The meaning that you attach to external events creates the emotional response you have to those events.
In other words, you feel the way you think.
This is the central concept behind the most powerful journaling technique that I’ve found when it comes to bringing my mental health back into balance when my mood goes dark, my anxiety flares up, or depression starts to creep in.
We can all lead happier and more productive lives by thinking in healthy ways, so give this technique a try the next time you need a little mental tune-up.
By the way, I cover all of this in the video on my channel “The Journaling Technique That Saved My Life.” If you’d like to watch that video, you can do so below. But if you prefer to gain your information through reading, keep scrolling, and I’ll fill you in on the details.
Have you ever noticed how different 2 people’s reactions can be to the same event? Maybe 2 people get laid off from the same company on the same day, and while one person initially feels upset, they’re able to view it as an opportunity to learn and grow, while the other person might take it as a statement about their worth as a human being, feeling like a total failure and becoming angry, bitter, and depressed? Why is that?
We ALL experience a continuous stream of positive, negative, and neutral events, and each of those events has to be given a conscious meaning before we experience any emotional response to them. That means that it’s our INTERPRETATION of those events that create our mood on any given day.
Of course, it’s completely normal to experience feelings of disappointment, sadness, or anger when bad things happen to us, but when those feelings linger and start to interfere with our happiness long-term, it’s probably because we’re not healthily interpreting those experiences.
The purpose of the journaling technique that I’m about to show you is to expose the unhealthy thinking patterns that create a lot of our stress, anxiety, and depressed moods.
But before we can do that you need to understand the different cognitive distortions that can crop up in our thinking patterns to create those negative feelings.
A cognitive distortion is an exaggerated or irrational thought pattern that leads to an inaccurate perception of reality, and this idea comes from a type of therapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. According to the theory behind this mode of therapy, these distortions are always what’s behind a person’s anxiety, depression, or general negative outlook on the world.
There are quite a few of these distortions, so I’ll give you just a few examples here, but feel free to check out the rest here if you’re interested.
All-Or-Nothing Thinking. This one is about seeing things only in black or white.
My business idea flopped. That means I’m a total failure.
Disqualifying the Positive. This is about rejecting positive experiences, claiming that they don’t count for some reason or another.
You got a promotion and a raise at work, but you think, well, it was just easier to promote me than find someone else, so it doesn’t count as an achievement.
Next is Jumping to Conclusions. You jump to a negative conclusion even though there aren’t any real facts to support it.
This is the one that crops up a lot for me. Maybe you send someone a message and you still haven’t heard back for a day or 2, and then you think that person is either mad at you, or maybe even that they’re dead.
Emotional Reasoning. This is about thinking something is true just because you feel like it is.
I feel like a failure, so that means I AM a failure.
Labeling. Attaching a negative label to yourself or someone else.
I’m a bad mother.
Personalization. Seeing yourself as the cause of some negative event that you weren’t responsible for.
It’s my fault that my son failed algebra.
Overgeneralization. You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
I always hit every single red light every time I’m out driving.
Catastrophizing. Exaggerating the importance of things. Another favourite of mine.
I can’t believe I made that mistake! My reputation will be ruined, and I’ll probably be fired and then drummed right out of town!
Let’s get to how we get over these cognitive distortions.
We’re going to first write down the thoughts that we’re having at that moment, identify the cognitive distortion that’s creating our unhealthy interpretation of the event, and then write down a more rational and objective response.
Let’s try out a real example. There are a few variations, but we’ll start with the triple-column technique.
Going back to the example of losing a job, our thought might be, I’m a total failure. Now we need to identify the cognitive distortion that’s at play. There are several, but the first one that comes to mind is all-or-nothing thinking.
Once you get familiar with the cognitive distortions, or, if you don’t have the list handy, you can get rid of the column for cognitive distortions and just focus on coming up with a more rational response.
The idea is to talk back to your negative thoughts, looking for the objective truth.
Conversely, if you want to take this a step further, you can add a few more columns like this. You’ll write out the situation that prompted the thought, the emotions you felt, along with your rating of each one, and the thoughts that arose in that situation. Then, you’ll pinpoint the cognitive distortion, create a rational response, and then reassess how you feel. I’ve attached a picture of an example below. (This is a real situation that happened to me when I was working at an ad agency, by the way.)
The cool thing about this more complicated version is seeing in real-time how your mood shifts after you’ve done the exercise.
I can’t overstate how powerful this journaling technique has been for my mental health. It helps me when I’m just dealing with the regular ups and downs of life, but it’s also helped me through the darkest times in my life, especially when I was in my early twenties and I slipped into a pretty bad depression. I was using drugs and alcohol pretty heavily to cope with a past trauma. I’d just left an unhealthy relationship, I was miserable at my job and had no other skills, no secondary education, no direction at all and no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And it just hurt to exist. Every morning I’d wake up and just feel instantly crushed under the weight of depression.
This was when I discovered this tool, and it was inside a book called Feeling Good, by David D. Burns, and I can’t recommend it enough. You can see just how used and beat up my own copy of it is, and that’s because it’s been well-used over the last couple of decades.
One thing I want to point out though, is that if you are feeling depressed, the first thing to do is to speak to a professional. See your doctor or your therapist before trying any treatment plans on your own, and don’t consider this journaling technique as a replacement for talking to a professional, although it can make a great compliment to it.
Anyway, I hope you find this journaling technique beneficial in enhancing your mental well-being. Wishing you newfound clarity and resilience through the application of this journaling technique on your journey to improved mental health.
