Before Susan Cain’s Quiet: and Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person showed me being a highly sensitive introvert was not only normal, but vital to society, was an ice age. My personal Late Paleozoic Icehouse where I constantly questioned why I was different, resulting in a flood of emotions I struggled to understand.

Way back when I was a teenager (LBJ was president), I went to therapy from time to time which included depression medications. Relief was short-lived. The same questions, the same emotions returned over and over again. I felt like Sisyphus rolling a heavy stone uphill to have it fall back down. Two steps forward and one step back. Or more like one step forward and two steps back at times. Straight A’s one semester, flunking a course or two the next.

Years later, I found a therapist who introduced me to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Of course, as a typical HSP, I had to read everything I could find on CBT and other dialectal behavior theories such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

The basic premise of these theories is that something triggers an emotional response. For both CBT and ACT, the trigger is a thought. For NLP, the trigger can be any neurological stimulus such as scent, image, sensation, thought, or memory. Each theory takes a different approach to reduce negative emotions. However, you can use their techniques at the same time.

With CBT, you challenge the triggering thought to uncover why it makes no sense. Logical fallacies include:

• All or nothing thinking;
• Ignoring the positive and magnifying the negative;
• Thinking one incident defines your life;
• Mind-reading others;
• Always expecting draconian results;
• Thinking everything is about you;
• Believing that only you know what is right or fair;
• Assuming that you should or must do things a certain way; or
• Comparing yourself to anyone.

For instance, a woman suddenly experiences a sense of anger (identifying the emotion). Then, she recognizes that it started when a friend didn’t respond to her birthday wish on Facebook within an hour (identifying the trigger). Next, she realizes she considered it an intentional slight (mind-reading), but her friend might have been too busy to respond to the FB post (identifying the fallacy).

To complete the process, she sees that the worst thing that could happen is her friend intentionally ignored her (identifying the worst-case scenario). In which case, she would ask her friend if she was mad at her and take steps to make amends (identifying actions to take in the worst-case scenario).

The negative emotion is immediately relieved when you resolve the negative trigger in your journal. But no matter how many times you resolve the same trigger, the negative thought will return.

With ACT, the goal is to quickly determine whether the thought that triggered the emotion will in any way be helpful or useful in your life. If not, you should ignore it and let it slip away.

My favorite image for this process is a non-stop stream of floating bubbles. Only those rare ones with a bubble within a bubble are helpful and should get attention. The rest are negative remnants of our species’ survival instincts. Letting them pass by without notice avoids irrational negative emotions.

Every negative emotion you disprove or let slip away is a victory. But the battle never ends. Negative thoughts and emotions bubble up constantly, hoping to slip through your CBT and ACT nets.

Our self-talk or inner dialogue is constant and often negative. It was a survival technique developed over millennia. We’re hardwired to remember bad experiences more than good experiences so that leopards, lions, and eagles don’t get us the next time. A unique HSP talent that makes us great at anticipating and avoiding dangers or hurting others.

NLP uses similar techniques to CBT and ACT to change the association of a trigger from a negative to a positive association. Triggers in NLP can be thoughts, scents, physical sensations, images, situations, or anything that starts a neurological response. Popular NLP guru Tony Robbins uses the example of how he quickly breaks the fear of flying to explain the process.

Robbins asks the subject to discuss flying. Every time signs of fear arise, he splashes water in the subject’s face without saying a word. If the subject balks, he avoids any explanation and encourages the subject to keep talking about flying. Eventually, the subject breaks out in laughter, replacing the negative association with a positive one, and the fear of flying disappears.

Another NLP technique is to create a sensory anchor. I used one to control anxiety when I quit smoking by using a worry stone. Mine was a smooth stone I found on a beach. I kept the stone in my pocket and rubbed it anytime I was very relaxed and happy (and not smoking) before starting nicotine withdrawal. Hikes in the woods, walks on the beach, watching sunrises and sunsets all charged the stone with positive associations.

