Journaling Can Help You Cope with Your BFRB
I was introduced to journaling by my mother. I was about 7 years old when she gave me a nice, small journal with blue and black covers. She didn’t give me instructions other than to tell me that writing down a few lines every day can make me remember important things about my life and that it can make me feel better. Secretly, I suspect my mom’s plan may have been to get me to write more and improve my handwriting, as I can’t remember a single teacher who failed to mention how awful and illegible my handwriting is. Whatever her intentions may have been, journaling daily-ish has stayed with me all this time. Over time, I’ve changed the way I journal and have used several journals simultaneously, some to record my days, others to analyze my thoughts, some to build discipline, to write down my dreams, etc. It’s a practice I deeply enjoy to this day.
Keeping a daily journal can be quite useful for your mental health too. A study showed that time spent journaling about thoughts and feelings can even reduce the number of sick days you take off work (Sohal, Singh, Dhillon & Gill, 2022), although please, if you possibly can, for an even greater health benefit, don’t fall into capitalism’s insidious productivity trap. If you’re not feeling well, don’t work. Journaling can diminish judgmental responses to your internal experiences (thoughts, memories, feelings, etc.) and external circumstances (failures, unexpected events, etc.) leading to fewer negative emotions overall (Ford, Lam, John, & Mauss, 2018; Baikie & Wilhelm, 2005). Journaling can help you cope with your BFRB more effectively too!
To simplify things, allow me to invent a classification of different kinds of journaling practices. This is solely based on my own journaling experience, there’s no such thing as an official journaling classification, to the best of my knowledge:
- Daily check-in journals, those that you use to review your day or an aspect of your day. Daily planners, “one sentence per day” journals, dream journals or simple overviews of your day fall into this category. This type of journaling can be used to self-monitor and our Downloads section for VIP users has a simple weekly self-monitoring journal ready for download.
- Cultivation journals – this is perhaps not the best way to call them but until I figure out a better word, we’re stuck with this one. Gratitude journals would fall within this category. The famous Meditations by Marcus Aurelius are nothing more than a cultivation journal - a series of notebooks where he wrote about his experience trying to cultivate Stoic virtues in everyday life.
- Exploration journals – those that you use to take a deep dive into your mind. Shadow work journals would be an obvious example, although any extensive journaling where you explore your thinking and write down memories, free associate and let your mind guide your hand.
For me, journaling is a two-step process. First, there is writing and then there is periodic reviewing, especially if journaling is done for a purpose. I have been keeping a dream journal for about a decade and about once a month, I will read the dreams I wrote down and think about their content. Dream analysis is a fascinating and sometimes deeply unsettling process! That occasional re-reading and reflection forms a part of the journaling process, but in order to reflect well, I need a decent sample size, a number of entries that will help me unearth patterns that escape my conscious mind. You can apply the exact same rule to BFRB journaling.
But before we get into the details, let’s review the five main benefits of journaling about your BFRB, so that you understand why I’m advising this as a daily practice.
Keeping a journal can help you identify triggering thoughts and feelings.
To journal effectively, you first must slow yourself down and be more mindful. This is often a challenge if you struggle with picking or pulling, mainly because avoiding present-moment experience is one of the major functions of BFRBs. No present moment experience, no uncomfortable emotions. No present moment experience, no unpleasant insights. This is why journaling is helpful. Slowing down while writing keeps you occupied yet your mind is present and focused – present enough to describe and identify your feelings and thoughts.
Keeping a journal devoted to feelings and thoughts can help you notice patterns that you otherwise might miss, especially if you tend to avoid your feelings and conveniently forget thoughts and memories. Reviewing a journal after a month or two of daily entries can help you discern patterns and themes that repeat themselves even if on day-to-day basis they seem random and unconnected to your picking/pulling, or anything else for that matter.
Journaling can help you understand why your triggers trigger you.
Some people may be able to identify triggers, but those external ones: conflict with a loved one, meetings with certain co-workers, driving, etc. Many things can trigger. But the part that may be difficult is to understand why something as banal as driving a car or watching a thriller triggers you.
Journaling about those experiences can provide valuable information.
If you’re wondering why it matters why something triggers you, the answer is simple – the why gives us meaning and meaning gives us psychological significance. When we change, it’s not just the behavior that we have to change, it’s the psychological structure that gives behavior its meaning.
