In this series of posts, I’m putting two ideas together—the idea that smart, creative, sensitive individuals are confronted by special challenges and the idea that journaling is a valuable self-help tool—and turning them into a set of journaling prompts designed to lead you on a personal journey of discovery.
I hope that you enjoy these prompts. Here are five more challenges, and four journal prompts to go with each challenge. Engaging with any one of them may well serve you. I hope you find these valuable! And I hope you’ll take a look at Why Smart People Hurt and at my latest journal, Affirmations for Self-Love.
In this post, we’ll look at some related ideas: that inner noise can prevent us from doing our best thinking; that we may misunderstand or underestimate our native intelligence if, all our life, our inner environment has been too noisy; how over-vigilance reduces our ability to think; how the lack of a felt sense of safety reduces our ability to think; and how anxiety conspires to produce noise and reduce our ability to think. Let’s take a look!
- The challenge of inner noise preventing us from doing our best thinking. According to research, people have on average 60,000 thoughts a day. That’s no problem—unless those thoughts pester us and produce the experience of what Buddhists call “monkey mind.”
+ Do you have the sense that your inner noise is preventing you from doing your best thinking?
+ Are there certain thoughts that are “noisiest” and that have risen to the pestering level of negative obsession?
+ What do you know to do to quiet that inner noise? Do you have some tactics that work?
+ What would you like to try as a new tactic for quieting that inner noise?
2. The challenge of misunderstanding or underestimating our native intelligence if, all our life, our inner environment has been too noisy. You may have long thought that you aren’t smart enough to tackle some intellectual pursuit—but what if that’s a miscalculation or a misunderstanding?
+ Do you think that it’s possible that you’ve underestimated your native intelligence because your noisy mind has stopped you from doing your best thinking?
+ If you believe that you may indeed have underestimated how smart you are, what, if any, have been the consequences of that underestimation?
+ What experiment might you run to test if you have or haven’t underestimated your native smarts?
+ If you discover that you have, what might that revelation prompt you to do?
3. The challenge of over-vigilance reducing our ability to think. For example, if our mind is fixed on one particular thought—say, will the novel that we’ve sent around to literary agents be accepted or rejected—it is very hard to do any new or deep thinking. In this example, our neurons have gathered together to vigilantly await the outcome of the query process, preventing us from working on our next novel.
+ Are you regularly over-vigilant by paying too much attention to a given thought?
+ Can you identify one of those thoughts? What seems to hook you to that thought and hold your attention there?
+ What do you know to do to unhook and release thoughts to which you are paying too much attention?
+ If nothing has worked particularly well so far, what new tactic or strategy might you try?
4. The challenge of how a lack of a felt sense of safety reduces our ability to think. To take an extreme example, if enemy missiles are raining down on our neighborhood, it is going to prove very hard, maybe verging on impossible, to do any quality thinking.
+ Do you feel safe in your environment? Safe enough to think?
+ What about your work environment? Do you feel safe there, or do you feel scrutinized, judged, micro-managed and otherwise inhibited and unsafe?
+ What about your family environment? Are family conflicts producing inner turmoil and making you feel unsafe in your own home?
+ What about your own thoughts? Do your own thoughts feel safe or unsafe to think? If they feel unsafe, are you defensively keeping them walled away, making them inaccessible to you?
5. The challenge of how anxiety conspires to produce noise and reduce our ability to think.
+ Anxiety is a great silencer. Do you experience it as silencing you and keeping your from doing your best thinking?
+ How does anxiety manifest in your life? As mental confusion? Physically, as headaches or nausea? As fatigue? Or in some other way?
+ What do you know to do to manage or reduce your experience of anxiety?
+ Is there something new you’d like to try to manage or reduce your experience of anxiety?
More to come! Enjoy!
**
Promote Healing, Ignite Creativity, and Discover Writing Tips from Two Journaling Experts
“This book is a beautiful quilt, each chapter written by one of the wisest voices in the journaling world, on every aspect of journal writing imaginable.” —Ruth Folit, founder and past director of the International Association for Journal Writing
#1 Best Seller in Writing Skills, Writing Guides, and Nonfiction Writing Reference
The Next-Generation Book on Journaling Techniques
Learn from the best. The Great Book of Journaling equips you with practical and effective journaling techniques, advances your writing skills, and enhances self-esteem. Written by esteemed psychotherapist Eric Maisel and journaling expert Lynda Monk, Director of the International Association for Journal Writing, this book guides you on a path of healing, creativity, and self-discovery.
Discover the therapeutic magic of journal writing. Experience the transformative power of journaling. By engaging in daily meditations and personal writing, you can tap into your innate creativity and nurture self-love.
Packed full of valuable journal writing knowhow. We’ve rounded up 40 of the top journal experts in the world to explain exactly what journal writing can do for you! The Great Book of Journaling is full of practical tips, evidence-based research, and rich anecdotes from their coaching, teaching, therapy work with journal writers, and personal journal writing.
Inside find:
- Innovative journaling techniques to boost your creativity and writing skills
- Therapeutic writing methods to foster healing and high self-esteem
- Daily meditation practices for cultivating self-love and wellness
- Expert advice from 40 leading journaling professionals for deepening your personal writing
If you have read Mindfulness Journal, The Self-Discovery Journal, or No Worries, you will love The Great Book of Journaling. Also, don’t miss Eric Maisel’s Redesign Your Mind and The Power of Daily Practice.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock
