? It's Craig the critic. You can hear that? Probably did, right? I can't hear it cause I don't have my headphones on. I'm being lazy. But so Craig the critic will pop in and tell you like, see, you're so anxious and you're so beyond hope. And nothing works because my favorite influencers told me that journaling is magic and it's not magic for me. So I'm beyond hope. So you gotta be careful about that too. Again, I need the eagle noise. I don't have the eagle noise. I gotta get the eagle noise. I will get the eagle noise. But I appreciate the fact that you recognize the eagle noise, which is something that you hear all the time on the Disordered Podcast that I do with Josh Fletcher. Anyway, so that's another sort of pitfall or trap of journaling. Why do you want to journal? What is it supposed to do? What is it supposed to do? I can play amygdala. That's this one. Amygdala. I guess you heard that because evidently, I actually remember what the buttons are now. So, and for those of you who don't get the joke, the podcast I do with Josh Fletcher is called Disordered. It comes out every Friday. That's at Disordered.fm and those little sound effects are in almost all of our episodes. So those are definitely some of the pitfalls or the traps of journaling for sure. Why are you journaling? What do you think it's supposed to do? Or the other associated trap or sort of pitfall of journaling could be from what I understand, if I could just journal enough, if I keep digging and digging on paper or in my app or on my phone and notes, however you do it, papyrus and quill pens. I see the quill pen jokes. If I just do it hard enough, I will uncover my hidden triggers or my hidden root cause. And that can be frustrating too, like no matter how hard I journal, I can't seem to come up with the magic trigger or the magic epiphany that tells me, oh, this is why, this is why I'm anxious or this is why my OCD is flaring up. Now I'm all better. So again, it's sometimes you have to be really careful. And I understand if in fact you are struggling right now and all you want to do is feel better, which nobody would blame me for, I want you to feel better too. It can be easy to fall into the trap of, I will journal because all the gurus and wellness influencers telling me to journal, it's gotta be magic. I'm gonna figure it out, I'm gonna do it right and it's gonna make me feel better and sometimes then it doesn't. So let's go into comments a little bit because that's a little bit more fun than just blabbing at you continuously for 30 minutes and then answering questions. So I'm gonna scroll up a little bit. We discovered that we cannot find the coffee bean background. That's because I switched restream plans and I have to re-upload that I think. So let me see what you guys have to say here. Journaling caused me anxiety. We put that up on the screen already. Journaling hasn't helped me. I'm just trying to get up here. I'm critical of my own writing. Let's put this up. This is a great name, by the way. Draw as I'll love it. I'm critical of my own writing is a thing. I'm not journaling right. I sit down to journal and I want it to come out a certain way. I want my writing to sound a certain way. I want to tell it a specific way and I can't seem to write properly or it doesn't look a certain way and then I don't like it and I get frustrated. That's pretty common, right? You have to be careful about that. Again, you would say, if we're going to approach the act of journaling and we're gonna talk about the way I like journaling in the recovery context in general, like as a general guideline, I would say that journaling has to be done without judgment. It's critically important that you journal without judgment about your journaling. It's so important, I think, to go there. This is the thing that you hear when we talk about practicing meditation or when you practice mindfulness. We do it without judgment. I'm thinking it's okay. I'm feeling whatever I'm feeling, it's okay. Whatever I'm thinking, it's okay. However way I write this thing on the paper, it's okay. So I think journaling could be a way to help kind of connect with that. Like, I'm okay, I don't have to be, I don't have to produce a specific outcome to be okay. So that might be one way to look at journaling for sure, as practice in that. Kat says that journaling might be avoidance. Anything can become avoidance. I like this comment. I wouldn't say that it's avoidance like on a universal standpoint. Oh, if you journal, you're avoiding, not at all, but if you yourself know that like, oh, as soon as they start to feel things, I have to run and open my journaling app or run and get my journal and start writing, then yeah, it might actually be avoidant. It's possible. So that's the thing. I love that comment, very good. I use notes on my phone. There's a million ways to journal. I call my journal, Craig the Critic, seriously though, it does help. Oh, let's see here. I kept a daily log of everything. Oh, this is good. Thank you, Beth, for this comment. Let's go through that. I kept a daily log of everything I did for a while, but he came incredibly obsessive and unhealthy and I felt like I couldn't take a day off because what if I need to remember this specific day? Yes, that's when it starts to fall into like a compulsive or habitual behavior that you think, when you think that your recovery absolutely hinges you. Oh, let's see. Let