On the 4th episode of the 6th season of “The Crown”, the spirit of Dodi Fayed appears to his father, after his death in the car accident with Princess Diana, and tells him these words. I couldn’t, and still cannot, agree more. Wounds Will Only Heal with The Truth.
Here are some ways to explore, find and express your truth
(The following is a continuation of the previous post, summarizing two episodes from the Huberman Lab Podcast.)
1. Emotional Granularity/Differentiation – Move from general and broad words like good, happy, sad, anxious, to more specific words to describe your current feeling, and to name your emotions. Emotions and Feelings are messages from our nervous system about the information it processed from the current situation and its prediction of what it assumes is going to happen in the future.
Ask yourself 3 - 6 times a day, what am I feeling right now? And answer with as much specificity as possible and available to you. It improves emotional processing, enhances emotional experiences, and provides better sensitivity for better understanding ourselves and others, therefore improves communications and relationships. Practicing Emotional Granularity correlates also with improvements in physiological metrics, that relate to overall improvements in Mood and Mental Health. (If you are interested in enriching your emotional vocabulary, I highly recommend this excellent book by Brené Brown).
2. Exploring the Unconscious Mind – Our unconscious mind creates defenses, that can be both useful and not for us. Understand and acknowledge that your Unconscious Mind is controlling much of what you feel, think, and do. However, by doing structured exploration of yourself, you can get a better understanding of how that unconscious processing is influencing what you think, feel, believe in, and do. Once you accept the important role of the unconscious mind – to keep you alive and as best as it can – and you make the decision to better understand how your conscious and unconscious mind are in this constant dialogue, and how you can have that dialogue better serve you, here are some actionable tools that you can do, that will allow you to better understand yourself and how you relate to others. (Check out this PDF for more information about The Structure of Self by Dr. Paul Conti).
2.1. Self-Concept Developing Exercise – Historical Sense of Yourself: Self-concept has a lot to do with our self-confidence, our feelings of ability to overcome challenges, our ability to serve the world that we’re in, and our ability to change ourselves over time. Investing in getting a clear picture of yourself, develops more Agency to pursue your aspirations and to reach your goals. A powerful tool, for both exploring and building up your concept of self is to build your life narrative consciously and deliberately. Dr. Huberman’s suggestion is to divide your life history into some regular increments, for example ages 0 to 4, 5 to 9, 10 to 14, etc. Increments of 3 to 5 years. You can create folders of documents, if you would want to do it electronically, or stacks of papers, if you want to write it down with stationery. Every folder = life phase. Every folder will consist of a one Word document, in which you write down bullet points with titles, a few sentences, describing some of the key milestone events, that you remember from phases of your life. For example: place of living, names of significant friends, people, and events. All you remember that was, and still is, important and meaningful to you, things that you would never want to forget, whether positive or negative, neutral, inspiring. It’s not about creating a coherent life story; it’s about creating a series of small collections of key life events. You can also add your reflection about those phases / events. Continue adding present events after reaching your current age 😊 The goal is to build a structured narrative representation of events that were meaningful in your life. It’s about understanding your past, understanding yourself at present and it threads into your goals and aspirations for your future. Something you can look at after writing and see if you are on the right path for you, while understanding what led you to this point. Helps you pinpoint the work you need to do for you to be on the right path for you. Doing this anchors you in your perception of passage of time, enabling you to realize how much time you have devoted to different endeavors, whether you are stuck in patterns that are not serving you well / anymore, as well as track behaviors, understand motivations, both conscious and unconscious.
2.2. Unconscious Mind and Dream Analysis - If you are interested in tapping into and understanding what your Unconscious Mind consists of = what your dreams are telling you, keep a journal next to where you sleep. Dreams, particularly the dreams we have at the later part of our night, that are associated with Rapid Eye Movement Sleep, and tend to be very emotionally latent dreams, reflect the Unconscious Mind. (When we are awake, our Conscious Mind has more control of our internal dialogue and our thoughts, emotions, and feelings). If you wake up and remember the dream, write it down – detailed or bullet points - whatever you remember and feels right to you. If you wake up and feel like you had a dream and you don’t remember the dream, close your eyes, and keep your body completely still for a few minutes – to create access to the dream. In case only feelings arise, you can concentrate on them, that can also help you recall the dream / its theme / its meaning. Whatever comes up - write it down. Sometimes the content of dreams can rise to your consciousness during the day as well. The goal is not to interpret your dreams, but to start recording some of the key takeaways, maybe even the entire narrative of the dreams that you had just before awaking, as a key to try and understand some of the themes that are occurring and recurring in the dialogue that exists within your Unconscious Mind.
