Do you feel like your emotions are complicated and confusing? If you struggle to understand why you feel or react the ways you do, you might benefit from using a journal. Journaling can help you appropriately identify and express your feelings to increase self-understanding.
Once you learn to identify and deal with your feelings in acceptable ways, you have truly mastered self-understanding. By simply jotting down what's going on with you and how you feel about it, you can get a handle on your emotions.
Writing your feelings in a journal helps increase self-understanding in four ways:
1. Journaling compels you to think about and process a particular situation or occurrence. When you write about an event, you automatically process the event through words and description. Recording the situation in writing can lead you to notice details you hadn't noticed when the event took place, thus increasing your insight about the situation.
* While journaling, put aside other thoughts and just focus on the situation.
2. Journaling allows you time to identify feelings about the situation. Chances are you may not have time to analyze every event as it occurs throughout the day. However, if you pledge to journal, you know that you'll later take the opportunity to reflect on important occurrences and consider how you felt about them.
* Labeling your feelings leads to a better understanding of how you respond in certain situations.
* Use "feeling" words when describing your emotions about a situation or event. Examples of feeling words are, "pumped," "annoyed," "ecstatic," and "angry."
* A helpful sentence structure to use in your journal is, "I felt __________ when ________ happened."
3. Journaling helps you see why you felt the way you did. Journaling provides an opportunity to fully explore your emotions about an event or situation and come to a conclusion about your feelings. Writing about your feelings can even assist you in changing negative feelings in the future, once you figure out why you felt the way you did.
* Knowing why you responded in a certain manner increases self-understanding and also allows opportunities for change.
* When completing a journal entry, consider all the reasons why you may have felt or responded in the way you did.
* Theorize and decide which theory best fits to explain your feelings and behavior.
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