me scroll down to the bottom real quick so I can get rid of this person. So good at marketing, they have to spam a live stream. Love it. Anyway, let's go back up here to this. Sorry, guys, I just don't like to leave them here. I like to block them when they show up. So what Beth is saying is true. That can be a thing for everybody. Like if I don't journal and I don't get this thought out of my head and I don't do it right, it's gonna destroy my recovery or I'm gonna miss something super important. So if journaling starts to become compulsive or you feel urgently like you must journal, and even worse, I must journal in exactly this way at exactly this time and exactly this app with this paper and this pen. And this is how I do it. And if it's not exactly right, it's not gonna work. Then you have to reexamine your relationship with the journaling activity, like anything else. Anything in recovery can become compulsive if we're not careful about it, right? So let's make you easier, understand how silly anxiety it can be. Yes, well, okay, we're gonna get to this. So Jason says journaling can make you, make it a little bit easier for you to understand how silly anxiety can be. And I see Kathleen definitely agrees with that. I agree, and we're gonna talk about success journaling, which is something that I sort of am a big fan of and I talk about quite a bit because success journaling, the way I'm gonna describe it and I've written about it in the anxious truth. I've done podcasts about it. I've talked about it in social media can really shine a light on like, oh, this is crazy. Like what's going on here is irrational or the fear that I was sure was true over and over and over again, actually turns out to never be true. So sometimes if you do it that way, you can in fact discover that like, oh, look at this, I'm seeing the irrationality in action. So that's a big deal. We're gonna talk about success journaling in a while. I just wanna sort of catch up a little bit. Let's hide Kathleen's comments here. Just write when I feel like it now, love it. This is good, so there's a follow up from Beth, I love it. Like if the urge strikes you, whatever you feel like writing, then you do it. And then journaling could become a useful thing or writing. Maybe it's just that you like to be creative and write. That's really cool. So I love it. Let's see. Kat Har says success journaling. We're gonna talk about that. Hello Israel from the Philippines. I'm glad you're here, welcome. You might be furthest away. Are there any like people from New Zealand or Australia in the room right now? I don't know. Let's see. I feel like journaling about anxiety will lead me to be thinking more about it and lead to more rumination and worry. I would not disagree with you. We talked about that before. The journaling activity can accidentally just hyper focus you on how you're feeling and what you're doing. Let's see. How long did it take? I'll answer it. It's not a journaling thing, but that's okay. How long did it take me to finally trust what I think and feel? Was that a tail end of recovery thing for you? What did that process look like for you? Well, I acted like I trusted and feel. How long did it take is irrelevant. It took me however long it takes me. It will take you however long it takes you. I'm never ever gonna give you guys like, oh, it took me six months to trust my feelings. South Africa, that might be the furthest away. I have to look at the map, I'm not really sure. But so in that situation, like trusting what you think and feel, the way I did that, what did it look like? What did it feel like? I would have to start to act like I could trust what I thought and felt. Like, because if I was assisting that like I can't trust what I feel so I have to counteract it. Very, very weird, like almost meta sounding. Like if the opposite is correct and the opposite of the opposite is correct. So you have to act like you're feeling, like you can abandon those anxious feelings. Like I don't feel like I'm supposed to ignore this anxious feeling or this anxious thought. So I'm gonna have to ignore it and roll the dice. Then over time, you learn that like, oh, look at that. I can trust my instinct, which is my logic that says I don't have to run with that. I can leave that behind and leave it unaddressed and I'll still wind up okay. But timeline is gonna be different for everybody, right? I found it exhausting. Okay, this is cool. So Carrie's talking about exactly what I was talking about, right? I agree with you. I found that exhausting journaling about how I feel as it was just going over it all again and taking time doing it too. Yeah, so like why, if your anxiety, if your state of anxiety, and that is your physical state, your emotional state, your mental state, your cognitive state. If that is always front and center, it's the most important thing in the universe to you all the time. Why on earth would we wanna get involved in an activity that makes it even more important or confirms like, yeah, I gotta dig into this. I really better dig into this, right? Cause that what you're doing is basically confirming this is important, man, we gotta get into this. But do we, right? So it's important to look at that. Oh, this is good, this is a good comment. Let's see here. It depends when people say reading is good for you. Well, it depends on what you're reading and why, right? Same thing, right? Certainly