Ep 54: How to Journal When You Don't Know What to Write
If you are a high-achieving woman who has spent years in survival mode, journaling can feel incredibly intimidating. We’re often told to "just write your feelings down," but when you’ve been disconnected from your body just to get through the day, you look at a blank page and completely freeze. You might worry you're doing it wrong, or your brain instantly tries to edit every sentence before your pen even hits the paper.
In this episode, I want to demystify the practice of journaling and examine it through neurological and somatic lenses. Writing by hand isn't just about recording facts; it’s a physical act that slows down your racing thoughts and creates a powerful mind-body loop. I'm breaking down three simple, unconventional journaling exercises designed to bypass your inner critic, release low-grade stress, and help you start exactly where you are.
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction to Journaling Challenges
02:12 - The Neuroscience of Handwriting
06:00 - Journaling Exercises: Writing From Feelings
15:39 - Unsent Letters: Emotional Release
22:17 - The Drain: Clearing Emotional Clutter
Key Takeaways
✨ Journaling is not a writing skill. It's a self-connection skill.
✨ Handwriting slows your brain down enough to process what you're experiencing rather than simply react to it.
✨ The emotion underneath the goal matters more than the goal itself.
✨ You don't need to know how something will happen before you allow yourself to feel what you want.
✨ If you're disconnected from your emotions, start with what is easiest to access. Even irritation, frustration, or complaints.
✨ Sometimes emotional clarity comes after writing, not before.
✨ There is no "right way" to journal.
✨ Recognizing your emotions, staying connected to them, and articulating them are all learnable skills.
✨ The goal isn't to write perfectly.
✨ The goal is to hear yourself.
Connect With Me
Threads: Come hang out and share your thoughts with me over on Threads at @AshaWilkersonESQ.
Community: Leave a comment on this podcast episode and let me know which of these three exercises landed best in your spirit this week.
Enjoyed This Episode?
Share it with a friend who keeps saying they should journal but never knows where to start.
And if you try one of these exercises this week, I'd love to hear how it goes.
Come home to yourself. 🌿
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Asha (00:05.062)
Hey, hey, hey, we are back with another episode. And this week I'm actually really excited to be talking to you about how to journal if you can't journal. I've had a couple of conversations with people over the past couple of weeks, a couple of friends, a couple of people I'm working with in RESET who have said.
that it's just hard to journal. I always suggest journaling because it's such a great tool for me to process my thoughts, to write about the future, to think about what is coming, to adjust my energy, to focus my mind. And I get that I have been someone who's written since I was a kid. I used to write all the time journals, letters, all that stuff. And so journaling for me is just such a natural process. Even though I didn't do it straight through from the time I was a kid to the time I was like I was an adult.
And I also recognize that other people are intimidated by journaling because either they don't know what to write or they don't know what I'm talking about when I say write your emotions and your feelings down. They go, what? And two things happen. They either fear that they're not doing it correctly because they think there's like one way to journal, or maybe several ways to journal, but they only know the bad ways, the wrong ways to journal.
Or when I tell people to write their emotions, they don't know how to do that because they're actually really disconnected from their bodies because they've been in survival mode for a long time. So I thought, let me get on here and tell you what I know about journaling and how to do it, particularly if you are someone who is either intimidated by journaling or you just don't know how to do it correctly.
And let me be clear, these are some suggestions. I'm gonna give you three different ways to journal, three different exercises that are not the be-all end-all, but they're three that I think can help you get started. So let's go. First, actually, though, I want to talk about what is happening when you journal and when you do it by hand, not on the computer.
Asha (02:12.888)
There's a real neuroscience connection. If you remember going to school and taking notes by hand and being able to remember what you wrote down or when you would study taking notes by hand and then reading them back to yourself or testing what you remembered by writing it by hand. And then we started using the computer, and I don't know about you, but it's so easy to passively type what I'm hearing that I'm not actually paying attention.
But when you're using your hand, you're using a part of your body, and it also activates the reticular activating system, the RAS, or the part of your brain that filters what's important and what flags it for, and then it your brain flags it for attention. Typing doesn't do this in the same way because even though you're moving your fingers, you're you're more routine. Whereas when you're writing with your hand, there's just a different part of your brain that's engaged because there's a physical act.
Of forming the letters that tells your brain this is important. Also, when you write by hand, it slows you down. And this is why I want you to journal by hand because it's slowing you down on purpose. Handwriting is slower than thought. Like you cannot write as fast as your thoughts come, which means that you have to actually think about what's important to write, what's not important to write. And I don't want you to really think, should I write this down? Should I not? Your brain is naturally gonna filter.
what's happening. So you don't even really have to think about it. It's just gonna happen naturally because you're just not gonna have the capacity to write down all of the million things that are writing through your brain. So you it means that you're not actually just transcribing something, you're actually processing and writing it down. Okay. Neuroscientists have also found that handwriting produces more distinct neural patterns in typing, which supports deeper
Encoding and memory consolidation. What does that mean? Then handwriting allows you to create a pattern for memorizing, for processing, which then helps with memory and also helps you to kind of put and group things together so your thoughts, your brain aren't all over the place. This also handwriting activates the body and not just the mind. It is actually a somatic practice, even though it's a small practice because.
