Article first published on my personal blog at HIVE. (Spanish Original)
Hello friends, I hope you're having a happy and productive day. I'm back to write a bit more about one of the topics I'm passionate about and haven't written about in a while: personal growth and productivity.
Our world moves faster every day, and everything is governed by immediacy and responses to hundreds of stimuli coming from all sides. Sometimes, in that fast-paced vortex, we forget the importance of focusing on ourselves and the often-overlooked emotions. Sitting down to reflect on what we feel sometimes seems like a luxury we can't afford.
Some time ago, I discovered the benefits of keeping an emotion journal, and I’d like to share these with you. By keeping an emotion journal, I found a useful tool to get to know myself better and understand how I react to different stimuli throughout the day. Moreover, it’s a fun activity that doesn't require much time; five minutes will be more than enough.
Gradually, you'll discover your patterns, the origins of negative emotions, and gain much self-awareness and mental clarity. I can even assure you that it will be a great tool for managing anxiety and stress, releasing all accumulated emotions and facing situations more effectively.
Keeping an emotion journal will also give us extensive communication skills and improve how we convey our feelings to others. We will foster great creativity over time, expressing our feelings on paper and opening ourselves up to a new form of artistic expression where innovative ideas develop.
How to Keep an Emotion Journal
There are several options for having our Emotion Journal handy, both digital and physical. Throughout this article, I'll try to cover both. The first thing you'll need is a notebook and a pen if you choose the traditional method. If you prefer to use a digital method, I'll leave some recommendations later on.
Note: If you decide to use the traditional method, I recommend decorating your Emotion Journal as you like. You can add stickers, nice notes, quotes, drawings... Anything that makes it feel more personal.
- Set a time just for your emotions: You can start with a short amount of time; 5 minutes is a very good start. The important thing is not so much the place but the peace to reflect. Times I recommend are in the morning or at night to have a good overview of the day.
- Describe what you feel: Don't limit yourself to simple emotions like happy, sad, excited. Take your time to describe each emotion in a few words and, if you recognize the triggers, add them. Also, naming the activities or the type of company during the moment you felt the emotion can help us discover patterns in our feelings.
- Honesty: Honesty and staying open and unfiltered is very important. Remember, only you will read this journal. Allow yourself total sincerity while writing; this will be a great key to understanding your emotions. Don't judge yourself in this moment and let yourself flow.
- Don’t focus only on the negative: One of the main mistakes I made when I started was focusing only on negative emotions. This made my Emotion Journal, for a few months, have the opposite effect I expected. Look for that happy moment of the day, no matter how small it is: a cup of coffee, a moment of relaxation, a song while you were on your way to work. This will help you have a more balanced view of the day and reflect on the things that truly matter to you. Something that helped me a lot was writing three things I was grateful for.
- Visualize: Add diagrams, photos, drawings, doodles; any visual content will help you better capture your emotions and create relationships between them. For example, little doodles of the weather, lists of plans, labels of objects and places. Try to relate all this to your emotions.
- A day to reflect: You have your Emotion Journal and have perfectly kept it for months, now it's time to review it. Start in chronological order, review your emotions, read everything you've written, use markers to highlight what you find most important. Reflect on everything you've learned and write a small summary of your most common emotions, the places that make you happiest, and the people you enjoy the most. And that's it! Now, start all over again. By now, you will have learned about your emotions. You will see that there has been real progress and you have identified patterns in your past experiences that will help you improve future ones.
My Favorite Emotion Apps
Moodpress:
Moodpress is an app that allows you to securely record your emotions, secrets, and important photos. It offers features like password protection, mood tracking with calendars and charts, and integration with health data for a complete view of your well-being. You can also set reminders to ensure you write in your journal regularly. It's my favorite because it combines practicality with a user-friendly experience, making emotional tracking very simple.
DailyBean:
DailyBean is a visual and simple app to record your daily activities and emotions. It offers a monthly calendar that shows a summary of your mood with colorful icons and emojis, as well as weekly and monthly statistics to analyze your well-being. You can customize the category blocks according to your preferences, adding or removing what you need. It's a good option because its minimalist and visual design makes journaling easy and enjoyable.
How We Feel:
How We Feel is a free app created by scientists, designers, engineers, and therapists to help you better understand your emotions and find strategies to manage them in the moment. Based on the work of Dr. Marc Brackett and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, this app helps you find the right words to describe how you feel while tracking your sleep, exercise, and health trends to identify patterns over time. Additionally, it includes step-by-step video strategies to improve your emotional well-being.
Final Words
Undoubtedly, Emotion Journals can be a tool that many underestimate, but in practice, it has proven its worth for my personal growth and emotional well-being. Whether on paper and pencil or from your phone, the most important thing is to learn about our emotions and how we react to them. It goes beyond documenting or keeping a traditional journal; it is a path to personal understanding and finding our balance both externally and internally.
I sincerely want to thank you for taking the time to read this article. Your support means a lot to me and motivates me to continue sharing content that can be useful and interesting for you. If you found this article helpful or enjoyed reading it, I would greatly appreciate your feedback. Best wishes.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
I apologize if there are any grammatical errors, English is not my native language, I have tried to be as careful as possible.
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