true, like there's no universal thing that says journaling is like, I've literally heard people almost get berated, especially in like wellness circles. I kind of have a microphone problem. See this mic, this is not my real mic. It's how that mic is actually out being used by somebody else right now. So I got this cheap mic and it's not heavy. So they, my swing arm just slowly like it's possessed. It's not, it just has a very strong spring because this boom arm is meant for a much heavier mic. But yeah, I've heard people in social media circles, especially like in wellness circles or circles where they say phrases like, do the work over and over and over. Like it's some sort of achievement to take care of your mental health. People will say, if you're not journaling, you're doing it wrong. You're doing it, what are you, why are you not up at four o'clock in the morning sitting in a tub of ice doing a kettlebell workout? I'm being very masculine here, sorry about that. And then like sitting with a leather bound journal and 16 books by dead Roman emperors. Why are you not doing that? You must do that. Maybe, maybe not. It is an imposter mic. This is the cheap mic, but it gets the job done. It's an $80 mic and it works, right? So let's see, let's keep going down. I'm gonna try and catch up and then we're gonna go into like success journaling and what I think could be a positive aspect of journaling. I'm trying a gratitude and success journal, just bullet points to try and focus on good stuff more. So in a way, this could be a good way to go too. If you find that this will work for you, then that's really cool. Like what else is going on? So let me connect this to sort of some of the principles of recovery, right? We talk about, I mean, what Carrie's saying on the screen here. We talk all the time or I like to use the phrase attention is a verb. Anxious people tend to think that attention is a noun and like it's a thing and you have a finite amount of it. So if I feel really anxious or I have a scary thought about self-harm, for instance, I have to apportion all of my attention like it's a thing or like I have a jar of attention, I must give all the attention to that. It seems wrong to not give it all of the attention, but attention is a verb. I pay attention, I choose to put my attention. Attention is something that you do. So if you look at it this way, the way Carrie is approaching journaling sometimes could be helpful. I am having repetitive thoughts about self-harm, I am really anxious, I'm nauseous, I feel dizzy, my legs are shaking, I have air hunger, whatever it is, I feel those things, I can't ignore them if somebody paid me to ignore them, but I can also use attention as a verb and choose to try and connect to some other things that are happening in the world around me or other things that are happening in my life. Is it gonna make me feel any different? No, but it starts to teach you the lesson if you do what Carrie's talking about here and you do it judiciously, like you can start to learn that lesson of like, oh look, I can actually, I can write about like my family picnic that I was scared to be at, that I packed that twice, that I didn't have a good time at, but I can write that I went even though I was afraid and it doesn't change the way I'm feeling right now, but hey look, anxious thoughts and sensations and all of those things, you can be here with me, I'm gonna write in my journal right now and we'll put some bullet points down on some other stuff that isn't you, right? So I like that, Carrie, thank you for that comment, I appreciate it. Let's see, the aesthetic of journaling, correct. Ooh, this is, I appreciate this. I also never wanna open that book again, reading it because it gets me back to that place or let myself get there. So this is good, right? Like if your journal was just nothing more than a carousel or merry-go-round all the time of repeating how you feel and how you feel and how you feel, that would be a tough thing to go back and read. You wouldn't wanna read that. Down the road, you might, or you might choose to burn it one day or just keep it in a drawer and never open it. Who the hell knows? You get to decide. It's all right, there's no wrong answer there. Let's see here. I'm gonna scroll down a little bit here. Yeah, so we're gonna E and S that might be a specific way to journal. I'm gonna talk about that now really when we go into sort of the second half of this. Where are we? 30 minutes, it's not too shabby. So I'll play a big deal. I forgot that you asked me to do that. I love office supplies. I love the comments section because I never know what you guys are gonna be talking about together. Let's see here. Keep going a long time ago. Kept the daily listing of all my activities for three years. Very little happened. I love that actually. Tried video journaling, but my OCD and Hyper Winners had me overthinking why I couldn't think clearly. Ah, let's put this up on the screen really quickly. Tats and Cats, great name, by the way. There must be some tats in there, right? Like, I appreciate you. So this could be that thing where like, I'm not journaling correctly. It's just reminding me. I've heard people say that like, oh, I wanna sit down and write in this beautiful like gratitude journal that my mom got me for for my birthday, cause she thought it would help me. But my hands are shaking so much that I can't write in