When I stopped smoking, I rubbed the stone anytime an urge for a cigarette became strong. It worked. I haven’t had a craving for a cigarette in thirty-four years, and it continues to work for any anxiety to this day. All I have to do now is rub my s middle finger and thumb together to get the positive association. And I still charge it when I’m feeling especially relaxed and happy.

While NLP is great for breaking associations with situations and neurological stimuli, it faces the same challenge as CBT and ACT regarding negative thoughts creating negative emotions. Self-talk, especially negative self-talk, is constant and will always return.

That is why it so often seems that we face the same feelings and thoughts over and over again. Even when we learn a thought is irrational or so unimportant that we should ignore it, it will return. The constant negative thoughts put us back on the hamster wheel where keeping an emotions journal can be most helpful.

In 1993 I started keeping a journal with a primitive database program. I made fields for the most common CBT questions: Date, Emotion, Arena (life areas), Trigger, Rational View, Worst Case Scenario, and Actions for what to do if the worst-case scenario happened. Those questions apply to CBT, ACT, and NLP. Keeping them in a database meant I could access them in powerful ways.

In 1996/1997 I learned programming to create a standalone program called Emotions Manager and a later version called Emotions Manager 2000. Individuals, schools, institutions, and even prisons used it around the globe. In addition to the immediate benefits from writing down and reframing thoughts and emotions, it was a great tool to focus therapy sessions.

One of the most beneficial features was its graphical statistical analysis. It instantly showed the user’s dominant emotions in any period (day/week/month/year/all-time) and how they changed over those periods. That made it easy to spot hot spots and trends.

A user might see, for example, that “shame” showed a significant increase in a particular month. A review of all “shame” entries in that month would uncover the reason for the rise in shame. It could be anything, social media trolls, feeling inadequate for a new project or position, ending a relationship, or painful childhood memories.

A deeper dive by searching for all “shame” entries and the arena, let’s say “career,” would likely reveal a trend – a self-dialogue script that repeats in your head and probably has been in your subconscious for years.

“You can’t do anything right,”
“You’ll always screw things up,”
“You never should’ve gotten that position,”
“Others are more qualified than you.”

Once you see the script, you’ll likely know where it came from, overly critical teachers, unsupportive parents, gaslighting, bullies.

It is these trends that provide the most helpful information. Sometimes, just identifying the internal script and where it came from can be enough to turn an irrational emotion into a rational thought process of why the implanted script is false or why the outcome may not be as draconian as you fear.

But the script will return again and again. This is where going back through your Rational Views for the emotion/arena will remind you why the script is false. It is also a great way to focus therapy sessions and conversations with trusted loved ones.

Emotions Manager received positive reviews from professionals and users. Its most significant criticism was that it would take lots of entries over months or years to be most beneficial, and most people don’t want to sit and type out notes that often. But, of course, HSPs, Introverts, and Empaths are precisely the ones who deeply consider things such as emotions and their origins and will benefit most from making and reviewing journal entries.

By the time I came up with Emotions Manager, I had a few years of entries that I immediately imported into the program. After decades of therapy and medications for depression, I expected the statistical analysis would show “sad” as my dominant emotion. A large bar extending up from “anxious” shocked me when I pulled up my overall emotions. It was more than twice as high as the bar for “sad.”

A deep dive into the arenas where anxiety ruled supreme and the scripts associated with the anxious/arena combinations pinpointed the causes. That allowed me to come up with strategies to reduce anxiety. Therapy focused on those issues, ad hoc medication for the most anxious situations, administrative decisions such as delegating anxiety-producing tasks that did not need my personal attention, and finding the best environment and tools for those tasks I could not delegate helped lower the anxious bar.

From those changes, my law practice flourished, and I saw a significant drop in “anxious” entries. Of course, I still had to deal with “sad” entries, but anxiety no longer got in the way. The downside was that my busier law practice didn’t leave enough time for me to update the Emotions Manager program as Windows versions constantly changed. As a result, Emotions Manager eventually became incompatible with Microsoft Windows.

