Hi, I'm Katie Lowe's and I'm Guillermo Diaz and we're the hosts of unpacking the toolbox the scandal rewatch podcast where we're talking about all the best moments of the show mesmerizing, but also we get to hang out with all of our old scandal friends like Bell Belly Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Carrie Washington, well suit up gladiators, grab your
big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for an even more behind the scenes stories with unpacking the toolbox.
Listen to unpacking the toolbox on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.
Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tory spelling.
She takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage.
I just filed for divorce.
Whoa, I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years while listen to miss spelling on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to criminelia.
I'm Maria Tramerky. I'm Holly Frye.
Together we invite you into the dark corridors of history and true crime.
For each season we explore a new theme from Poisoners to stalkers art thieves to Snake Oil Salesmen.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.
Listen to criminelia on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Guess what will what's that mango?
I've been trying to write a promo for our podcast part time genius but even though we've done over 250 episodes we don't really talk about murders or cults.
I mean we did just cover the illuminati of cheese so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money and then of course can you game a dog show.
So what you're saying is everyone should be listening.
Listen to part time genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody welcome back to the show welcome back to the podcast.
New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down dive into explore the psychology of our 20s.
If you have ever had a brush with the self help or the wellness community, the wellness space, which I am assuming that you have considering your listening to this podcast.
Someone somewhere at some stage has probably recommended that you journal or told you about how amazing journaling has been for them.
Whether you took them up on that or not, whether you decided to give it a go, whether you saw the appeal, but you've just never been able to get into it.
I think journaling is one of the holy grails of the wellness community, of the therapy community.
It's one of the biggest pieces of advice that people like to give to others when they are stressed, when they are anxious, when they are grieving, heartbroken, even in good times.
Have you tried journaling?
Why don't you journal about it?
And what is the deal with this?
Why is it so amazing to be able to write down your feelings?
Why does it always come up in these discussions?
Well today, I want to talk about it by popular request, by popular demand from so many listeners, what is the magic behind journaling and how can we really embrace it?
I am going to admit, I am one of those annoying people who has been journaling for years and who swear a spire.
I feel myself getting, I wouldn't say worse, but more detached from my life when I don't journal.
And I definitely feel the quality of my experiences and my emotions improve when I do journaling for me, makes me very present, it makes me more reflective of my life.
I feel closer to my memories, I love it for so many reasons, but I also get that it's kind of hard to get into if it's not something that you're a regular at or that you have done very often, or if it's not how you necessarily have tended to process your emotions.
Everyone that likes it really likes it, but it's kind of like reading or any hobby or exercising or eating healthy, we know we should be doing it, we know that we will feel better after doing it, but there are always so many mental barriers.
So many empty notebooks, we promise to start writing in at the start of the year, so many times that we plan to journal in the evening and then we just never get around to it.
Today, let's talk about the fundamentals and of course the psychology of journaling, why it helps our brains process trauma, why it helps our bodies heal faster, how it improves our intelligence, our friendships, our memories, but also more importantly, how do I actually make it an enjoyable practice and one that is actually useful rather than a chore.
How to actually want to journal and where to even start.
I'm going to give you the four fundamentals of journaling and how to actually enjoy journaling and some fun journal prompts and also really talk about some of the myths and misconceptions about this method and what it can actually do for our health and notice how I didn't just say mental health, our health on a holistic level from physical to physical.
To social to emotional, there is a lot to talk about.
So without further ado, let's get into the psychology and the fundamentals of journaling.
Journaling has a lot of different forms, you know, from the tried and tested notebook to a structured gratitude journal or a workbook, a blog, I don't know if people still blogging more maybe an Instagram account, even your notes app, anything that causes you to express your thoughts in a written form outside the confines of your mind to me, that counts as journaling.
I think we have a very narrow picture of what journaling looks like and it's a person at a desk writing page after page or, you know, a very Victorian image of a bronché character with an ink and a quill painting very beautiful poetry, not at all.
Journaling can be as large or small as romantic or practical as you want it to be and I think that's what makes it so incredible.
It is just so accessible and cost effective.
Anyone can do it in the way that works for them.
It's kind of like what running is for our physical health.
If you have shoes and you have your legs, you can run and if you have your brain and something to ride on, you can journal and you'll feel better.