it. And then that triggers like, I'm so anxious I can't even journal but I need to journal to be anxious. It's almost like exercise. You know the thing when people say, you should exercise. It's really good for your anxiety. And then you get into the treadmill and have a panic attack, cause it feels like a panic attack. And then you wonder like, clearly I'm the worst anxious person ever. My anxiety is special because exercise makes me worse. And in this situation, like Tats and Cats is saying, the act of journaling made her feel even worse, triggered her even more. So I get that. Very good. If you journal often and then I've tried journaling in the past, but I never knew what to write about. You know what? This actually pretty common for almost anybody that journals took me a long time. I said in the beginning of a stream, I've been journaling pretty consistently most days for about a year and a half now. And at first I was like, I don't even know what to write about here. But then you've kind of figured out as you go. But again, that's just sort of regular journaling if you will, or people who like to keep a diary or whatever. That's a little different than recovered journaling. Okay. So let me scroll down to the bottom. I think I caught up. Okay. Oh, wait. Fake Canada is here. Mary Lisa says, I hate journaling. I think that when journaling bad things, it's like I'm living it all over again. Okay. See, sometimes it just doesn't work. So the standard advice that says, write down what you're thinking and feeling like, I don't want to, I'm trying to get away from these things. Like all I care about is what I think and feel. You know, I'm trying to fix that. Thank you very much. So please don't tell me to write down my thoughts and my feelings. My thoughts and my feelings own me and I'm trying to learn how they cannot own me. So I get you on that. I feel you. So let's talk about one way that I think is a great way to use journaling. If you're not a journaler now or you are a journal and you tried all the different ways of journaling, it's not working for you. One thing that I like to sort of advocate for is the use of what I call a success journal. And I am not sure who mentioned it in the comments. Maybe even Kathleen, I can't remember, or maybe it was Bessie. A success journal I think is a big deal. What I mean by a success journal is this is a stupidly simple journal. There's nothing special about it. Again, I don't care how you write it, scroll it on the wall like Tom Hanks and freaking Castaway put it on. Jason talked about journaling on a Doritos bag. I don't care how you do it. There's no right or wrong way to do it. Do it a different way every night, who cares? But if you can keep a record that basically says at the end of a day or after a scary experience, here are the things I was afraid of and what happened. So a great success journal entry might be was terrified of a psychotic break again today. Didn't have a psychotic break, see you tomorrow. That's really great. Another great success journal entry might look like I had no choice, had to take my daughter to the doctor, was terrified, had two panic attacks, did it, came home, I'm okay, I'm just scared. The end, see you tomorrow, next entry tomorrow. Like the success journal is really just a way to kind of give you an idea where you can go back and look at that and say, oh look, I was afraid to drive around the block six times in the last two weeks. And every single time I did it and nothing happened and I was able to drive around the block. Oh look, every single time I thought that today was definitely the day that I was going to lose my sanity, I didn't. But look at how every day I write that I'm afraid of a psychotic break today and then it doesn't happen. So that is one way to success journal. Success journal is not glamorous, it's not detailed in a lot of ways, it's very basic. I was afraid of this, I did it, I did this anyway, nothing happened. Or you can acknowledge I did this anyway and I was really afraid and I felt a lot of anxiety symptoms. Not, I went to the supermarket today and my heart was pounding and it felt like I couldn't breathe and then my hands were shaking. No, not that. I would not success journal where you just write down all of the things you feel. Don't write down every thought you have. Don't write down every sensation that you have. There's no reason for that. You already will tell anybody who will listen whether it's me, your therapist, your best friend or your cat what your symptoms are, am I right? So there's no reason to put your symptoms in your journal anymore. You've talked about them more than enough. So I did a scary thing today. I felt really afraid and uncomfortable. I didn't think I was going to make it and I did it. See you tomorrow. Good night journal. Like that's a great way to try a different form of journaling. Now what does that do? In the old days of CBT, we would do things like thought records and thought challenging and like fact checking. It's a form of that for sure. But it's not meant to somehow like, oh, you look at your success journal and say, oh, my anxiety is ridiculous. I'm cured. It doesn't work that way. Nor did old school CBT work that way. But it is a way to inject a little bit of objectivity in what is a very subjective experience. So who's in the room right now that is completely and utterly wrapped up in every feeling, sensation, thought? You