Have you ever had something bothering you…on your mind but when you sit down to write for 5, 10, 15 minutes you don’t feel any better? You feel like it accomplished nothing? Like there is something that you are still clawing at or that is clawing at you and you still have something that needs to be fleshed out?
I used to feel like this. I’d wake up feeling some sort of general anxiety. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly but felt like it had something to do with “apples”. So, I’d took out my journal and started writing about apples but then my mind wandered off and I started writing about celery and grocery shopping. You get the point. At the end, I was still thinking about apples as if I had more to say but that was more distant. I still felt that pesky general anxiety about apples.
About two or three months ago, I decided to try something new and created a title for my journal entry. Lets call it “work”. I was only going to write about work and I was going to write every single thought and feeling I could think of about work in that session. I brain-dumped on the page(s) and once I was done, I had nothing else to say about work. My mind was unburdened. I released all of the anxieties about work out on the page and I felt so much better.
Then I did it again, with other things, like people in my life, goals, other interests, and most important other anxieties. What this did for me was turn down the dial on my anxieties and depression. I could convert more energy to the present instead of on the past or the unpredictability of the future.
I became happier, more focused, and self-aware.
Through this practice, I’ve found that there are feelings that we hide from ourselves—our subconscious’s defense mechanism. When we write without editing or filtering or judging, we allow our subconscious to release some of those feelings in a safe space so we can do something with them. What we do with them is individual to each person. What we have now is more information about what’s going on in our head, and less in our head to manage. We can free ourselves through this constraint.
If it pleases you, leave a comment below if this is something you do or have tried because of this post.