Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Journaling Correctly
Ever pour your heart onto the page, feel lighter, and then find yourself stuck in the same loop a week later? We get it and we built this conversation to help you turn journaling from a quick reset into a reliable engine for transformation, clarity, and faith-centered growth.
We start by separating regulation from resolution. Venting can calm the nervous system, and that matters, but lasting change asks for more: noticing the thought-emotion link, testing whether a belief serves your aims, and choosing language that creates movement. You’ll hear a simple litmus test to spot when journaling becomes a pressure valve, plus a practical way to reframe without bypassing your experience. We walk through healthy detachment... caring without being consumed...so you can release ego drama without losing your drive, your goals, or your full emotional range.
Emotions are created by thoughts but live as sensations; if writing stays in the head, you miss vital data. We use somatic awareness to metabolize anger, anxiety, and confusion safely and fully.
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Welcome to Islamic Life Home Tool Podcast. How many tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful? Now your host, Dr. Gamal Usler. Hello, hello, hello, everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. The idea of today's podcast came from the fact that many of my clients love to journal. And there are so many Instagram posts about which journaling technique is the best, which journal to buy, and how many influencers out there sharing their journals and asking you to apply this technique or that. All of that is great, and I have nothing against it. Having choices while building the skill of journaling is amazing. I personally love journaling. I love to write things down. It helps me remember things, it helps me anchor myself in the reality that I want to create, especially if there's a reality that I want to continue to believe. And it helps me recognize the things that I want to release and that are unhelpful. So why do I call this podcast journaling correctly? And how are you going to journal correctly? Because really, there's no correct way to journal. The way you journal, especially if it helps you, is the correct way to journal. But there are women out there who want to journal and don't find the benefit in it, or they don't find this practice sustainable. So I want to tell you that there are so many benefits of this that you can utilize and how you can make it sustainable. Most women, when they sit down to journal, they're subconsciously sitting down to find out what's wrong with them. I mean, that's overall not a good idea. First of all, when you look for something, the brain gives you answers for exactly that. If you sit down to look to find out what's wrong with you, the brain will tell you exactly that. So first you have to have a beneficial reason to journal, and the answers you're trying to find will somehow help you. And I'm gonna give you plenty of those reasons here. With the current social media and the work environments, it's very natural to start developing inattention because that's what you've been practicing all day. And nothing wrong with that, that's what current culture demands. And at some point, if you come across a realization that's gone out of hand and your thoughts are bouncing around, and it's hard to pinpoint the problem, and you somehow in the background keep feeling yucky during the day, but you can't figure out why. In all of this scenario, journaling is an excellent avenue to slow down your mind and find out what's going on. This is an excellent way to slow down your attention to figure out where the thought errors are creating an emotional burden in your day. Since your thoughts cause your emotions, journaling is an excellent way to reveal your thoughts to yourself in a world of inattention. The next reason you might want to journal is to create a difference between regulation or resolution. Journaling helps you feel calm, but that does not mean that you're necessarily changing something deeper that's a thought pattern in you. You might have experienced the feeling where you feel lighter after journaling, after letting your heart out and just writing it on paper. Your brain feels quieter, and you may even be proud of yourself for doing the work. But the real question is, does that peace last? And a lot of times for women who don't find the habit of journaling sustainable, the mistake they're making is that when they journal, they feel lighter immediately, but they don't slow down to examine what needs to change. If journaling only feels good in the moment, it's probably helping you regulate your nervous system, not resolving the root thoughts. And don't get me wrong, a regulated nervous system is a huge win. I will opt for journaling just to regulate my nervous system any day of the week. If that is all journaling did, I would take that every day. But journaling can do so much more. It does serve as a quick reset while it's helping you regulate yourself like anything else, like exercise, time with friends, going for a swim, having a quick wrestling match with your child, anything to reset. But all of this is not rewiring. Weird journaling surpasses in its benefits, and in my opinion, surpasses all of these other activities by a long shot, is that it gives you the opportunity for rewriting the thought patterns that you discover, especially if they're unhelpful or limiting thought patterns. And the litmus test that the way to figure out if you're just resetting or rewiring using journaling is if the same thought keeps reoccurring, then you're most likely journaling just to reset. This practice is not yet transforming you, it's just soothing you. Again, because I say it's just soothing you, I'm not saying it to minimize the effect of a soothed nervous system. I'm saying it because if that's all you do, you're probably not going to be able to keep up with the journaling practice. And it's not the full benefit of it. So what you're going to ask yourself instead is, am I repeating my thoughts over and over again, or are they changing at some level? If you keep looping back to the same story every few days, then journaling is serving as a pressure valve, not necessarily a shift in perspective. It's comfortable, but it's not changing. And that change itself is an amazing gift that journaling can give you. Next benefit is detachment, not necessarily avoidance. And I've talked previously about what detachment