need to know about it. What caused it? Why is it happening? When is it going to go away? What does it mean? If you're wrapped up in that right now, you're in an incredibly subjective experience. You're interpreting and trying to attach meaning that you can't find to things that you don't understand that scare the hell out of you, which is normal. I would expect human beings to do that, but then it goes off the rails and then you wind up in an anxiety disorder state. So in this situation, we're saying, okay, I know I wanna just spew out again exactly what I was afraid of. Oh, my head felt weird again. No, no, no, not my head felt weird. How about just I was afraid? How about just I had a lot of anxiety sensations today? And what happened? Nothing, I was afraid. What else happened? Well, I guess nothing, I was afraid. Like, so in a way, you can use your success journal to just inject some objectivity into what was otherwise a very highly emotionally charged subjective experience. And that subjectivity and that emotional reasoning is part of what makes recovery so difficult. So we can use success journaling this way as a way to sort of start to balance that, counteract that. Here is when I say that, sometimes I get a little bit of hate because people think I'm telling you to invalidate your emotions. My thoughts, but my thoughts, they come from inside of me. They're sacred, I must, I must connect to my thoughts and like flesh them out and dig into them. Oh, you don't, that's what got you into this problem to begin with. I'm not telling anybody to invalidate your humanness, but when you are literally in a stuck in a torture chamber of validating every emotion and thought and feeling and experience, internal experience that you have, we have to find a way to pry ourselves away from that for a little while, right? So sometimes you're gonna get people who say, that's crazy, you'll never heal if you start to like ignore your emotions that way because your anxiety is a hidden message and you have to dig to find it. If you've been digging and you haven't found it after two years, stop digging, try it this way. What's the harm? Like it's not working the other way anyway, right? So I'm looking at, I even I enjoyed the rain watching outside or having a roof above my head. Yes, stuff like that. Instead of like, hey, I was really scared today. Guess what else was going on in the world? The neighbor's kid was practicing with his band in their garage. They were terrible, but it was kind of cool because they're trying. How's that? That's a success journal entry. I was terrified, but my cat dragged a burden from the backyard. That sucked. See how like more than one thing can be true at a time and you begin to put in a little bit of objectivity. I was afraid, but life was still happening. And it was, I was okay that I was afraid. He didn't have to make it the most important thing. The other thing that I think a success journal can do for you and the purpose it can serve is it starts to become an objective brain for you. So we human beings, this isn't even an anxiety thing. This is just a human thing. Humans have an incredibly strong negative bias, right? We tend to remember bad things way easier than we remember good things. We remember bad things in far greater detail than we remember good things. Like this is just the way we seem to be wired. Maybe it's a survival thing, who the hell knows? We could probably talk about that for months or years. There are probably people who spend their entire careers trying to explain that sort of stuff. It's interesting, right? But your success journal can actually be a record that counteracts that negative recall bias because how many people in the room have worked on their recovery and maybe had one or two experiences where I took a leap of faith. And oh my God, I did it. You felt amazing that day, but then three days later, maybe you have a panic attack and you just, that's it. That's it. You like throw your hands up, you throw in the towel, it's over. You completely, completely forget all the things that you've done in the past. You throw them away and you start to, again, glue yourself to only the internal experience that you don't like that you're having now. I don't give a crap that I've had four months of continual but slow progress. I feel bad today and that's the only thing that matters. That's a hallmark of somebody in a state of chronic and disordered anxiety. And when you get down to it, it's like, well, if I can go back to my success journal and say, hey, wait a minute here, I am feeling bad right now. I can acknowledge that. I don't have to pretend that I don't. But I can also go back and look, hey, remember when I used to be afraid to walk around the block? Or remember when I couldn't stay home alone at all and now I stay home alone regularly for half hour at a time? Remember when I would Google my symptoms every 15 minutes and now I can go three hours between? Like the success journal can remind you that like how you feel now isn't the only thing that matters. So that's another valuable thing in terms of success journal. Success journaling is not sexy. It's not romantic. There's no aesthetic to it. It's pretty dry, but it could be really useful if you want to look at it this way and play with it, like experiment with it. There's no right or wrong way. Just be careful of falling into the old journaling traps of my