Keep An Emotional Journal
On an average day, how many emotions do you actually go through? Most people have no idea. At best, they notice the dominant feeling of the day — if there is one. If they had a fight with their boss, they’ll remember it, maybe discuss it with their spouse, but by the next day it usually fades.
If someone at work, in college, or at a party treated you badly, you’d remember both the person and the incident for a while. Yet eventually — even after taking some action — you’d let it slip into the past. Life is full of such episodes. They come and go. But what if, just once, you dissected your emotional state deeply enough to understand why you felt the way you did? Why you reacted the way you did? What was really driving you underneath?
That’s where an emotional journal comes in. Write down every emotion you felt throughout the day. Keep it simple — just a word or two. Then, each night, spend fifteen minutes expanding on those feelings. Approach it like a surgeon opening a body: careful, precise, unflinching. By the end, you’ll realize that’s exactly what you’ve done — you opened yourself up and fixed what needed fixing.
When you take the time to move beyond headlines and uncover the reasoning behind your emotions — not just their immediate causes — you grow your inner awareness. This process helps you redefine your identity and adjust what needs adjusting. Writing about your emotions is like standing before a mirror: at first, you may not like what you see. But if you keep at it, you’ll learn to live with it, adapt to it, and even improve it.
You can never control how the world sees you. You can only change yourself — and your reactions to the world. And to do that, you first need to know who you are.