Journaling: A Neuropsychological Perspective

Welcome back!

I hope everyone’s 2021 is off to a good, strong start. It’s strange how something as inconsequential as a calendar change can ignite a fire in some of us; I’ve never felt more of a desire to continue my journaling practice, and the benefits have been very noticeable lately. So for the remainder of January, I’ll be focusing on building up a stronger argument for why journaling is a life-changing practice to invite into your daily routine. Be sure to keep an eye on my IG @ourblueskyminds where I’ll be regularly posting some of the scientific findings that support (and maybe not support) the results of a regular journaling practice.

This week, as a sort of continuation from last week, I’d like to focus on the framing and perspective adjustments that are possible when we decide to sit down with a paper, pen, and our situation.

The Troubled Mind

When we have a problem in our lives that we are avoiding, consciously or not, there are a number of responses that can occur in our brain.

Problems are given their emotional “volume” or intensity through the activation of parts of the amygdala (and other areas, but we’ll focus on just the amygdala today). If you’ve read about the amygdala's role in mental health, you’ve probably heard its responsible for the processing of fear; although true, it has many other capabilities and influences. More specifically, the amygdala is a powerful member of your neural community that creates and maintains our moment to moment emotional context. The amygdala is a structure that resides in an area in the middle of our brain called the limbic system and is connected to many areas of the brain that are responsible for behaviour, reasoning, self-image, awareness, vision and other senses, arousal and our emotional experience.

So when we have a problematic situation that arises, the amygdala is one of the primary structures that gets activated in response to the problem. In fact, we perceive problems because of the activation of the amygdala. If we were in the same objective situation without an activated amygdala, we wouldn’t actually perceive a problem, or we would be far less emotionally perturbed. This isn’t to say the amygdala is out to make your life an emotional rollercoaster; believe it or not, we actually need our amygdala to help inform us of dangerous situations. It tells us when to panic and when to relax. Without it, we could walk into traffic without a second thought.

Trouble arises when our amygdala’s alarm bells start to sound at things that aren’t actually dangerous and/or blows things way out of proportion. Someone with an anxiety disorder could certainly attest to this. An overactive amygdala can be a real source of suffering when we don’t know what to do about it.

So what can you do about it?

Although things like exercise and a proper diet certainly help, there are a few things you can do right at the moment that will help quiet down the amygdala. One of which is to journal.

By sitting down in a comfy spot and pulling out your Notes app on your phone, or a notepad and pen, you are immediately demonstrating behaviours that are not congruent with a panic response. Watching yourself behave in this way already starts to slow the panic signals because your brain sees “oh, how dangerous can a situation be if I’m capable of sitting down and pulling out something to write with”. Your brain is an evidence collector, and this single behaviour is a strong piece of evidence that disproves the idea that you’re under attack.

Journaling also helps because it forces our thoughts to slow down a bit. Try writing at the same speed you think - even John Wayne couldn’t write that fast and he had the fastest hands in the west, partner!

Through the observation of behaviours that are incongruent with a panic response (sitting down to write), and forcing your thinking to slow down a bit, you have already begun to activate higher-order cognitive structures, namely the prefrontal lobes. Interestingly, the prefrontal lobes, which are responsible for several processes, including reasoning and organizing thoughts, also serve as a braking mechanism for the amygdala! The prefrontal lobes have an element of control over the amygdala, so if recruited properly, they “tell” the amygdala to quiet down.

The Rational Mind

When we decide to respond to troubles/anxiety/panic with behaviours that are incongruent with what is happening neurologically, the brain begins to learn how to reframe and adjust perspective towards situations that would otherwise feel problematic. Behaviours like meditation, writing, singing/humming, dancing, or walking are perfect examples of things that you can do when you notice these troubles begin to arise. That’s not to say that you ignore the messages coming from deep within your brain, but rather consciously decide how you respond to them. The default response when these things happen is to freak; your heart starts to pound, your breathing gets rapid, the butterflies begin to flutter, etc… we’ve all been there. At the root of all these processes sits the amygdala with a megaphone.

When you engage in behaviours like the ones we talked about above, you are downregulating the “emotional mind” (the limbic system), and upregulating the “rational mind” (prefrontal cortex). Why and how these systems got their names will be a future topic that I’m excited to break down, but for now, we will call the prefrontal lobes the “rational mind”.

Ideally, you are living a life with a good balance between these two minds, but when a problem arises, one tends to take over the other. As the emotional mind kicks into overdrive, the resources from our rational mind are shunted away due to a general resource priority rule our brain has established; a sort of “better safe than sorry” rule (read more about the panic response in this post here). When we notice the symptoms of this resource shift (the heart-pounding and whatnot), the ideal response is that we look around, ensure we are not in any danger, and begin to behave in the way mentioned above to tell our brain that everything is actually okay. That allows us to begin rationalizing or analyzing our situation which will allow those emotional centres to calm down to baseline.

This is why learning how to acknowledge an arising problem and how to respond to it is so valuable for our well being; those emotional blinders can totally override our rationale when we aren’t paying attention. By deciding that you are going to respond differently when faced with a problem, you are well on your way towards training your rational mind to exert a little more control over your emotional mind by pumping the brakes at more appropriate times. Through this attitude and behavioural adjustment, you are strengthening your brain’s ability to self regulate which directly translates to a higher quality of life in all facets.

Ultimately, this is an act of self-care that we all could use a little extra of these days. Instead of just being stuck in a nasty storm which you must weather, you become the conductor of the storm.

Learning how to sit in the eye of the storm with a notepad is one of the surest ways to face and calm the storm directly.

Have a great week everyone.

-Our Blue Sky Minds