journal is to recall all of my symptoms and every scary thing I have. Somebody just asked about, oh, Bethany said, can you talk about values-based journaling? Sure. So values-based journaling is really interesting. The thing that is interesting about value-based journaling, and I got this out of the book that I read called The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonagall, who I think we're gonna have on disordered. That's gonna be great if we can arrange it. She said she wants to come on, we're still trying to work it out. But there's research, a lot of research was done that says when I'm struggling with anxiety, if I can connect back to the things that are valuable to me, that I care about in life, not goals, but values, like I value creativity, I value kindness, I value curiosity, whatever it happens to be. If you can start to connect to your values, you start to remember, oh, that's right, I chose to do the school pickup run because I value family. Family is important to me. And I did that heart thing and I had a panic attack waiting in the pickup line at the middle school, but I did it because I value this. So there's a really cool exercise where you can sit down and start to look at what your values are. And by the way, if you can't identify your values right away, totally fine. Most people cannot, it might take a while. And then what you wind up doing is I do it once a month. Once a month, I have a list of like eight or 10 core values that are sort of important to me, sort of the core of my value system. And once a month, I'll sit for 10 minutes one night. I have it as a to-do list item. This is the way I remember to do it. And I will pick three of those values and I'll just write random stuff about those values for 10 minutes. And I do that once a month. And it's an interesting exercise because when you are actively involved in challenging your fears and doing exposures and going toward your fear and doing all the things we talk about here that nobody wants to do because it's freaking terrifying and it's so hard, sometimes if you can connect to your values and sometimes use your value, remind yourself of your values in your journal entries, you can remember, oh, this is why I'm doing this. It can be very helpful to stay connected to why you're choosing to stay home alone for 15 minutes. And that scares the hell out of you because you're sure that if you're alone, no one will save you from accidentally hurting yourself if you have that thought and nobody's there to save you, right? So that's value-based journaling. Good question, B, thanks for asking. Where are we here? 42 minutes. So let's see what else we have. I like, I actually kind of like that. I went through the comments halfway through instead of wait until the end. That's better. Let's see here. I would try and catch up with your comments with each other, but I can't. I just dig that you guys talk to each other and support each other that way. Inject a little left brain, there you go. You want to look at it that way, that's totally fine. I kind of like the left brain, right brain stuff. That's a creative versus rational, emotion versus logical. Have a way you like to conceptualize it. If that's the way you conceptualize it, right brain, left brain, and that works for you. Go for it, right? Let's see here. What is this one? I also try to right-see little things as a win because of my perfectionism only focuses on the big things. I'm trying to value the little things now, like getting out of bed, brushing teeth, and dishes. That's awesome. So like that would be a really great thing to use in like the success journaling mode that I was talking about. Like I know I want to write down every, I want to sit down every night and make journal entries that talk about how recovered I am. But for the next week, I'm really just going to look at, today I listened to an entire, you know, side of an album. It was really hard for me to sit still because I'm so anxious, but I sat and I paid attention to the music. I listened to four whole songs before I got up and had to walk around. That's a huge win, but your perfectionism won't say it is, so you can use a journal to maybe remind yourself, hey, wait a minute here. Can I give myself some credit, right? Oh, I should try this as Kel's. Yeah, sure, give it a shot. You can't, you know, there's no harm here and you have to find your way in it for sure, but this is cool too. I like, oops, sorry for banging my watch on the desk. Might open my eyes to how much worry about losing my mind and undergoing crazy and how even the smallest did it anyway was done and I made it to tomorrow. What you're gonna find is if you can maintain this habit, you know me, I never like to say you made it because you were always gonna make it, did it. I did it anyway, I did it. So if you can keep recording your did, you know, we do, Josh and I do did it anyways on Disordered. Start your own did it anyway list. You can go to disorder.fm and send us email or voicemails on your did it anyways and we try to read some of them on the air or play your voicemails, but you can also use your success journal to document your own did it anyways. It's super valuable. Guess what? You did it anyways matter even if no one else sees it. I know that's hard to believe in the social media era. Like if you do a thing and nobody knows you did it, still actually happened. Like if you know it