Journaling Tips for Anxiety Disorder Recovery (Ep 302)

Journaling is one of the most popular “default” activities often connected to mental health and wellness. Journaling isn’t bad or evil, but as usual, things get a bit upside down in when we’re talking about anxiety disorders so we need to talk about how journaling fits into the context of chronic or disordered anxiety.

Why do we journal?

• To keep a record of our days
• To give ourselves a private, safe place to express emotions.
• To work through emotions, ideas, problems, and conflicts, or to find answers inside ourselves

Pitfalls of Traditional Journaling

It’s the part where we work through feelings, emotions, thoughts, ideas, conflicts, and challenges – through introspection and examining ourselves – that’s where things go off the rails for us.

Anxiety disorders largely revolve around falling into the trap of trying to use this basic human ability and trait in situations where it doesn’t belong and isn’t helpful. Anxious people try to solve their feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, but that’s a bad idea in general.

Record keeping is a trap for an anxious mind too. Looking back at our days and our emotions can be super useful in the right context. But for an anxious mind in the middle of an anxiety disorder, record keeping reveals a never ending, unproductive, constantly looping horror story.  This can lead to digging furiously for clues and hints as to how to fix those feelings, thoughts, emotions, and sensations.

Journaling In Old-School Traditional CBT

Thought Records

Looking for triggers – so they can be avoided and managed. This is avoidance and is almost the exact opposite of psychological flexibility.

Using logic and reason to highlight why anxious thoughts are irrational – for the purpose of directly changing them through thinking and cognition . This does not work terribly well in the context of an actual anxiety disorder.

So We Should Never Journal?

That’s not what I’m saying.

If journaling is a thing you enjoy doing, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if your journal looks like a never ending episode of Stranger Things and you’ve been trying specifically to fix your anxiety through journaling without much success, it might be time to revisit the habit.

A recovered person might return to more traditional forms of journaling as a personal history and introspection tool, but a chronically anxious person might need to modify their journaling style for a while.

Top Tips for Anxiety Disorder Journaling:

Use standing reminders:

It’s OK to start every journal entry with framing statements or reminders.

Examples:

• I don’t have to figure out or fix my feelings all the time.
• All thoughts are allowed. I don’t have to control my thoughts.
• Frightened bodies do frightened body things.

See how these statements can help you remember what your recovery framework looks like before you start digging into thoughts, feelings, and sensations?

To start, when recording and record keeping … focus on four things:

* What happened – What did you feel, thinking, or experience. What emotions did you experience as a result?  Hint: That will usually be fear, uncertainty, or feeling vulnerable

* What did you do in response to that? – Be specific. Did you do something behaviorally in response to that experience?  Did you do something mentally like engage in active thinking or problem solving or verifying?

* How did things turn out? What was the outcome?  Did your behavioral or mental response help? Did it make you feel better in the moment?

* Is this a pattern?  This is probably the most important one. If you look back over the last few weeks or months in your journal, can you find repeated instances that look like this one?  Is this recurring? And if it is, compare that to the outcome you recorded.  If ruminating or escaping made you feel better, why does this keep happening?

Pro tip: Do not attempt to interpret any of this. Just stick to the facts. Say what happened in your body exactly, not what it felt like. Say what emotions you experienced. “I was very afraid” will suffice. You don’t need to add the part where it “felt like” you might pass out, die, make a scene, or go insane. We want to be as objective as we can here.

Next Phase: What can I change?

If your journaling is revealing a repeating pattern of trigger / escape / avoid / repeat, then now it might be time to set up a new journal framework to help change that.

• I felt ….
• I did ….
• I wound up …

This is where things get more descriptive because we want to record actual mental and behavioral action to build a record that you can rely on. Also, this is the part where we can start to bring those catastrophic interpretations back into the picture.

For example:

“Had thoughts about insanity again. I was really afraid again. It got so bad that it felt like I was going to snap and totally lose myself forever. I was very worried that this would be too much and it would break me.

