Have you ever felt like you’re just draggin’ ass through life and everything just feels SO hard? When I went through my burnout phase it felt like everything I wanted was just so out of reach. It took a while for me to overcome this, partially because I didn’t know how to use my journal to actually help my situation. But eventually, I mustered up the energy to start building systems to get me out of my pity party, which included making goals using the method I talked about in this video. But I noticed that in order for me to efficiently work on my goals, I had to come clean with myself on a lot of things. For example, this meant journaling about things that pissed me off and being honest about why they upset me so much. Was it because it hurt my pride? Made me feel stupid? Deepened my insecurity about my financial intelligence? Or did this person upset me because they reminded me of my worst characteristics??? The more I confronted uncomfortable truths about my feelings (and kinda cringe behavior) by writing about them, the more I realized how distracting and draining it was to waste my emotions on stuff like this. I mean, it’s totally normal to experience negative emotions but I wish I knew the importance of confronting the ones that drag you down. Often times it’s easier to avoid negative emotions by feigning a positive outlook on everything, but I’ve learned that’s just another version of bottling things up. *insert hard detour* Saturn is my favorite plant for a few reasons:
That 3rd reason relates to my point: Be Floaty. When we collect a bunch of negative emotions, we become really dense and just reek these things inside us. You know when you can just tell when someone’s in a bad mood? Or when people are described based on their consistently sh*tty attitude? That’s what I mean by dense. Here’s some examples of emotions that make us dense, aka less floaty:
It’s a lot harder to progress in life when we’re dragging around anvils of negative emotions. Before I learned how to journal to let this stuff go, I would have embarrassing, angry outbursts followed by a long period of sulking. Imagine me trying to make a YouTube video after raging or crying for like 30 min straight - actually don’t. I’ll just tell you it’s extremely difficult to do anything afterwards and completely ruins the fun in everything. These days I’ve gotten much better at managing my emotions and I definitely feel more floaty. It’s so much easier to act on what feels good or works towards my goals, and so many good things have been happening since. So here’s the prompt that helped me: Write down an experience that you had really strong negative emotions about. Keep it pretty objective and stick to the facts - Like what happened and how you behaved. I’ll admit, this next part was kinda corny for me, but it totally helped me move on. Write a short and sweet forgiveness letter to yourself. It can start like, “I know you’re just trying to do your best….” and end with “I forgive you”. After that, follow up with what you learned from the whole experience. Phew! This was kind of a heavy one but a necessary one. It’s been a while since I’ve done this exercise so I’m happy to be sharing this because this is kinda like one of those routine maintenance type of prompts. As always, feel free to reply to this email. TTYL! Simie |
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