is. Becoming detached with your unhelpful thoughts, with your limiting belief patterns is the first step towards trying to rewire them. And detaching in this way does not mean you're numbing or escaping them or pretending that they don't exist. What journaling does in helping you detach from your negative thought patterns is that it lets you see them clearly without getting entangled with them. This detachment is not like I don't care. It's more like I care, but I'm not consumed by these thoughts. If during journaling you see a thought like he should have treated me better, instead of feeling bad about having that thought, instead of wrestling with it, instead of numbing the feelings that arise, you say, Oh look, that's that thought visiting again. You're not pushing it away, you're recognizing it, and you're not letting it move in permanently. And no matter how much you practice detachment, it does have its limits. You're not gonna float away from the difficult experiences of life, but it's going to get much better. You don't necessarily need to detach from everything. Some parts of your life, like goals, discomfort, ambition, require a certain attachment, and they require your strong associations, and this calls for your full emotional presence in order for you to live a life with its full spectrum. And this is where I split from pure quote-unquote detachment philosophy. I don't want to detach from life. I want to detach from my ego's drama. I don't want to detach from the dreams. I want to detach from the limiting beliefs that my ego feeds me about these dreams. Ego, like I said, how my friend taught me, is a tool you pick up when you need it, and you drop it when you don't need it. I still want to set goals, I still want to journal my way towards them. I want to build and create, and I want to collect failures on my way towards these goals. I want to feel the whole range of spectrum of emotions while doing it. I don't want to necessarily detach from it. And this is the exact kind of distinction that journaling will help you create. You're not using journaling to numb and completely detach. You're using things to pick up the things that you want to attach to and inquire willingly. You don't want to journal your way out of life. You want to be awake in it, consciously choosing what to attach to and what to give your attention to. You don't journal to fix your life or avoid negative emotions. If you reach for your journal, every time you feel a strong emotion, especially anger, you might be using it to escape the feeling instead of allowing it. And you can very easily fix for this issue by asking: are there emotions that you were trying to journal away? Or you're moving towards them and listening to the message behind them. For me, this most common emotion that I tried to journal away was anger. When I felt that spark, that tightness, that heat, I would immediately start coaching myself out of it, rationalizing, trying to reframe, trying to explain every point of view. But at some point I realized I wasn't feeling anger, I was managing it. Journaling does not have to be the immediate fire extinguisher to the emotion. It needs to be the container to feel it safely, fully, and all the way through. And for this process to occur, you have to have a body awareness. Your body must be a part of this process. Real emotional integration requires somatic awareness, noticing sensations, tension, your breath, warmth, movement, where these sensations lie. Emotions don't live in your thoughts. They are created by them. They live in your body, and your head happens to be a part of your body. So if your journaling happens only through the language, only through the rational part, only through the brain, you're missing half of the experience. Try writing and noticing where the feeling is sitting in your body. Where do I feel it most intensely in my body? When your thoughts meet sensation, that's where healing starts to happen. Then the next benefit of journaling is evolution. Journaling and coaching. There's an overlap with differences. Journaling and coaching both help you observe thoughts, but coaching adds structure and intentional redirection. Journaling and coaching overlap in self-awareness. And coaching adds the next question of okay, what now? I figured all of this out. Where do I need to go next? Where do I want to go next? Journaling helps you see the thought, separate from it. Coaching helps you shift. Journaling helps you witness an emotion. Coaching helps you reframe it into movement, into progress, into evolution. That includes both you coaching yourself or getting coached by somebody else. All of these steps matter. Journaling for relief and regulation, for awareness, and then detachment, and then journaling for transformation and evolution. Here, not only are you stepping into thinking and then out of your thinking, you're no longer the person doing the thinking. You're becoming the person who's watching yourself think, and being the watcher of the thinking immediately provides relief. And at that point, you can ask yourself, why am I thinking this? Is this helping me or hurting me? You just need to know which one you're doing and why. And also continue to notice when journaling soothes you or takes you away from transformation. Staying at any of these stages is not wrong. They're all part and benefits of journaling, but you might want to explore further and further stages for your ongoing evolution and growth. And the takeaway here is to pay attention to your intention behind journaling. The real question isn't is journaling good or bad? It's why am I journaling right now? Am I running away from something that I don't want to feel? Or am I sitting down to meet it? So if I am to break it down into steps, the very first step is going to be step zero. What journaling is not for? It's not for finding out what's wrong with you or your life. When you sit down looking for what's wrong, the brain will gladly provide a list. It will give you the evidence. And while you might be thinking you're journaling for reflection, it's just more and more of self-criticism. Then there's no way journaling is going to be sustainable or beneficial. Instead of asking what's wrong with me, just ask what's going on here? What am I witnessing? Step two is journaling for regulation. And the purpose here is to stay calm within your nervous system and bring order to your racing thoughts. At this stage, journaling will help you slow down enough to hear your mind clearly. It's like the equivalent of taking rest in your mind. And when you're