Writing As Therapy

It’s no secret to anyone that things are a little bit stressful here in the SJ household.  We’re in a new location, not even in our own home, and we’re both job hunting.  With so much up in the air, yes, anxiety levels are sometimes a little bit high.

So how am I, a woman with a mild-to-moderate case of GAD, coping with the extra stressors that have been piled on since July?  You know, other than resenting the ever-loving crap out of my husband’s former employer.  There are definitely better, more productive ways to manage my stress.

One such method is something I had started back in the dark, dark days of PPD hell – a focus on the positive.  My therapist at the time urged me to try to find positive things about each day and write them down.  I kept with it for a while, and I did notice a difference.  I’ve done it sporadically since then, when things felt particularly bleak, but it never became a real, solid routine.

A week and a half ago, though, one of my dearest friends started posting Daily Positives in her journal, and urged her readers to do the same for a period of eight days.  I latched right on to that bait, and immediately started to notice a difference.  In so doing, I determined that it was something I should keep doing.  Not just for eight days, but for as long as it feels right.  I’m starting with a month (today is day #11), but it may well continue after that as well.

In this time of recession, job loss, and personal turmoil, it is really easy to get lost in negatives.  Every day is NOT all sunshine and roses, even here in tropical Florida, where it’s hard to even remember that it’s autumn.  But every day does have at least a few rays of hope.  No, those rays don’t take away the worries.  They don’t stop my brain from obsessing about finding work, missing loved ones, or trivialities like Christmas plans or something someone said to me in passing.  But remembering the positives forces me to shift my focus, at least for the length of the journal entry (and usually quite a while beyond), onto something good and away from anything negative.  That can only be a good thing, as far as I’m concerned.