Asha (04:33.964)
your hand and your brain have to be in connection. So your hands are heavily mapped in the motor cortex of your brain. So it's like almost like kinesthetic learning, right? Writing by hand creates this mind-body loop that typing doesn't allow you to do. So if you're emotionally connected, being in this loop matters. The physical sensation of putting the pen on paper
can be can get you to open up in the way that words alone won't be able to do. There's something about the practice of moving your arm, moving your hand that allows you to just be more in your body. Also, when you're handwriting, typically you're not gonna edit as much, whereas when you're typing you might see the little red squiggly underline and
you just have more capacity to go, does this look right? Does this sound right? Delete delay deli deli. If you write a sentence that doesn't really make sense when you're handwriting, you're not going back and erasing the whole thing or crossing it all out. Like you don't have an expectation that it's gonna be polished, you're just gonna write, which is the most important part. Okay, so now that you understand that writing by hand actually has some neurological effects that will help you process without you even intentionally doing it.
I'm gonna give you a couple of exercises. The first one I'm gonna call right from feelings, not facts. And this is what you're going to use when you are envisioning, planning, or manifesting the future. So I'm working with clients right now who are in a place of feeling stuck, feeling burned out, feeling like they've done everything right and they don't know what's next. Almost everybody. And I also do this process probably once every
10 to 12 weeks, once every quarter, I just naturally go through this process. I'm like, what do I want for the future? And I have learned that instead of making a goal based on the achievement, I make a goal based on how I want to feel. I have to get to the emotion, what I want my body to feel like, so that I can then create that reality. Now, don't get me wrong, I do think, okay, I want to bring more money into the business. I want to
Asha (06:57.206)
You know, I want more clients to come to the studio. I want to do this, I want to do that. That's fine. That's how we're all taught, but I want you to connect with the underlying emotion under it. So I want to bring more money into the studio in Lisbon. Why? What am I hoping to feel? Not just accomplish. I'm hoping to feel more secure. I'm hoping to feel more stable. Bringing more money into the business will also help me to feel more successful.
Not just that, but that is a way that I'm measuring success. Not the only way though. It will also reflect that I have been able to work with more people. So these are the emotions that I want to connect to, the stability, the feeling like I'm progressing, touching and reaching more people. So I am going to write about how I want to feel in the next week, month, 30 days, right? 90 days.
So that I can bring that into my body. Instead of writing from the accomplishment, I'm writing from the emotion. I want to feel safety, I want to feel pride, I want to feel joy. So it's not wrong to think about the outcome, but under the outcome is the emotion that you're hoping to feel. And I want you to write about that emotion so you can connect to it. Now, here's where people get stuck. They go, I don't know how I feel.
I can't connect to my body. Okay, no problem. Or I've never written about the emotion before. How do I even connect to the emotion behind it? I'm just so geared towards the achievement that I can't even understand it. Or your brain will go, okay, yeah, but how is this gonna happen? And it's gonna take you out of the emotion because you don't know how you're going to achieve it. How you're going to achieve it does not matter. That's actually kind of none of your business.
You're going to listen to your intuitive nudges and follow the day-to-day momentum to get to your goal. And it's unfolding every day. You don't know exactly how that's going to happen. But to reach the emotion, all you need to do is to try the emotion on. You don't need to understand how you're going to get there. And if you're not able to feel the emotions in your body, I want you to write about them.
Asha (09:23.05)
As if they are somebody else's emotions. And here's the beautiful thing about this is that when you connect to the emotion when you're manifesting or envisioning, you don't have to believe that it's possible. Because when you can connect to the emotion in yourself, it already is possible. You're already feeling that right now. So how it comes about doesn't matter. So if your imagination is blocked or you can't.
connect with the emotions within your body. First, I want you to take a deep breath. Inhale in through your nose, exhale out through your mouth, and do that as many times as you need to so you can drop into your body so your mind can start stop racing. And then I want you to imagine yourself doing the thing that you're working towards. Imagine how you're going to feel when the money hits your bank account. Imagine how you're going to feel when you have this many clients. Imagine how you're going to feel
When you walk your child to school and you're not in a rush. Imagine how you're going to feel when you get on that plane and you travel to a new country. Imagine how you're going to feel when you wake up in the morning with the love of your life. How are you going to feel? What's it going to feel like in your body? Where do you feel it in your body? What clothing are you wearing? What sounds are you hearing? What sights are you seeing? What smells are you experiencing? Be as descriptive as possible using your five senses.
