Subconscious Stress: The Power of Journaling

Rewinding 6 months, if you’d asked me then if I’d consider journaling I would have said “when am I going to find time for that?” I’d just started focusing on turning my art into a business and, at the time, I thought I had it all under control. I was getting to grips with what I wanted my brand to be, learning new tech, apps, social media, marketing, website building. All sorts of brand new skills all at once. Chilled as I am, that’s a lot of bandwidth & I certainly worked very hard, coming up against obstacles every day, overcoming them, learning something else…

It’s so easy to let the boundaries go out of the window.

Isn’t it funny how, during the busiest or most difficult times of our lives, we tend to completely deprioritise our own wellbeing, when we actually need to prioritise it the most? We tell ourselves we don’t have time to take that moment to actively check in with ourselves and it promptly plummets to the bottom of the list, if it even makes it there at all. When you’re working for yourself, it’s so easy to let the boundaries go out of the window and give up the breaks you need to just do that one more thing. I was working longer days than ever. Don’t get me wrong, I was loving it, but exhausting myself in the process.

Then the illness started. You’ve already read all about that in ‘Weathering the Storm’ but looking back, it’s very likely the speed of learning and the whole multitude of frustration from the previous 6 months of my corporate life were coming back to bite me. Who knows if the two things were connected, but it’d be remiss to think those things weren’t linked in some way.

Perhaps my body was trying to tell me something.

As the investigations into my health continued and kept coming back clear, I started being asked more and more whether I was stressed or anxious. I don’t remember feeling stressed or anxious (apart from that fateful Sunday evening), but it’s important to remember stress doesn’t always manifest itself in the ways you’d expect. Perhaps my body was trying to tell me something. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve experienced stress before as we all have, but it’s never manifested itself physically to that degree.

In the early days, I kept a journal of my symptoms every day - mainly to feed back to my GP. Nothing fancy, just notes in my phone. I didn’t delve into how I was feeling about it mentally at that point, but I’d subconsciously started to take action to process the emotions I was feeling. I noticed after a couple of weeks that I was starting to refer back to previous notes and started taking comfort in how some of the symptoms were improving.

My partner bought me Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’ for Christmas last year. I had a quick flick through at the time, but didn’t think too much about it at the time as I thought it was about creative blocks - something I’ve yet to experience thankfully. I picked it up a few months later (ironically just before I got ill) and started to think more broadly about blocks - that the theory Julia talked about could relate to any block, not just creative ones.

My HR brain kicked in. Throughout my corporate career, I was always a strong advocate for wellbeing. You’ll see this feeding through into my social media posts: the power of saying no; putting your own oxygen mask on first; being patient; sitting in ambiguity etc. My subconscious was clearly trying to tell me something.

I realised I was stuck in survival mode.

I started doing the ‘morning pages’ every morning - where you write three long-hand pages of whatever’s on your mind before you do anything related to work or your business - a written stream of consciousness if you will. It doesn’t have to make sense, just the act of putting pen to paper is incredibly cathartic in itself. I remember trying to rush through it as quickly as I could to begin with, so I could get on with whichever part of my business was to be the focus that day. Then one day I remembered all of the training I used to deliver in corporate world, about retraining our brains to reconnect with our rational mind to solve problems rather than the fight, flight, freeze response our reactive mind would have us use.

Then the epiphany struck. I realised I was stuck in survival mode. Instead of taking some time out to heal from those final 6 months at work or make any attempt to process it, I plunged straight into starting my own business - literally one of the hardest things you could ever do.

It’s like having a counselling session with yourself every morning.

The ‘morning pages’ have become part of my daily routine. I’ve also started practising mindfulness again after not doing so for years, immediately after the morning pages. It’s a such a great way of starting the day with a clearer mind. Flipping the script on those negative thoughts into positive manifestation and action is a game-changer - it’s like having a counselling session with yourself every morning.

“how do you stay so calm?”

The funny thing is, it’s not until I’ve forgotten to do one or the other that I notice how much of a difference it actually makes. For decades, people have routinely asked me “how do you stay so calm?’, “how are you so zen?”, even in the most stressful of situations. That’s a combination of my natural personality and keen interest in the psychology of emotions, but as the years went by and I kept hearing the same thing, I realise now I’d probably taken it for granted. I’d neglected my own wellbeing, which is something the vast majority of us are very guilty of.

I’m not an expert on journaling by any stretch, but I can definitely recommend it. Writing down your mindtalk and actively retraining your brain to filter and reframe it is the ultimate act of self-empowerment. You don’t even need to write words in a book, you could type them into an app or onto a laptop, whatever you like. It doesn’t even have to be words - you could do ‘visual journaling’ by drawing pictures to capture your thoughts. I know someone who sells fabulous plain journals - they’ve got art on the cover and everything 😉

Knowing you’ve got your own back.

On a serious note though, why not give it a try? If you’ve got this far into the post, chances are you were already considering it. There’s no right or wrong, it’s just finding the right way for you. Giving yourself some room to confront and process how you actually feel - eventually feeling comfortable in that space, knowing you’ve got your own back.

Isn’t it funny how my subconscious, intuition & a little bit of chance all conspired together to lead me back to prioritising my own wellbeing through journaling?

A very important lesson to myself & one I won’t forget in a hurry.