Writing down your experiences makes you more attuned to them in everyday life. You become more aware and, therefore, can act consciously.
This is an important benefit that comes from daily journaling, especially if your picking and/or pulling is automatic, so unconscious. Self-awareness is useful for many things but, most of all, for BFRBs, its importance is in the fact that self-awareness allows you to act intentionally.
How can you expect to change a behavior if you’re not aware that you’re doing it?
Keeping a journal helps you track your progress.
Especially when things get tough – and they always do at some point when you’re working on changing yourself – it’s all too easy to forget about the progress you’ve made. Journaling helps reset your point of view by reminding you of where you are compared to where you started, it allows you to see how much effort you’ve put in and how much you’re able to overcome.
Journaling is a form of accountability.
Change requires discipline, and when you’re going through it alone, it’s easy to slip up. You decide on a set of techniques but one day you feel too tired to use them, the next day you do it quickly because you’re in a rush and, next thing you know, you haven’t used anything in a week and your picking/pulling is worse than it was before.
If your journal is a place to come back to every day and a place to write down what you did, excuses tend to pale when you know you’ll have to reflect on them honestly at the end of the day.
The benefits outlined above are just some of the benefits. Overall, while journaling is important, it’s not a complete and comprehensive solution. Being complex beings that we are, it’s not realistic to expect that one strategy will be the ultimate one. Every psychological problem is best seen as an onion, with layers peeling slowly with different strategy. Journaling is one strategy and it can serve as a tracker for other strategies, but it is not everything you need to overcome your BFRB.
Now the practical question – how to do it?
There are many ways to journal and I already mentioned that we have a template ready for our VIP members. You can even email your notes to me weekly if you have questions or if you’d like personalized feedback or help with journal review.
Not everyone is our VIP member so, obviously, not everyone can do that.
Luckily, there are a few simple ways to use a journal to track your BFRB. I suggest paying attention to at least some of the following:
- External triggers (place, situation, person, etc.)
- Internal triggers (thoughts, feelings, memories)
- Reasoning/ justification (how do you explain to yourself that it’s OK to pick/pull in the moment)
- Body sensations
- Location, where on your body do you pick or where do you pull hair from
- How do you feel during a picking/pulling episode
- What usually gets you to stop
- Do you have any rituals before or after: disposing of skin/hair, playing with hair roots, eating the skin/hairs, etc.
- How do you feel after picking/pulling? What do you think about?
- Is your BFRB automatic or focused in a particular situation?
- Does it ever start as automatic but then becomes focused?
- What does the urge feel like?
- Is the urge sudden or gradual?
- How do you rate it from 0 to 10 in intensity when it becomes impossible to resist?
This is a long list and it’s not a comprehensive one either! I could add at least a dozen more things. I have to add that it’s unrealistic to expect that you could possibly track all of these at once. You can’t spend hours a day journaling and it’s nearly impossible to maintain awareness of all that at the same time.
Choose two or three things that you struggle to identify and then start from there. Change up the items you will journal about every month or so when you do a systematic review and when you see that you’ve made enough progress and developed sufficient awareness.
If you prefer to have a more set structure, consider this simple daily journaling technique:
- What did I do well today?
- What could I have done better?
- What did I learn about myself today?
This contains three simple questions that give a somewhat sweeping overview of your day. You can add your own questions or modify these, just keep one thing in mind: these three questions refer to all major aspects of your experience. They take into account what you did well, but also where you failed, except that failure isn’t framed that way and is instead proactively reformulated so that you prime your mind to think in terms of solutions, rather than shortcomings: what could I have done better? The last question invites you to use the good and the bad to learn about yourself. By all means change the questions if you think something else might be more beneficial, but make sure to take into account all aspects of your experience, successes and failures, and to phrase it so that your mind is oriented toward finding solutions, rather than being stuck on your mistakes.
When you use the same template for journaling every day, you are teaching yourself to observe your day-to-day experience in a particular way. If you emphasize failures, that will certainly affect your self-perception after a while. This is why I’m cautioning you about phrasing!
Once a month, take some time to review your journal entries and learn from them. Try to see patterns, look for areas where you can make progress. Here are some questions that you can use for review:
- What could I have done better that I didn’t see at the time?
- What is it that I already know I could do better, but I resist doing?
- What am I doing well already?
To read more on this subject make sure you join The BFRB Club!
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