39 | Why Journaling Your Feelings is the Key to Managing Your Emotions

In this episode, I'm diving deep into why journaling is such a powerful tool for managing emotions, especially for highly sensitive and introverted women. 

As someone who processes feelings intensely, I share how journaling provides a judgment-free space to work through overwhelming emotions and gain clarity. Through my own recent experience with processing hurt from a friend's comment, I demonstrate how journaling can help you identify patterns, develop emotional resilience, and embrace your sensitivity as a strength. 

Whether you're dealing with difficult emotions or seeking to understand yourself better, I explain why journaling is the most effective tool I've found for emotional management.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Happy New Year everyone. I'm so glad to be back with you on the podcast, and I am extra excited because this week, monday to Friday I am doing a five-part series on journaling your feelings and why it is important for building emotional resilience. So every day this week Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday I'll be dropping a new episode with some tips and some encouragement for you, as you began to look forward to developing emotional wellness this year, and so today, I cannot wait to get started, because I'm going to talk all about why, like why, does journaling work? Why is it something that you should consider as part of your toolbox when it comes to managing and processing your emotions, especially as a highly sensitive and introverted woman? If you're tired of feeling like you're drowning in your emotions and want to stop walking around feeling numb and overwhelmed, you're in the right place. What's up? I'm Latoya, an emotional resilience coach and fellow highly sensitive introvert who learned how to manage all the feels with journaling, and I love helping women like you identify and work through your emotions. Embrace your God-given sensitivity so you can stop running away from your feelings in a way that feels authentic to you. Ready to dig in? Grab your weighted blanket, get comfy and let's get it.

Speaker 1: 1:18

If you're here, it's probably because you are someone who feels things very deeply. You have that sensitivity to the environment and to the world around you and you understand how quick your feelings can pile up and become overwhelming. Well, journaling is a tool that can really help you stop breathe process and begin to find some peace and some clarity when things feel too big to handle. Right, when your emotions feel too much and they're overwhelming. And today, on the podcast for day one of this Feel your Feelings series, I'm going to start talking about why journaling is a powerful tool, especially for us highly sensitive, intubated women. Right, and how it can help you stop feeling overwhelmed. It's going to help you reduce your stress and embrace your God-given sensitivity. So the first thing that we want to take a look at really quickly is why journaling is something that you want to do as a highly sensitive person, as an introvert. So here's what we know. We know that one of the gifts of this heightened sensitivity that we have as an HSP and also as introverts means that we process emotions deeply, so we feel things more intensely than others. You are going to be the person that walks into the room and can kind of get the temperature right away. Right, you're going to know how you feel and you're probably going to know how everybody else in the room is feeling as well. You also have this great strength and this ability to be really reflective, to think deeply, right, to be retrospective, right.

Speaker 1: 2:58

You can think about things really deeply, and what that leads to often is overthinking, which is not always helpful, because as you begin to think and think, and think and think and think, you're going to find yourself emotionally exhausted, right, or just feeling like you know what, this is too much, I cannot deal. And then we sometimes have this tendency to go numb. It's like you know what? I can't handle everything that I'm feeling right now. It's too much, so I'm just going to not feel anything. And so journaling is a great way to avoid falling into either one of those traps, and here's why Journaling is your safe space. Your safe place to process and feel. All the things right On the pages of your journal is where you can share what you're actually feeling, what you're actually thinking, without judgment.

Speaker 1: 3:53

Your journal is a judgment-free zone, so if you are feeling really, really pissed off because of something nasty that somebody said to you, your journal is the place where you can let them have it. Okay, you can pour out every single insult, every single mean thing, every single mean thought that you are having about that person, without running the risk of damaging relationships, of saying something that you're later going to have to go back and apologize for. Right, that is your space to process all the things, and the key here is without judgment. So when you are journaling, when you are writing down your emotions, when you're trying to figure out what in the world is going on, it's so important not to judge yourself, because what happens is we become our own worst critic. Right? We get to turn that editor off. We've got to turn that critic off. It's going to be like oh, you can't say that because it's terrible. What kind of a person actually thinks like that? Listen, I know because I've been there.

Speaker 1: 4:49

I recently had a situation, right before the holidays, where somebody that I considered a good friend said something really hurtful to me and I was angry for a really long time and I had to go to my journal to process it. I had to go to my journal and just write down every nasty thought that I was having about her, every nasty word that I wanted to say to her to get it all out of my system so I could say okay, latoya, step back Now objectively, look at that situation. Right. And I was able to separate certain things out like things I needed to receive and take to heart and make some changes about, and things that I can kind led me to a place of peace where I could actually address what was bothering me in a healthy way, without being rude and being nasty.

Speaker 1: 5:37

So the other thing that you're going to get when you're journaling is that you will gain clarity. And here's why, when you're walking around trying to hold on to all of the feelings either in your heart or in your mind or in your head, you actually can't see anything. I call it like walking around in a fog, right? This is exactly how I felt after that incident. I was so emotional with all the things, like all the negative things, that I couldn't see straight. I couldn't think straight and I couldn't actually get a clear picture about what I was feeling, why I was feeling it, so that I could process it and resolve it, to figure out what kind of steps I needed to take. And so when you get all of these thoughts and emotions out on paper instead of just letting them roommate in your head. You actually are going to gain clarity. You'll be able to be like, oh, actually that was the correct emotion to have, right, or actually you know what? I kind of overreacted. I need to kind of step it back a little bit. Having it out of your head on the page is going to allow you to have that distance from it to actually make some sense of it. Okay, now the other thing that's really key here is that journaling helps you work through that overthinking that we tend to do, right Again, remember my example.