Afterwards, hopefully, most likely, some people like to just like pour their heart out every three months when they need it.
There are people who, like I said, write a page or more every day.
There is, you know, list form.
There is naming what you're grateful for, what you, you know, what happened in your day, your highlights and lowlights.
There is the kind of journaling that is very structured and really keeps account of what you're going through day by day.
My point here is that there are no rules.
The only condition for journaling is that you're finding some way to record your personal thoughts, your feelings, insights, troubles or daily life.
And the final condition, maybe not even a condition, maybe not even a rule, but the beauty of journaling is that it doesn't even need to be good.
That's another thing that I think sometimes holds us back from writing or saying that we are someone who journals.
When we put something on a page or we put it down in writing, it feels so permanent and so sacred.
And I don't know if it's just me, but we can't help but picture someone reading it back, maybe in the future and getting to essentially appear directly into our lives.
So sometimes we fixate or making it worth it.
We fixate on it sounding good or using our needless handwriting or not coming off as to, I don't know, to anything, not coming off as too loud or too emotional or too sensitive in our own journal entries.
But the thing is that journaling is strictly for you.
There are no mistakes. There are no bad entries except for the ones that weren't written.
There are no wrong thoughts.
No one is going to give you a mark like it's an assignment.
As I said before, journaling is a self-care, self-love practice.
It's one of the only times that everything gets to be about you and you get to do it in the way that works best as long as you are doing it.
Journaling has an amazing reputation when it comes to, I guess, healing some of our biggest emotional afflictions, whether that is helping us with anxiety and depression or grief or even just managing everyday stresses.
I don't even think I would be able to count the number of therapists that have been, or have said to me, oh, have you tried journaling?
Have you tried writing about these feelings?
Have you tried articulating them in written form?
What exactly is so powerful about that, though?
Because anyone can pick up a piece of paper and a pen and write about how they're feeling, right?
What is the big secret here?
Well, let's talk about it.
Starting with the science and the evidence, of course, because we're not going to be making any claims without some proof.
Journaling has basically been proven to have everything from psychological to even physical benefits, which may surprise some of us.
It definitely surprised me and we'll get to why in a second, but starting with the more psychological side.
The moment when I think people really began to recognize the benefits of this, what's from a landmark study in 1988?
And in this study, students were randomly assigned to write about either very traumatic experiences or very superficial topics for four days in a row.
Six weeks later, those who had delved into traumatic experiences, who had really written pages and pages about how they felt, the meaning they applied, how it impacted their life, they actually reported feeling a lot better.
They reported more positive moods, lesser anxiety, fewer illnesses, than those who were writing about everyday experiences.
This is when journaling really began to be recommended more.
I'm sure when this study was first proposed, back in the 80s, people were like, you want to measure whether writing something down is good for people.
But after this study was published, I think it kind of said something that everyone was already thinking.
When you actually find an outlet for what is going on in your brain and the kind of emotional and cognitive affliction that your problems are causing you, the mental strain, I guess, when you find an outlet for that, you feel better.
And I think that was one of the first times that people had put that into words.
People had been obviously writing journal entries and poetry and novels and stories for as long as humans had existed.
But this study was when someone really said, hey, no, this actually has a really positive impact on mental health.
And people started recommending it.
They were basically like, oh, I better get on board.
This is such a cost-effective method of making people feel better.
Since then, it's become a huge topic of conversation.
And so many more studies have been produced around that.
One of my favorite ones is a study that shows that people who journal regularly twice a week recover from heartbreak faster than those who don't.
Sometimes even twice as fast.
That was one of the estimates given by the researchers.
I don't know if you can really measure how fast someone gets over heartbreak.
But there you go. There was another study published only a couple years ago that said, journaling for 15 minutes a day can increase our IQ, our literal intelligence, and also our EQ, which is our emotional intelligence.
That makes you a better friend.
That makes you a better partner, a better coworker, more in touch with your own emotions, of course, but also more in tune and therefore empathetic to others.
This stuff, I think we all know, writing about your feelings makes you understand them better, which means you understand yourself better, but also others, people who are also members of the human race.
That's fairly simple. But when we start looking at the physical health benefits, that's when it really starts to get so interesting and almost a little bit insane for me.
And the case for journaling just becomes even greater.
