Journaling can be one of the most therapeutic tools in the world for working through tough emotions.
And let’s be honest – when you’ve got acne, you’re probably dealing with a boat load of tough emotions!
What is journaling exactly?
It’s the practice of keeping a diary of sorts – a written record – of your life. It could explore thoughts, feelings, plans, hopes, or pains surrounding stressful events. It’s an open canvas of self expression and exploration.
The Benefits of Journaling:
- Help you clarify your thoughts and organize them outside your brain; it’s often easier to come up with solutions to problems once the thoughts are out of your head and onto paper.
- Helps you fully explore and release emotions involved with traumatic events; gives you a safe place to vent and be honest about your emotions without feeling judged.
- Can be a profound journey of self discovery and sometimes spiritual development. Allows you to know yourself better and understand the meaning you give your life.
- If you’re writing about happy events, it can help you remember the little details of your life that you would have likely forgotten, creating a nostalgic record that you will enjoy looking back on for years to come.
- Serves as a record to show you how far you’ve come on certain issues when you look back on your writing.
- It’s scientifically proven to counteract negative effects of stress, which means combatting illness in general, as well as strengthening the immune system and cognitive function.
- Accessible to everyone and inexpensive – at the very least, all you need is pen and paper! (but feel free to journal on a computer too)
Tracy’s Journaling History
Personally I’ve always been big on journaling.
I started keeping a journal in Grades 6 and 7, relaying all the adolescent angst of middle school (hilariously embarrassing to look back on these school girl musings now).
I picked it up again later on, journaling my life from ages 18 to 24, keeping track of all the travel, boyfriends, and other events of my young adult life. This has proven to to be a seriously fun piece of nostalgia to look back on and smile.
And then the trauma of severe acne hit me by storm, and that’s when The Love Vitamin came long to serve as my latest form of journaling.
I quit private journaling at this point, as I moved my emotional journey to the blogosphere so I could work through my emotions about acne with everyone else who was going through the same thing.
Yes it’s different doing it publicly, but it has still worked nonetheless. Organizing my thoughts, pains, and emotions in writing has been incredibly therapeutic to me, and I don’t know if I would have even been able to work through the trauma without it.
How Do I Journal Through My Emotions About Acne?
There really are no rules to journaling – just put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – and let it flow. Be as honest and candid as absolutely possible. Never hide anything from yourself.
Make sure you date each entry, and don’t worry about punctuation, grammar, or spelling. No one’s going to see it. Don’t let perfectionist tendencies get in your way!
Here are some ideas for getting started on journaling through your emotions about acne (or any other negative situation that you are dealing with in your life).
- Just completely rant. Are you angry? Sad? Frustrated? Just tell your paper how pissed you are about everything to do with having acne. Go into detail about it. Blow off all that steam that you’ve built up.
- Write about your hopes and fears surrounding acne
- Is there any way that this experience with acne could an opportunity to grow as a person? Is there a silver lining to all this? Are there lessons that you’ve learned that will benefit you in the long run?
- Review how you’ve been approaching your experience with acne (emotionally or physically). What’s been working and what’s not been working?
- Come up with plans for how you are going to move forward in the situation. What will you change?
- Look up quotes about the emotion you’re feeling and copy them into your journal
- If you’re not sure where to start, begin journal entries with things such as “Today I felt…” or “I’m worried because …” or “I was excited because …”
- Take or leave any suggestion here. Only write about what’s important to you.
Happy journaling!
Lots of love,
Tracy xo
How do you use journaling to help you move through painful life events like having acne? Do you have any ideas that might help people with journaling?
Share in the comments below! Also, check out my Naturally Clear Skin Bootcamp program for a ton of practical emotional work and journaling exercises to help you heal your soul – as well as your skin – from the awfulness that is acne.
6 Responses
Hey Tracy 🙂 Long time reader, first time commenter…I love that you put this out there as a suggestion for emotional management. I’ve kept a journal since i could write lol. Lately though I’m almost too angry to do it. I’ve been dealing with acne for over a decade on and off and in the last few months my entries have just declined into excessive profanity out of the sheer frustration of it all.
I knew i had hormonal issues and was treating for estrogen dominance and low progesterone ( Estroblock and just started Vitex) but being stupid and not having a lot o fmoney I didn’t get a hormone test until just now. And my progesterone is super low, so I guess the vitex is good, but my estrogen is incredibly low as well so now I don’t know if the chasteberry is even still a good idea(?)
