Capture the positive energy
Many therapists and mental health professionals recommend journaling as a good practice to help you process your experiences. In many ways, writing is qualitatively different compared to thinking about something. Consider the fact that it’s usually easy to think in circles, but it’s much harder to write the same thing over and over again.
If you tend to ruminate, a good strategy is to write down your thoughts verbatim, which forces you to take a different look at them. This is a surprisingly effective but rarely implemented form of forcing yourself to become aware of your thoughts, which is usually very hard to do in our culture of easy distraction. After all, why think when you can just pull out your phone? Some of the most difficult moments in therapy are when you confront a difficult topic from a place of stillness, not allowing yourself to get carried away with distraction, which then forces you to confront the issue head-on.
To take this strategy further, I recommend writing down your thoughts when you’re feeling good, and not just when you’re depressed or anxious about something. It doesn’t necessarily feel natural to do this, but I highly recommend it because your writing can serve as a reminder of the hidden positivity within your mind. Depression can lie, making you think that everything in the past was terrible, and it can be handy to have some written evidence available to counter that notion.
If you have a tendency towards being anxious or depressed, you might find it “natural” to dwell on the negative, which makes it very hard to remember the good times. Additionally, we tend to remember events most similar to our current mood state. For example, if you’re feeling depressed, you might be ruminating about negative events that occurred in the past. Conversely, if you’re feeling good, you might remember more positive events instead. Our memory is intertwined with emotion, and we generally remember how events make us feel, even if we forget the specifics. Writing down your thoughts and emotions can counteract a tendency towards negativity by providing you with clear, objective evidence of how your mind is not necessarily trustworthy, which is an important step on the path towards mindful awareness of situations. This can counteract what some researchers call “depressive realism,” which is the tendency to think that your depressed thoughts are somehow more accurate or realistic compared to your more optimistic thoughts.
Our thoughts and emotions vary over time, and capturing them can serve as a light to guide us when life seems particularly dark. Try writing things down and see what happens -- you might surprise yourself.
References:
Allan LG, Siegel S, Hannah S. The sad truth about depressive realism. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006). 2007;60(3):482-495. doi:10.1080/17470210601002686
Konnikova M. Don’t Worry, Be Happy. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/dont-worry-be-happy. Published 2017. Accessed August 8, 2019.
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