If you usually do not remember dreams, then right upon waking up, stay with your eyes closed, remain perfectly still for a few minutes, and explore the contents of your thinking, and what you think of your thoughts. Write it down. This Introspective Work is very difficult to do when you are fully awake.
3. Journaling – a powerful tool for emotional processing. There are 2 main styles:
3.1. Free associative, also known as Data Dump & Morning Notes – Write down whatever comes to your mind in the morning. It helps to structure your thinking.
3.2. Structured Journaling - Set an intention, a specific topic that you're going to restrict your writing to – specific goals and aspirations that you would like to accomplish or generate.
Both styles are “just for you” notes! Very important to feel safe to write whatever comes to mind. This is an exploration of yourself, that is designed to help you enhance your concept and your understanding of self. Translates into better confidence, better understanding of your goals and aspirations, as well as your unhealthy patterns and defenses, to be conscious of what you can let go of, what to change, what new patterns to acquire.
The process of journaling is about accessing The Generative Drive and building it up. “The Generative Drive is our desire to create, build, and contribute to the world in meaningful ways, and appreciate the process to get there” – as Dr. Paul Conti defined so accurately. It is the core feature of our Mental Health. When we can really think about what we would like to create for ourselves and our lives, both present and future, in a dedicated way, while keeping in mind our past events, because we always carry that life narrative forward, then we are in a far better place to actualize those goals and aspirations.
You don’t have to journal and/or analyze your dreams every day. Just remember that they are oh so valuable for better understanding the self-concept and they really read forward into real everyday actions that can positively enrich your Mood and Mental Health. Do it as often as it feels right and useful to you and your goals. (If you wish to dive deeply and explore detailed and reach information about the human’s different drives and how to assess and improve mental health and relationships, there is a four-episode series on the Huberman Lab Podcast with Dr. Paul Conti, you can listen to. or I might blog more posts from this series in the future😊).
3.3. Journaling for Trauma/Difficult Events Processing - the next tool is not a replacement for therapy with a professional in cases of Trauma and PTSD. It’s in addition to. It is supported by over 200 peer reviewed studies in quality journals, and found to have helped in improving lowering Anxiety, improving Sleep, improving Immunity to things like Cold & Flus, etc., and reducing symptoms of Autoimmune Disorders, such as Arthritis, Lupus, and provided some relief for Fibromyalgia. It was shown to reduce Depression and PTSD symptoms and IBS – irritable bowel syndrome - considerably. Has also shown to improve everyday Metrics, including Memory, Decision making, and on and on…! Ongoing Reliefs, not only in the short term. This way of journaling was initially researched by Dr. James Pennebaker.
Take 15-30 min. to handwrite or type about the most difficult, or stressful, maybe even traumatic event, that you can recall from your life.
Do it in a quiet and private space. It is important not to be disturbed, as well as to write the entire time.
Write for yourself only – no one is going to see, therefore no meaning to handwriting, grammar, etc.
You can also write about something you feel is affecting your life negatively, whether internally or externally.
Write your Deepest Emotions and Thoughts about the event/issue, how this event is related to the person you have become, who you’ve been in the past, who you would like to become.
Write about facts (your truth! Not exaggerating, nor belittling) of that event/issue, emotions that you felt during the event, and emotions that you feel about it in the present and while writing about it.
Include everything that you associate with the event from the past, present and future – people, things that are happening in the present, future plans – even if you don’t really understand the connection, and those people, events, thoughts, emotions, just came up your mind while writing.
Very important to not monitor your words and write whatever comes up. It’s for you only, you can tear it and throw it away afterwards if you wish.
Be aware that this exercise taps into negative events, therefore unpleasant emotions will rise, so you will need some time after writing to rebalance.
Repeat four times – in the time frame of 4 weeks. Which means you can do it 4 days in a row, up to once a week (even if on different days of the week 😊).
Which of the above you will happily adopt? Which got you curious to explore, and which made you think “NO WAY!”, but maybe you will try anyway?
Leave your comments, I’ll be happy to read what works for you more or less, and answer any questions you might have.
Love and Truth to us all 💜✨💖
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