happened, then it happened. Put it in your journal. Let's see here. Yeah, Jade is kind of looking at this too. I see that at the end of the day we made it through with still don't believe we'll be okay and just move past the experience. This is when I wrote The Anxious Truth which is my big recovery guide. If you don't have that book and you wanna check it out, it's on my website which is TheAnxiousTruth.com. It's there. I talked about recovery as a changing of reactions. There are three reactions. The reaction before that's the anticipatory anxiety. The reaction during. What do you do when you're in the midst of that really scary experience and you're feeling all the feels and the reaction after. How do you frame the experience when it's over? That's the reaction that most people forget. Like I did it and now I wanna go home and just tell everybody how horrible it was and how I barely made it. And I felt like I was gonna go crazy. I felt like I was gonna have an auto attack but you didn't go crazy and you didn't have a heart attack. So it's so important that you can start to use a success journal formula if you will or that mode or that idea to build a more helpful after experience and after reaction. The reaction after is like I did it. I did it. I was really afraid. I was terrified. I felt a lot of things but I did it and I managed to do it. Remember I'll connect you back to like the three C's. I did a podcast episode. I don't know when. Just search for courage, competence, confidence on my website, whatever episode that is. Be if you're still here and you wanna look it up. You're always good for that. The three C's of recovery. You start with courage. You take your leap of faith. The courage leads you to have experiences that show you that you are competent and that's all we care about. So your success journal doesn't have to tell you about how happy you are or how amazing or how full of gratitude you are for your school pickup run. Maybe you will. And that's cool if you feel that. Put it down, nothing wrong with that. But it will show you that you were competent even when you were afraid. Look, here's another day that I was competent. Here's another day when I was competent. Here's another day when I was competent. And then after a while, all of that competency fueled by courage leads to confidence. Confidence is the last C that you get and that tells you that I will be competent. Even before I did a thing, I started to recognize that, oh look, I will be competent. Right, so courage leads to competence, leads to confidence over time. I guess we're good. 47 minutes on journaling. I think we did pretty good. I don't know what you guys are talking about here, but I dig it. Usually there's all kinds of weird conversations going on, but these look strangely normal. You guys are just winding me today. Usually it's very random stuff. Anyway, I hope this has been helpful. Again, just to recap really quickly, I'm not here to tell you not to ever journal. I'm not picking on journaling. You know, a lot of people love journaling. I totally get that. When you are in a recovered state, you might journal completely differently. Maybe you'll go back to your old way. Maybe your journals will be flowery and aesthetic and romantic and maybe they will be full of digging into your emotions and your life experiences and that will be fine because you'll be able to do that then. But for now, if those type of practices that you maybe used to love or think you're supposed to do are hurting you or at least not helping you or keeping you stuck, consider what we've talked about today. So there's no universal journaling bed. It's not that. Consider what I talked about. Some of the red flags, the traps and some of the maybe the more productive ways to use journaling for anxiety. See how I did that? See what I did there? Anyway, guys, I'm going to back out of here. I guess if you want to, we do these if you're new to this or you're watching on a replay. First of all, if you like this video, hit the thumbs up and if you're new to the channel and haven't subscribed, please hit the subscribe button on YouTube for sure. The best way to always find these on the replay are on my YouTube channel because there's a playlist called Recovery Monday. If you ever want to go back and rewatch this, go to my YouTube channel, subscribe while you're there and look in the Recovery Monday playlist and you'll find this. You can go back and watch it anytime you want. If you're watching on a replay, by all means, leave a comment. I will circle back at some point today, at some point this week and try to answer your comments if I can. I will put up one more quick plug for the workshop that Josh Fletcher and I are doing in early February. It's in about a month or so. It's called worry and rumination explained. Just go to this URL that you see at the bottom of the screen, bit.ly slash worry rumination. It's a two-hour Zoom-based workshop that talks about the mechanics of worry and rumination and how you can start to take steps to break that habit. I'm actually gonna post about it today on Instagram and socials and that's it guys. Thanks for hanging out. Always fun. I can't believe it was been a month without one of these. I'll see you not next Monday, but the Monday after and then next week on Wednesday, there'll be an episode of the anxious truth. Every Friday there's an episode of Disordered. We're out. See ya.