So let me tell you about a pretty amazing New Zealand study from 2013, which basically showed, maybe not showed, basically suggested that writing helped our body heal itself faster from physical injury.
So it's not just that it helps people recover from trauma or become more intelligent or feel less stressed.
It has physical healing properties.
So in this study, 49 healthy adults aged 64 and 97, they wrote about either a really upsetting event or just their daily activities for 20 minutes.
After two weeks at past to make sure that any initial negative feelings stirred up by recalling those upsetting events had passed, all the subjects had a biopsy on their arm, basically meaning that a piece of tissue was removed from their arm.
They had a small wound. That wound was then photographed for the next 21 days while the group continued to keep journaling about either upsetting events or everyday events.
On the 11th day, 76% of the group that did expressive writing had fully healed with 42% of the control group having healed.
So 42 versus 76%. How is that not talked about more than is such an astonishing study?
Obviously, small sample size, it would definitely need to be replicated.
But if you think that study was just a fluke, after it was released, even before people were really looking into this.
And there was another study that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
So not a small journal and it looked at patients with asthma and arthritis.
Half of who were again asked to write for 20 minutes each day about something that was bothering them, a stressor, a past trauma, and the other half who were asked to just write about their daily life.
Four months later, the patients in the stressful writing group showed increased improvement on objective clinical evaluations about their symptoms of asthma, arthritis, and emotional distress.
They were less stressed.
They had fewer negative symptoms of their asthma.
And the situation that condition has had deteriorated less.
So the researchers basically concluded writing about something that was stressing them out, really engaging their emotions through this practice.
Not only helped these patients get better in a sense, but it also kept them from getting worse.
Why is this the case? How is it possible that writing could heal a wound or minimize a chronic illness?
And I want to obviously just state here that we're not trying to, I'm not trying to claim that journaling is going to replace modern medicine and magically everyone will get better.
But what it really comes down to in all of these instances is stress.
Stress kills ourselves, stress reduces our immune system functioning, stress shortens our life expectancy.
It puts our body under strain.
All of these things obviously have a very big physical impact and can contribute to pre-existing illness or make us more susceptible to new illness.
But controlling our stress, that helps control the physical burden placed on our body.
And that is why journaling is shown to have these really wonderful, if not unbelievable, healing properties for physical, not just mental ailments.
Because it basically gets our brain to process heavy emotions and experiences that would otherwise manifest in physical tension and physical turmoil.
I think it's just one of the many ways that our mind and our body interact and impact each other.
And I think we don't explore that enough, especially in Western medicine.
We're so focused on treating symptoms rather than holistically really thinking about the body and thinking about the mind and how our psychology and our emotional system and our emotional state contributes to how we're basically functioning.
The reason that I think journaling is so effective at managing stress or processing an emotion, any emotion, is that it's an essentially, you know, an organizational system.
It's an organizational procedure.
It's a way of cleaning things up or making sense of things that we can't work out by just thinking about them over and over again.
That's the curse of overthinking, something that I'm sure we all do from time to time.
It leads us to believe that we are problem solving when actually we are just making the issue more convoluted and getting further into the labyrinth and writing about it does something about the thoughts.
And it kind of keeps track of where we've been, but also at a very basic level.
It's a circuit breaker.
Generally gets us out of our mind.
It kind of removes us from the problem and allows us to write about it, not in the third person, but almost in a more detached way.
We have some form of emotional distance that we don't get when we try and process all of our feelings about a situation, all of our heavy emotions in our brain alone.
The more we practice journaling, obviously in a moment it can just help us really break away from, you know, going over and over unnecessary details, not being able to find an exit to our thoughts, but the more we practice it, the more it becomes a tool to reprogram our adaptive thoughts, to reflect and remember our lives more realistically to actually be able to
look back at journal entries and be like, oh no, maybe my thoughts about that situation were wrong.
This is how I remember it at the time.
And it helps us organize our life and our thoughts and provide emotional catharsis.
That was one of my favorite words, catharsis, when we really need it.
And I'm like, this thing is bothering me, this breakup, this heartache, this assignment, this moment when I embarrass myself, let me really spend time trying to think about this in a way that my brain normally wouldn't think about it by writing about it.
And I'm not looking for a solution, I'm not journaling to find an answer, I'm journaling just to process what I've been through.