By the time Emotions Manager 2000 stopped working in Windows, my anxiety entries dropped below my “sad” entries, and even my sad entries were lower than they had been. But I had no doubt the parade of negative thoughts would continue and needed a way to track them. The simple solution was a password-protected Microsoft Word document.

Microsoft Word and most other document programs allow you to require a password to access a document and encrypt its content. Both of these protections are important. You have to feel safe recording your true thoughts and feelings to benefit from a journal. A secure password and encryption mean only you can see your entries. But also make sure you close your journal when not in use, so no one stumbles across your journal.

I use my password-protected journal for more than recording emotions. To effectively search emotions entries, however, I add the emotion/arena after the entry date. So, for example, I might add “angry/family” after the date and before the entry.

Then I can quickly find similar entries by emotion, arena or a combination of the two. I can search for “angry/” “/family” or “angry/family” to see how I dealt with these situations in the past and to spot trends. It doesn’t give me helpful statistical analysis, but it does provide the immediate relief of putting emotion in rational perspective and uncovering unhealthy internal scripts.

To make searching effective, limit the number of available emotions and arenas. I do this by listing only seven core emotions, those that I most likely will encounter and need to focus on, and eighteen arenas or areas of my life. The emotions I use are:

• Happy
• Sad
• Anxious
• Shame
• Disappointed
• Anger, and
• Hurt

Each of these is within Brené Brown’s list of core emotions. All other emotions can fit within these seven, but of course, you can pick the ones you most often confront. In any event, the list should be limited to no more than ten emotions.

The arenas (life areas) I use are loosely based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

• Nutrition
• Exercise
• Hygiene
• Physical Health
• Mental Well Being
• Children
• Spouse
• Romance
• Family
• Friends
• Leisure
• Career
• Finances
• Spirituality
• Goals
• Habits
• Virtue
• Other

(When recording emotion/arena for Physical Health and Mental Well Being I shorten them to “physical” and “mental,” such as disappointed/physical or shame/mental. “

The “other” arena is for a specific area not covered by the other arenas, which needs attention at any given point in my life. It should only be used to apply to one new area at a time. You’ll be surprised at how almost anything in life fits with the first seventeen arenas.

At the very top of the journal, I keep a template of the questions for each entry: Date: Emotion/Arena: Trigger: Rational View: Worst-Case Scenario: Actions: that I cut and past for each new entry. You can use multiple Emotion/Arena entries, like anxious/career and shame/career. The Worst-Case Scenario and Actions sections apply most for Anxious but consider them for every entry.

From your first entry, you should experience a greater partnership with your thoughts and emotions. The more you use the journal, the more entries you make, the greater the benefit. After months you will start putting irrational thoughts and negative emotions in perspective instinctively.

While writing this post, it dawned on me that the best way to keep this type of journal would be in a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel. It can use all of the fields that Emotions Manager 2000 had and provide the same search and statistical analysis.

My current familiarity with spreadsheets is relatively basic. But I’m sure I will be able to create a template in Microsoft Excel and possibly OpenOffice (free) with complete search and statistical analysis over the next few months. If you’re starting to keep an emotions journal now, it will take at least that long for your entries to have statistical significance.

That gives you the option of using a password-protected/encrypted document as described above or starting your journal with a simple spreadsheet (also password-protected/encrypted). Then, when the template is complete, you can import your entries into the new template.

To start a spreadsheet emotions journal:

• Set columns with the following headers:
  • Date
  • Emotion
  • Arena
  • Trigger
  • Rational View
  • Worst Case Scenario
  • Actions
• Make sure you password protect/encrypt the spreadsheet.
• Make entries for both good and bad emotional experiences.
• Check back at https://speciesofone.com or follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram for news of when the final template is done.