Before I moved to Portugal, I was gonna say Paris, but not in Paris. Really, even way before I moved, it was this was before I even knew that I wanted to leave Oakland. I started writing about how I wanted to feel every day, how I wanted to wake up. And in the beginning, it was hard to even imagine because I was so entrenched in my current situation. But I would write repeatedly the same thing over and over. I want to wake up without an alarm clock
I want to wake up in a room with white walls. I want to wake up to daylight just feeling good. I want to feel the sun on my face when I get up. I want to take the covers off and I want them to be white linens. I want to put my feet on the ground and put them into my house slippers. I want to get up feeling the warmth of the sun and make a cup of coffee. And the smells of the coffee beans are going to feel smell delicious. I'm going to grab that cup of coffee, feel the warmth in my hands, and turn, look out these big picture windows and see the ocean and just kind of.
Asha (11:48.888)
Give myself a little squeeze and a hug, knowing that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. I want to sit out on outside on my deck. I want to feel the breeze, the warm breeze touch my skin. When it's a little chilly, I want goosebumps to help me know that I'm alive. I want to be wearing pajamas that are cute, or maybe a flowy nightgown that is also white that makes me feel like a goddess when I wake up. None of these things had happened.
But all of these things I was imagining in the beginning, I was like, how the hell is this gonna happen? But it didn't matter. I started really putting myself in that scene and connecting to how I wanted to feel and what I wanted it to be like. That I want to have a personal trainer who will come and train me in the mornings. I want to have a chef so I don't have to think about food, that I can get up, take care of myself first, and then when I actually sit down to do work.
Which I had to be real with myself. I don't want to actually do any work. But if I gotta do work, I want to sit down and do work that is aligned with who I am. I don't want to feel like I'm putting on an attorney hat or a separate hat. I just want to be me all the time. The things that I do at home, I want to do for other people. The books that I read for my own enjoyment, I want to share with other people. Now, this entire dream hasn't come true, but I have seen twice in my life since leaving Oakland.
Where I have woken up in the bedroom that I saw in my dream. Not the exact one, but that feeling. I get up and I make a cup of coffee and I turn with it warm in my hands and I look outside and my picture windows. The two apartments I've had in Lisbon have been had great daylight and beautiful windows that allow the sun to come in. And I felt multiple times that this feeling that I had journaled about is here.
It wasn't the exact vision, and that's okay. It's the feeling. The reason why this works is because your emotions are energy, right? We're all made up of energy. Your emotions, your words, they are also energy. Similar energy attracts similar energy. So if you are thinking about the love that you want to feel, the joy that you want to feel, the security you want to feel, you are naturally going to be drawing that into you and seeking that because like attracts like.
Asha (14:10.784)
If this still feels difficult, write the story in third person. Write about how you would feel, or write about how somebody else is going to feel, or write about yourself as if it's not you. That creates a little bit of distance, which might allow your brain to open up and to write. So now you're writing this story, maybe for little kid you, maybe for your child that you have or don't have, maybe for your niece, your nephew, or your little cousin, you're writing it for somebody else and tell them how.
Asha feels in the morning when she wakes up. You're not, you don't have to say how I feel, we'll get to that. But this is just the practice to connect to emotions in general. Write about it as if it's in the third person. And how this person, you that you're seeing from above, is gonna feel on this journey. See how that works for you. And then, third, for this exercise, stop judging yourself. Stop judging yourself. Recognize that your emotions.
Recognize that recognizing your emotions, staying connected to them, and even being able to articulate them is a skill. And if you don't have it sharpened yet, keep working at it because just like learning to tie your shoes or to make a meal or to program a computer, you can learn this skill too. So do not judge yourself. That is going to be more detrimental to your practice than anything else. Okay.
Here's another exercise that you can do. This is gonna be called the unsent letter. This is great, especially if you are frozen or shut down. This helps you because sometimes people will say, you know, connect to joy, connect to the positive. But if there's something underlying that is going on that makes it hard for you to connect to joy or connect to the positive, you have to address what your underlying sort of complaints are.
You have to get that stuff off your chest. So this is going to be a letter that you write to someone else or to something else, not to yourself, because it's going to trick your nervous system into feeling safe enough to open up. So you're again kind of putting a third person as the focal point so that you can sort of bypass your protection mechanism. So you're going to write a letter that you're never going to send to a person.
Asha (16:40.544)
a past version of yourself, a future version of yourself, maybe a feeling or a situation, a body part, a year, anything, write a letter that you're never gonna send to something else. And here you're not trying to resolve anything. You're just saying what hasn't been said.