And that is something that we don't always do, because we have to stuck in our feelings to really detach from them and distance ourselves from them for a moment and just think about the situation in the grand scheme of things.
So basically what I'm trying to say in the most convoluted way possible, journaling is valuable and helps us deal with stress and distress, because it forces you to put complicated emotions about your future, about your family, your friends, your trauma, your day, whatever it may be, it forces you to put those complicated emotions into some form of coherent sentence
or paragraph. And through that act, you get more clarity and you feel that you're getting somewhere.
Everything else that comes along with that is basically a benefit of not being consumed with over analyzing and overthinking a problem.
We have more space to begin to think about others, to really listen to them, to be curious.
Our memory improves because we're not so caught up in ruminating, we sleep better, we enjoy life more.
And that is what really helps us activate a better version of ourselves through journaling.
I think it's not just that we are writing about something and somehow that makes everything feel a little bit less heavy, yes that's a component of it, but it's that we're using a new part of our brain, not just to problem-solve, but to really go deeper to apply meaning, to think about things in a different light.
And here's the thing, it may be hard to start, it's really hard to find the time to feel motivated, but personally I have never walked away from writing even just like a page or two, less than 500 words and not felt better, not felt like something has been lifted.
And I really, I don't think I'm the only one who has had that experience.
Okay, I feel like I've gone on and on here about the benefits, hopefully you're convinced, but being convinced is one thing actually doing the thing is a lot harder, any of us could tell you that.
So many of us want to be the person who journals, we want to have this catalog of our life and our feelings, but we feel like we don't have the time, we feel like we don't know where to start, we don't know what to write about, you know, taking 10 minutes to write about our feelings, doesn't always feel as enjoyable immediately in the moment as the instant gratification and pleasure
that we get from our phones or from watching TV, that's how the fast dopamine of our entertainment cycle really works.
Another barrier is perfectionism, you know, procrastination, boredom, it's kind of tiring sometimes to write all the time, but I'm going to stop us right there.
And kind of give you a hard truth.
Life is as full of excuses and there is an excuse for everything.
You can go your whole life just taking the easiest route.
But the thing about journaling is that it is such a small investment.
It's basically free. It can take as little as five minutes and a lot of those studies we just spoke of people only journaled for 10 to 20 minutes.
That's shorter than most TV episodes.
And in comparison, the benefits are astounding.
From a strictly, you know, like proof cons perspective, there is no reason not to journal.
So the ratio of time and effort to break throughs and mental clarity is like one to two million.
So how do we build this habit even when it feels difficult?
Well, I've got you guys.
It's a message. I get all the time from you.
I always get people asking me about how to actually get into journaling.
And I've thought about it a lot.
So we're going to discuss the four secret ingredients or foundations to becoming a good journaler.
How to make it feel not like a chore.
How to actually be excited.
And more importantly, how to actually integrate it into your identity.
And it's part of who you are going to talk about all of that and more after this short break.
Back in 1969, this was the hardest song around.
So hot that some guys from Michigan tried to steal it.
The time of the season for love.
My name is Daniel Ralston.
For 10 years, I've been obsessed with one of the most bizarre and audacious cons in rock and roll history.
The group would have a hit record and quickly they would hire a bunch of guys to go out and be the group.
People were being cheated on several levels.
After years of searching, we bring you the true story of the fake zombies.
I was like blowing away.
These guys are not going to get away with it.
Listen to the true story of the fake zombies on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Want to know how to leverage culture to build a successful business?
The butternomics is the podcast for you.
I'm your host, Brandon Butler, founder and CEO of Butter ATL.
Over my career, I've built and helped run multiple seven figure businesses that leverage culture and built successful brands.
Now I want to share what I've learned with you.
And on butternomics, we go deep with today's most influential entrepreneurs, innovators and business leaders to peel back the layers on how they use culture as a driving force in their business.
On every episode, we get the inside scoop on how these leaders tap into culture to build something amazing.
From exclusive interviews to business breakdowns, we'll explore the journey of turning passion for culture into business.
Whether you're just getting started or an established business owner, butternomics will give you what you need to take your games to the next level.
This is butternomics. Listen to the butternomics on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all new podcast There and Gone.
It's a real life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck and vanished.
Nobody hears anything, nobody sees anything.
Did they run away? Was it an accident?
Or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear.
The FBI called it Murder for Hire.