I stopped the Estroblock because it scares me now. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do but the only suggestions anyone will give me are birth control pills (I quit them years ago!) or hormone replacement therapy like for menopausal women…I’m twenty three!
I’ve tried so many things and I honestly just want to burn my journal and trash my house and cry right now because nothing is helping. Even my naturopath admits he isn’t sure how to help me so there’s a few hundred more bucks down the drain.
I just can’t take it anymore. So I guess I’ll comment and ask you (why not try one last thing? Maybe the post being about journaling was a sign to get my attention…you never know with fate)…is chasteberry ok for someone with low progesterone & low estrogen? Is there anything else a young woman with low estrogen should do? Everyone is full of advice about estrogen dominance but I just can’t figure out what to do in the opposite case.
Thank you in advance for any help you might be able to give. I love your blog. Sorry for the rant.
Hi Bee,
I understand that pain and frustration… I’ve learned something over the years and that a big part of emotional management is learning to accept how you feel right now, no matter how that is… meaning if you need to scream and cry and be angry, then just go with that. Trying to resist it makes it worse and leads to more stressful habits and behaviours.
Anyway from what I know, yes chasteberry (aka vitex for anyone reading this) is supposed to help raise low progesterone. And Estroblock isn’t supposed to lower your overall estrogen but to help you metabolize any bad estrogen and estrogen mimickers into good estrogen. So it might not actually be bad for you – but remember that I am not all knowing (nor a trained naturopath or doctor), and I can’t give you any guarantee about how you will react to these supplements.
Also, just on an aside, maybe check out this article, it might help you. Sometimes when people have literally tried the entire gamut of things to treat their acne, this is actually the answer (but often the hardest one for people to see): https://thelovevitamin.com/14149/self-acceptance-changed-skin-life/
Thank you so much for responding and for your kind words. It means a lot to me and has given me some things to think about.
🙂
Hi Bee,
I understand how you must be feeling SO discouraged right now. It’s definitely hard to journal and chronicle your thoughts when it feels like nothing is working – especially when ‘the experts’ are telling you as much! SO frustrating.
Tracy’s advice is great and I found another blog that is quite helpful for treating hormonal problems: http://www.larabriden.com/the-pms-solution-3-steps-to-hormonal-resilience/#more-1950. You may want to check her out. In this post she mentions Tribulus and Shatavari as herbs to treat low estrogen.
Best of luck! I wish you much healing.
Thank you so much, Meagan 🙂 This is very kind of you and extremely helpful. Much love.
Hi Bee,
I’ve been meaning to write Tracy an email for a while now to thank her and tell her how I finally healed my acne (fingers crossed that it sticks!), but I’ll go ahead give a quick summary now, because I completely sympathize with your frustration, and maybe this can help you right away.
The first step in healing my acne was fixing my gut, and this was a very important step, but I won’t go into detail here because everyone reading this website probably knows all about the importance of a healthy gut. The second step was trickier and took me forever to figure out! Apparently I am very sensitive to chemicals and metals. I had to switch or eliminate my shampoo, conditioner, soap, deodorant, toothpaste, laundry detergent, hand soap, dish soap, cleaning products, etc. I had to stop using all hand soap and paper towels in public bathrooms. I can’t blow my nose with tissues. I switched my laundry detergent twice. I’m pretty sure I’m sensitive to coconut derivatives, which are in most “natural” products. Even ingredients that don’t sound like coconut are often coconut-based! It’s tough to find products without coconut. Dr. Bronner’s is coconut based. So is baby soap. Most deodorants have either metals in them or coconut derivatives. I can’t wear jewelry either. Even simple silver or gold stud earrings give me jawline acne. I stopped using earphones with metal on them. It might be a nickel or copper allergy, but I’m not sure. I found a lot of information on the internet about chemical sensitivities, particularly to things like sodium lauryl sulfate and so forth, but I never imagined that I could be as sensitive as I am. Each time I removed another product, I saw an improvement in my acne. If it seems overwhelming at first, start by eliminating a couple at a time and you might already see improvement.
I hope this information helps some of you out there. I wish I could have know this years ago.
Best,