I did my best to allow all those thoughts without fighting them. I tried to relax my body and let it do whatever it thought it needed to do. It was hard. I slipped up a few times and had to keep reminding myself of what to do.

I wound up … OK.  Still afraid and worried but I didn’t take my usual evasive action and I was able to move through those fears when they flared up.”

NOW we have a useful record!  When you’re convinced that you are making no progress, that you know nothing about recovery, that you’re a setback or that you will never get better, you can look back on these entries to inject some objective reality into that process. Useful, right?  Way better than reading back through 104 entries that all sound like the end of the world and give you no credit for your innate ability to be human and experience human things.

Going Forward As You Progress

As you progress in your recovery and you are finding that you are less reactive to your sensations, thoughts, and emotions and feeling them to be less continuously threatening, you may find that you are experiencing emotions and thoughts like a non-anxious person might.  When being really angry at your sister is just being really angry about your sister, you might be able to use your journal in more of a traditional way to explore that feeling, the situation that caused it, and what you think you might do next to address it. Your journal might become useful again in that respect.

If you’ve always journaled in this style … congrats!  You’re getting something you love back.  Pat yourself on the back for making progress and returning to the things that matter to you.

If you’ve never been a journal kinda person and you find that you have less need to make “anxiety disorder” entries, you might decide to explore traditional journaling to see how that fits into your emerging recovery. You might like it, or you might find it totally useless and one day when you aren’t always afraid of your own body and mind you might make your last journal entry and never look back.  That’s fine too.

Criticisms

I know that when you look at this stuff through the lens of general wellness, emotional support, mental health, and personal growth, telling someone to NOT fully describe and honor thoughts and emotions might seem ridiculous or even harmful.

I understand where this comes from. I will simply remind you that I am addressing a very specific issue and context on this podcast – chronic and disordered anxiety. So if you are aghast because you are sure that the key to recovery from panic disorder or OCD (as examples) must lie in uncovering hidden pain or other highly emotionally introspective activities, you are free to disagree and move on, but know that in large populations of people that suffer from the kind of mental health issue we’re talking about here, that kind of things is most times harmful rather than helpful. At a minimum it winds up being fruitless and frustrating.

Nobody here is suggesting that we ignore emotions or feelings or let the world just kick our butts in an entirely passive way, but we have to recognize when active resistance and problem solving goes off the rails and fuels the struggles we’re addressing together when I blabber into this microphone every two weeks.

Wrapping Up

Sometimes it sounds like I am anti-journaling. I am not. I myself have been journaling very consistently for the last 2-3 years now and I have come to love it. But the way I journal now would not have been helpful or even possible back when I was in the thick of my anxiety and mental health issues. So I am a fan of journaling!  And even when traditional journaling can be counterproductive to anxiety disorder recovery, I’m a fan of adapting it like I’ve described here and using it if it works for you.  So consider using your journal to:

• Remind you of what recovery is about to help you stay out of the rabbit hole of resistance, fixing, and ruminating
• Teach you how to objectively describe your experiences and recognize repeating patterns that you want to break and change
• Keep a useful record of changes in ACTION that are helping you break those maladaptive, restrictive, rigid patterns.

That’s it!  I’ve been thinking about doing a little journaling workshop that can help people walk through these ideas. If you think that might be helpful then take a second and pop into my email list at learn.theanxioustruth.com and if I get around to creating that workshop I will let you guys know. Don’t worry. I do not send spam. I can barely find the time to do a monthly newsletter. Hawking crazy stuff to get money from you is not part of what I do.

Links Of Interest

Is Journaling “Good for Anxiety”?

Your Recovery “Bad Day Playbook”

• My Panic Attacks Explained Workshop
• My Agoraphobia Explained Workshop
• My Panic and Agoraphobia Recovery Guidebook
• Follow me on Instagram
• My YouTube Channel
• Disordered – With Josh Fletcher

 

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.