writing at this stage, you might be emotionally venting, dumping, or listing, and all of that is okay, especially if your nervous system resets from chaos to coherence. Step two is journaling for awareness. And here the purpose is to reveal the thought and the emotion connection. Here you're gonna start to see patterns. What thoughts are creating your emotions and what stories are on repeat? What inner dialogue is driving your day-to-day activities? You might begin to notice I'm feeling anxious when I think about that conversation. This is the sentence that shows up in my mind every time I feel small. At this level, you're learning your emotional alphabet language. Step three is journaling for detachment. Here the purpose is to separate yourself from your thoughts. Here you start to evolve into thinking he should have treated me better, to telling yourself, I'm having a thought that he should have treated me better. And then you can decide if this thought helps you or not. You're no longer fusing with the story, you're observing it. There is this healthy detachment here, or what otherwise also is called non-attachment, which is more like I care but I'm not consumed, while unhealthy detachment is I don't care anymore and I'm trying to suppress this thought. Through this stage of journaling, you will figure out what helps you and what doesn't and what thought to release. Step four is journaling for embodiment. And this is a very highly evolved skill. This is to integrate your emotions throughout your body, not just the sentences in your mind. You start noticing sensations with your awareness. And the sensations might be heat in your chest or clenching of the jaw with tension. Or for me, when I'm confused, my brain feels like it's physically twisting when it's actually not. Emotions live in the body. When you are at this level of awareness of physical sensations, you're letting the body join the conversation, you're opting into receiving a lot more input. And this is extremely helpful information. Then the next step, step five, is journaling for transformation. To move from witnessing to rewiring. Now your journaling becomes very intentional. You're not just recording or discovering what's happening, you're shaping into how you want to be, what you want to become. Asking questions like, what can I reframe this into that doesn't bypass my experience, but also gets me into growth and movement. All of this collectively puts you from reactivity to creation, from being a thinker to becoming the observer of your mind to eventually becoming the creator of your life. All of this is to see if your journaling is making you a deep thinker or a ruminative thinker. Meaning, are you coming back to the same topic and thinking about it over and over again in different ways? Or are you thinking about what needs to be changed and distancing yourself from your limiting patterns and allowing yourself room to change? A deep thinker comes up with a different result when a ruminative thinker comes up with the same result of a truncated life, of a difficult life, while it might even look like they're thinking about things differently. Ruminative thinkers circle about the same thing in different thoughts over and over again, but there's no good outcome. A deep thinker uses journaling to expand, where each session of journaling ends in a new insight and clarity. And as per usual, while I have given you very neat and clean categories, nothing in life exists like that, just like separate levels. When you start journaling based on the ideas of this podcast, you will see that there is a lot of overlap. You might think that that's not supposed to happen, but that's not the case. I always simplify things in order to create a deeper impact, but things don't exist as clean categories when you put them into practice. And all of that is okay. If you find yourself overlapping or jumping from one stage to the other, everything is fine. When you integrate any or all of these categories, you're going to be living the highest level of purpose, especially using the journaling technique, how it's supposed to be used. And that is for the reasons of integration and evolution. The purpose here is to blend everything: regulation, awareness, detachment, embodiment, transformation, and practice it into daily life where you actually start to feel better and see results in your life. You can, and I welcome to journal when you're in a crisis, but you eventually journal to grow. You journal to maintain clarity, gratitude, and creative flow. And it becomes a practice of you aligning with your highest self. To be able to live what I write, I absolutely love living at that level of journaling. This is where the practice is truly sustainable and transformative in the real sense of the word. This is where journaling has become the source of thezkiyah, an act of self-purification. In the Quran, the Qalb, the heart, is the true center of perception. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, they have hearts with which they do not understand, meaning your heart is the instrument of knowledge. When you're journaling only from your head, you're in the superficial stages. When you're journaling from heart, you're purifying and you're improving and transforming. This difference might feel nuanced for somebody who's new at this, but it is so important. Education in Islam is not just about collecting information and regurgitating it, it's about the zkiyah, purification through understanding, implementation, practical application. True learning transforms character. It brings your soul closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. When your journaling evolves through these stages and you're not just sitting there trying to find out what's wrong, you will uncover what's absolutely true about you. You will uncover more and more of your pure self, the original primordial self, your fitra. God-given nature underneath all of the noise. So this way journaling has become a spiritual act. It is self-help, but mostly it is the act of self-return. With that, I pray to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, Ya Allah, let my words on paper be a mirror of the truth, not a recycling of pain. Guide my thoughts from confusion to clarity. Take me away from rumination into reflection and self-compassion. Guide me towards the skiyah and recognizing my true self. And help me release what no longer serves my soul. Make my journaling a bridge between my heart and your true wisdom. Amin Ya Rabul Amin. Please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.