In my weekly YouTube videos for The Weekly Process, I use the term ‘expressive writing’ instead of journaling or ‘therapeutic writing’ in some videos. As this term is used less commonly, I thought I would write this article to explain it. So, what is expressive writing? James Pennebaker coined the term in the 1980s. The…
Find emotional clarity through an innovative blend of expressive writing, CBT strategies and music I have written an in depth self-paced online course that you can take in your own time. The course will combine a new method for managing emotions with expressive writing to offer a powerful strategy that you can use to offload…
Another Sunday is here for us to do with what we choose. Do you feel that you have a choice over what you do today? I hope you do, or if you don’t, then I hope you feel good about what you have to do. In this article, I will discuss how to manage work…
I have written a lot about worry and how to manage it recently, and in many of those posts I have mentioned the worry tree. I thought I would create a page where you can easily find this template, and you can also download it for your own personal use at the end of this…
In our live expressive writing session last week, we looked at how to stop worrying, and we used a CBT technique called the Worry Tree to start training our brains to manage worry differently. The Worry Tree is a great strategy for worries, but there is another technique that you can use before this. It…
Identifying feelings using the Hot Cross Bun CBT Method Do you like the smell of hot cross buns? The cinnamon and mixed spice? If not, look away now. My partner just had a hot cross bun for breakfast, and the smell was gorgeous. I wasn’t planning on posting a picture of an actual hot cross…
What is this thing called worry? Have you ever found yourself thinking about something that hasn’t happened yet? Or thinking about what could happen and feeling anxious about it? This thinking can usually occur when we don’t want it to. It is a pattern of thinking that brings with it a feeling of anxiety, and…
I have been thinking about ways to structure our weekly process expressive writing sessions and have drawn up a template that may be useful. It builds on The Feeling Wheel of last week and adds another aspect (clarity) that could be rated before and after the writing session. You can download the template below: Join…
The feeling wheel is also known as the affective circumplex. My image is adapted from the work of Posner, Russel, and Peterson (2005), who described a way to categorise broadly how you feel from moment to moment. This feeling wheel is slightly different to the wheel of emotions that you might find online because I…
In this week’s Weekly Process post, I am thinking about Sunday night anxiety and why worry is something that can happen when we are trying to get to sleep on Sunday night (or whichever night is the night before you go back to work after a break). With Blue Monday coming up, it might be…
This is the first of The Weekly Process newsletters, and, as our memory is very good at remembering the first and last items of any ‘chunk’ of information, I feel a pressure to write the right thing here! “Welcome to my first post!” seems a bit of a waste of words really though, so I…