So there aren't any rules for this about the tone of voice that you're gonna use. It can be angry, it can be tender, it can be confused, it can be grieving, it can be all of these things. Any of it is allowed. So instead of asking how I feel, which if you're disconnected is really hard for you to answer. This question that you're answering is what would I say? And you're gonna allow the feelings to follow the words.
Okay, so this works neurologically because this expressive writing activates your prefrontal cortex while simultaneously down regulating the amygdala, which is your threat response center. So you are going to be able to write while not placing yourself at the center, so you won't be in that protection mode. Okay, this unsent letter is.
Also removes the fear of consequences, which will make it easier for you to write, which is often what keeps you emotionally shut down or keeps you from accessing those feelings at all. Because if you can't say the wrong thing, you can't say the wrong thing to someone who's never gonna read the letter. So it's a super safe exercise for you to do and for you to engage in. So the unsent letter, write whatever needs to be said. Now you're probably going, but I don't know what to write.
Well, you can start with what's on your mind? How am I feeling today? that might be too tough. Okay, what am I pissed about today? What am I excited about today? Who do I remember from 1999? What do I want 2029 to look like? Anything. The goal is just to practice writing. Okay, exercise number three is we're gonna call this the drain. This is where you're gonna write your stream of complaints.
Asha (18:57.718)
Unapologetically. Now, this one sounds counterintuitive because, like I started to say in the last exercise, we're often taught that we need to be super positive and think about what could go right, not what could go wrong. And there's time and space for that. But if you have underlying complaints or underlying beliefs that something is wrong, you actually need to address them before you can start thinking about what could happen in the future. And a lot of
Common internet advice right now will tell us to just think positive, just frame it in a positive. And but you have to address the things that are that are going on. So here, you're not gonna try and write beautifully or insightfully. Your goal here is just to complain. This is your complaint letter. Write it out, write it fully without editing. Here's how you can do it: you can set a timer for five minutes or ten minutes.
And write every complaint, annoyance, grievance, or frustration you have about anything. It could be big, small, petty, profound. Your coffee was bad. You're tired of being strong. Your back hurts. You don't know who you are anymore. You can't rent the house that you want. The Portuguese houses are all moldy and expensive. Whatever it is, right? Whatever it is that you are feeling. My mom didn't call me today. My boyfriend didn't text me.
The grass is too green, whatever it is. I want you to write about it. And don't reread it when you're done. You can just close a notebook or tear it out, rip out the piece of paper. This is going to help your nervous system get the unprocessed low-grade stress out of you so that you even so that you can create the room to feel joy or safety or clarity. It's really hard for your nervous system to access those.
emotions, joy, safety, clarity when it's holding on to a process, when it's holding on to a pile of unprocessed low-grade stress. So you can consider this exercise like a drain. You're getting out the surface layer noise and letting it go down the drain so that the deeper stuff has room to actually come up to be present. It's also really hard to stay emotionally disconnected when you're actively complaining.
Asha (21:20.046)
So sometimes it's hard for us to connect to joy or safety because we got a whole bunch of complaints and stuff, a whole bunch of things that are in the way. But as soon as you start complaining about something or saying how someone pissed you off, you start feeling that. That's actually emotional connection. When that irritation comes up and that frustration comes up, those are emotions. And it's okay to write about those. And sometimes those are all we have for the access point. And that's okay. They're typically more accessible than grief or
joy because they're also more protective. So they they sit closer to the surface. So start with whatever is in reach and then let it lead you deeper. So again this works because instead of asking you to be vulnerable about how you want to feel joy and connect to this, connect to that, you're actually giving yourself permission to be compet to you're actually giving yourself permission to be petty to complain.
To air out all your grievances. Sometimes when we're polite or when we're educated or when we have a good life, it's really hard to access this because we have a good life and we'd be ungrateful if we didn't do it. But it needs to be done. So please, please, please, please allow yourself this drain exercise to complain. So, as a recap, the first exercise is to write from feelings, not facts.
This is what you can do for future visioning, connecting to emotional energy, manifestation, planning the future. This helps you connect to your feelings, not to get so caught up on the facts around them. Exercise number two is the unsent letter. This is your emotional release. Say what hasn't been said to anybody, anything past, present, or future. And exercise three is your drain exercise, your stream of complaints.
This helps you to clear your nervous system. It allows you to access the emotions that are at the surface. And it gives you permission to start where you actually are. So please try one of these this week or all of these this week. And then let me know what you think. If you would like to connect with me, I am hanging out these days on Threads. My handle is @ashawilkersonesq I'd love to hear what your thoughts are.
Asha (23:43.714)
How it goes, and let me know if you have any questions. You can also leave a comment on this podcast episode. Thank you for listening. Ciao, ciao.