Speaker 1: 6:52

I was feeling all the things and I was thinking and thinking and thinking of all kinds of things and I was not getting to the bottom of what was actually bothering me. It took me probably a solid week to actually get to the bottom of what I was so upset about, right, to figure out that I wasn't actually angry, that I was hurt and felt betrayed, right, because of something that my friend said. But it took me a week to get there. It took me a week of everyday journaling, of talking with a friend, of talking with you know, a coach that could help me kind of sort things out of actually doing that work, to begin to share those thoughts, so I could stop thinking them, I could stop focusing on it and eventually I got to the bottom of what was actually bothering me. And when I got there, I was able to say okay, now I'm in a place where I can figure out what my next steps are. What are my options? What do I need to do? How am I going to move forward? And I did. And I did it with no guilt, with no shame. Right, with a clear heart and with peace of mind, and I want the same thing for you.

Speaker 1: 8:07

So, before we wrap up today, I want to talk about some of the long-term benefits of journaling. Right, so we've looked at, like, the challenges that we're dealing with as HSPs and introverts. I've talked a little bit about how journaling helps, but I want to talk to you about the long term benefits, because here, our ultimate goal is not to simply resolve the emotion that we're currently feeling. Right, the goal is not, in this moment, this one instance, this one kind of situation. I've worked my way through that. No, that's not good enough.

Speaker 1: 8:35

What we want to do with journaling is to use it as a tool to develop emotional resilience, right, the ability to bounce back when life kind of smacks us in the face, right? It's what I had to do. It took me a week, but I had to go through all of those steps and all of those processes so that I could work on that emotional resilience. I was able to come back and be myself and live my life and interact with people without being derailed because of that one conversation. And that's what I want for you. I want you to be able to strengthen that muscle of emotional wellness, of emotional resilience, by getting in the habit of journaling, often, your feelings, your thoughts, your emotions, so that you can process things and you have everything that you need to bounce back, to make those choices, to figure out how to take care of yourself in those situations and how to figure out what your next steps are. Okay, the second long-term benefit here is that you're going to begin to recognize patterns and triggers so that you can change your response. I'm going to use myself as an example here In the past when I have had conversations and interaction with people, especially somebody that I considered a friend, because if I didn't consider you a friend, I kind of just blew you off.

Speaker 1: 9:51

But if a friend or somebody close to me said something hurtful, I kind of would get mad, shut down, isolate right and like just kind of stew, and I wouldn't actually take the steps I needed to resolve that. Do you know how I realized this? It's because I was journaling about what I was feeling, what I was thinking, and I was able to make connections. Oh, my goodness, this reminds me of that one time and this other time and this other time and all of those previous times, I did this, this, this and this, and I didn't really like that outcome, and so I was able to say, okay, this is a trigger, right, your trigger is feeling betrayed by somebody close to you, and when you do that, your behaviors and your actions and your choices are this, this and this, and we don't want that. We want to do something different, and so that allowed me to take a moment to realize all of that and then find a better way to respond to what was going on.

Speaker 1: 10:54

Instead of just reacting right, instead of just either lashing out or cutting people off, I was actually able to sit, pause, right, process and respond, and you know what? I did it a lot faster and, like I said, it took me a week, but in the past like it could have taken me months or years to actually get over something hurtful that somebody said to me. So when you are journaling, you're going to be able to see those patterns and triggers in yourself, which is a good thing, because once you recognize a pattern and you know what the trigger is, you can make a plan for it. So now in the future, when that happens again, right, I have a new plan. Okay, I'm going to do what I did the last time, because that actually worked out well for me and for the other person. Right.

Speaker 1: 11:33

And the final way that journaling is going to help you long-term is that you are going to be able to embrace your sensitivity as a strength instead of a weakness. So I'm going to say this a lot, but you were made sensitive and extra sensitive on purpose. It's not a mistake, it's not a flaw, it's not something that you have to overcome, something that you got to like turn off or ignore. No, you were intentionally given this extra sensitivity that people around you may or may not have. Right, it's part of who you are and it's a gift.

Speaker 1: 12:09

And here's what happens as you are journaling, as you are building those muscles of identifying your emotions right, recognizing how it feels in your body, recognizing what those triggers are, learning what those patterns are, right, You're gonna be like, okay, when I feel angry, this is what it looks like and here's what I can do about it. Like, when you have all that under your belt and you can go back and say, oh, my goodness, look at how far I've come, you're going to be able to recognize that your sensitivity is a gift. It is a strength, right, because I am sensitive. Look at what I've been able to learn about myself. Look at how much I've been able to grow right. Look at all the changes and positive things that are going on for me, right?

Speaker 1: 12:51

So journaling is not just about writing, it's not about, dear diary, I had this for breakfast, this for lunch, and so and so was cute and so and so said this mean thing to me. Like that's not what it's about, not here. That's how we're talking about. It's about giving yourself permission to feel what you're feeling, to just sit with your emotions, sit with your thoughts. Think the thoughts, feel the feelings, process them right, learn from them and move forward. And it is the best tool that I know of for managing your emotions as a highly sensitive person or an introvert. It's just, hands down, the best.

Speaker 1: 13:23

I haven't found anything that works as well. I haven't found anything that is easy to implement or that is easy to be consistent with, other than journaling, and it's so easy to get started right. Something to write with something to write on and you're good to go. Now that's it for today, but tomorrow I want you to come back because I'm going to share a quick, practical journaling technique with you that you can try right away and get started on using journaling to help you manage your emotions, and it's going to be so easy that you can do it even if you've never journaled before. Be sure to tune in tomorrow morning for day two of our Feel your Feeling series. Did you learn something new or have an aha moment from today's episode? I would love to hear from you. The best way to do that is to leave a five-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts. This also helps other women like us find the show. Thank you so much for joining me today.