Life hack #10: Journal your pain out

Life hack #10: Journal your pain out

[00:00:00] One of the best life hacks that is absolutely free and will help you in a crisis or a moment of distress is journaling. Journaling is as simple as writing down your thoughts on paper or using your notepad on your phone or whatever is convenient for you. The reason I'm telling you about journaling is because it fucking helps. Okay. I have seen this. I have real stories of people. I have helped in my past where I saw them basically vibrating in anger because they didn't know how to get it out of their body. They were so angry about something, they were not being heard that they were physically vibrating. And I remember telling this person, get a piece of paper and a pen. And I want you to write down right now what you were angry about. And I saw her do it. And I saw her write with anger and whatever. And like, you know, oomph. And then like a couple of minutes later, she would like lose some of the, you know, she's still writing, but like less aggressively.

And then afterwards she'd be able to like talk to us about what she was angry about, but without the vibration of overwhelming feeling. [00:01:00] And I saw it with my own eyes, right? These are people I care about. I'm helping learn how to regulate and self soothe their emotions. And so it's effective.

And whenever I'm in a crisis, I journal. If I'm having a great week, I might not journal at all. And that's when I've realized that journaling is medicinal for me. Journaling is something that if I wake up and I'm sad about an ex or I'm missing somebody, or I'm in the anger stage or whatever, the best way to process these things and get them out of your head and your being is to put them on paper. So the reason that this is so effective, and I want to give it a little analogy. So visualize this with me if you can, but you know when you're trying to remember someone's phone number and you're like, you know, 5, 5, 5, 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8, like in your head, and you're reciting it because you can't forget it.

You have to get to a place where you can write it down so that it's out of your head. Right? And until you find that place to write the number down, you're like 5, 5, 5. You know, 7, 7, 7 like, you're reciting it in your head and it's like, it's an anxiety about holding this [00:02:00] thing in your head. Now when you get a piece of paper and you write down that phone number, (555) 777-8888.

You hear that? That was your body relaxing, because now that thing that you were holding in your head is now on paper, safely on paper. You're not going to lose it. It's there. You don't need to hold it so tightly. That relief you get is similar to journaling when you're in a painful experience, right? So if you are going through a break up, and you are having all of the feelings that go with it, and you don't have a lot of people to talk to, or even if you do, the journal is going to be your best friend, because it's the same relief, in my experience, of when you're trying to get that phone number anxiety out, and then you write it down, and it's gone, of when you're crying over something, and you're upset over something, and you write it down, like, you know, you did this, this, this, this is how I felt, you know, I'm angry at you for this.

After that, You've literally released it. You've released it from your head, even though you could still think about it. [00:03:00] There's an energetic charge that has actually been transferred out of your body and onto the paper, and then basically just transmuted, like it's just put into like a neutral state on paper.

And I think it's a really powerful energetic life hack because you don't even need to know how it works. You don't even need to believe in anything mystical. You just need to get a pen and a paper and open your mind and the next time you're really upset or sad, why am I sad at the top and then start writing, right?

And so sometimes the most helpful things for me is to write what I'm grateful for in a journal as a way of just saying, okay, yeah, I might be going through a break up, but I'm grateful for the following. I'm grateful I have a safe home to live in while i'm in this recovery phase. I'm grateful I have my own job and income, right?

I'm, you know, not everyone going through a break up is stable. A lot of people have to suddenly find new housing or a whole new way of earning, uh, you know, an income and supporting themselves and that can add so much trauma on top of trauma. So, you know, i'm putting these things in a journal and I'm reminding myself when I read them [00:04:00] that, yeah, this could have been worse, you know?

So journaling is just one of those things where, when I personally am having a crisis moment of distress or i'm suddenly overwhelmed with a bad feeling, like if I got triggered because I saw a picture of me and my ex or something, the first thing I would do with instinct is get my journal and start writing and that this is going to be a bit of a gross analogy, but you know how when you have that nauseous feeling and you think you're going to throw up and your instinct, if you're not available at a toilet, is to grab a bucket.

The same feeling for me as when I'm upset to grab my journal. Because I'm going to need it to get that out. It's essentially emotionally vomiting onto the paper, and then it's at least out of your body. If you don't believe me, then try it. See it for yourself. Rule it out after you've given it a fair shot, right?

I think that the best life hacks are the ones that you don't need to spend money on. You don't need to worry about how, you know, methods or whatever, you know, how you journal is up to you. There is things that you can Google to be like, you know, how to journal your [00:05:00] thoughts out, how to journal your pain out and get some helpful prompts and things like that.

There's even journal classes like you guys can like you join a little group and people journal, um, together with, with somebody going over prompts. Like, I've done these things. I did one by Zoom where a bunch of us were like in our bedrooms on our webcams and we had our journals and we would just go in a circle and talk about like prompts and then she would go silent for five minutes while we journaled and then we would reflect after.

So journaling is a beautiful practice and there's a lot you can go and do with it if you find it helpful. Journaling, you gotta journal that pain out, man. It's one of the most effective methods there is.