(012) Making sense of it all

Writing your way to a better place

Nov 05, 2023

There was a lot I wanted to share last week, but with emotions running high given all that is happening in the world, I decided it was better to take a moment to reflect rather than react. The post below is not what I originally intended to post, but hopefully a helpful lesson that can help guide you through these (and other) challenging times.

Some friends and I have recently been exploring how to best process everything that life throws at us. Between a creaking economy, wars where innocent people are dying, societal pressures, or whatever it may be, there is constantly something swirling around and consuming our minds.

And yet, so few of us take the time to learn the tools that can help us process the daily chaos that is life.

I always thought of myself as a relatively open minded, spiritual guy who was resilient and able to cope well with hard things. What I realised during the pandemic however, as I lay on the floor with a stress-induced herniated disc unable to move, was that I was not *coping* at all. I was *avoiding*.

Now, I didn’t arrive at this realisation on my own. I had help. My wife knew I wasn’t happy but wasn’t sure why, so encouraged me to speak to someone.

As I lay there, I got out my phone and messaged my therapist back in Australia, “Hey, do you have any time for a few sessions, please?”.

This moment was the beginning of a big unlock for me, and helped me start attacking my problems head on, rather than avoiding them. I had spoken to my therapist some years prior, and she helped me process issues I was facing at the time, but what I was experiencing now was completely different and I didn’t know how to handle it.

As I started therapy again, I learned that I am responsible for my own life and my own happiness. Not only that, but the most important thing I could do to protect my happiness was arm myself with the tools to process what I was feeling, rather than bottling things up and letting them consume me.

So, I took my therapist’s advice and started journaling.

At the start my journal had no structure. I would take myself for a walk to the nearest park, sit on a bench, and just free flow with pen to paper. I would write some things that seemed insignificant, and others that I’d been carrying around for years. It made little sense at the start, but the release felt incredible. All of a sudden I saw my thoughts in front of me and could start to make sense of them.

2 and a bit years later, I’m still journalling and after much trial and error, I’ve found a structure that helps keep me grounded. My hope in sharing this is that it might help someone else, especially during these particularly turbulent times.

How I journal

I use journaling in two ways. The first I do daily to set up my day by bringing focus to the things I’m grateful for and reminding myself of the things that are important to me, and the second I use weekly or ad-hoc to organise my thoughts.

01. Setting up my day

The first thing I write when I start journaling are three things I’m grateful for. This might not sound like much, but it immediately centres my thoughts and my day around happy things.

Here is what I wrote this morning:

I am grateful that my nephew is healthy.
I am grateful for weekly plans with good friends.
I am grateful for the opportunity to be working on something significant.

There is nothing too large or small to be grateful for — just write whatever comes to mind. The important thing to practise is identifying things in your life that are going well or that make you happy.

I then follow my gratitude with affirmations. I write about 10 things that I want to remind myself of every single day — the things that are important to me but are easy to lose sight of in the face of stress and overwhelm.

Here are some of my affirmations as an example:

I am capable of doing anything I put my mind towards and trust myself completely.
I am creative and am proud to share my work with the world.
I am focused and high output at work.
I am light and present with my friends and family.

I have found there are two types of affirmations that work for me. The first helps me counter my limiting beliefs (examples 1 & 2 above), and the second reminds me of how I want to show up in different situations (examples 3 & 4 above).

Don’t over think these. What works for you may be different and will likely change over time. In fact, changing your affirmations shows your awareness is shifting and your priorities are evolving as a result. This is a good thing.

02. Organising my thoughts

I find it easy to get lost in thought. At any one time it feels like I have a million ideas, tasks, or memories fighting for space in my mind, and it can easily become too much. There are three exercises that I use to help keep my mind organised: the brain dump; zooming in; and zooming out.

Brain Dump

The brain dump is as it sounds - a free flowing stream of consciousness with no plan. Whatever comes to mind gets transferred to paper. The point of this is literally just to clear my mind of everything, without any regard for trying to organise things. I use this when I’m feeling particularly overwhelmed.

As soon as my thoughts are on paper, I find I have distance from them and am able to analyse them more objectively. Don’t use this exercise to process any one thought, however. You can use the next two exercises for this.

Zooming out

I use this exercise to give me perspective on the things that are important to me. I tend to do this toward the end of each week to check in with my priorities. It’s very simple - I just write down the following questions on a blank piece of paper and the spend about 5-10 minutes answering them:

What are all of the things that I’m working on?
What is the most important thing to me right now?
Where does everything else sit relative to my most important thing?
What can I park to help me achieve my most important thing?
What is taking up more space in mind than it should?

By the end of this exercise you should have a pretty clear idea as to what you want to continue doing, and potentially more importantly, stop doing. Everything you say yes to is inadvertently saying no to something else. Sometimes we need to say no to things we want to do to be able to do the things we really want to do.

Zooming in

The last exercise in my toolkit is zooming in, and luckily, this is the easiest of all the exercises. I use this exercise to go deep on one single issue or priority, and write down everything that comes to mind. The output of this exercise is different depending on what I’m interrogating. Here are some examples:

Interrogating a decision: I might write a pros and cons list or decision tree.
Interrogating an issue: I might write down all the things I know about a situation, how I’m feeling now, and how I want to feel.
Interrogating something I’m working on: I might write down a list of tasks that need to get done and rank them in order of importance.

As I mentioned above, journalling is a hugely personal thing and what works for you may very well be different to what works for me. The only thing I know for sure, however, is it is something everyone would benefit from doing.

If there are any exercises that have helped you either through difficult times or on a daily basis, I’d love to hear them.

Until next time.

Matteo x

MOOD

This week’s playlist is some ambient background music I play when journalling at a cafe.