Journal with me: Kari makes a collage page

0:12 Hi, I'm Kari

Oh hi, I’m Kari. I am the creator of this journal. I made it. Well, not physically, but I designed it.

I am not a therapist, but I’m someone who has lived experience of mental health problems, and that includes anxiety, depression and several other things that make it a bit more difficult for me to cope with emotions, or to regulate my emotions.

But I’m also someone who worked and is working in mental health, helping people who also have issues with anxiety and emotion regulation. And I made this journal to help people like us.

1:08 Giving your attention somewhere to go

This evening for me is something very relaxing. I’m doing something that I truly enjoy and I am just living in the moment.

So what I’m really doing here is mindfulness. It’s my kind of mindfulness. Why? Because my mind is not anywhere else. It’s just focusing on what I’m doing. I’m in the present and I’m just enjoying the moment.

1:43 A bit of science: three systems

Nothing here is random. The journal is based on skills from real therapies like DBT. And every so often I’ll pop in with a bit of science using this diagram.

Three systems that balance our moods. Threat, the alarm that puts us on alert. Drive, the busy one that chases and achieves. And soothing: calm, content, connected. For a lot of us the first two run loud and soothing gets squeezed out. This is the theory behind the practice.

Worry runs on the brain’s background network, the one that chatters when nothing else is happening. When your hands and eyes are busy, that network tends to quieten and a task-focused one takes over. That’s why an absorbing activity eases the chatter for a while.

2:36 Why stickers?

Why stickers? Because they make me happy! Stickers make me happy, truly. They remind me of something that I really, really loved doing when I was a kid. And it doesn’t matter how old you are, you can always “sticker”.

A memory you loved as a child still carries its feeling with it. Deliberately choosing a happy one, stickers say, reliably lifts mood and makes people feel more connected in dozens of experiments. In Paul Gilbert’s terms, that’s inviting the soothing system in.

3:17 No rules, not judging yourself

You don’t have to be artistic, you don’t have to be creative. You can be creative, I think I am, but I don’t know how to draw for example. So you can do something like I’m doing here with this page. You can do a collage and it can be a messy collage and that’s fine. It’s a representation of where you are at the moment that you made it.

That’s why this journal doesn’t have any rules. You can do whatever you want. For instance, if I don’t like how something turned out, I can just glue something on top of it, or put a sticker on it. So there’s no way of ruining the page. If it looks messy, well, that’s how you were feeling that day. And you can always do something else on top of the part that you don’t like.

Being harsh with yourself keeps the brain’s error checking and threat systems busy, and a body on alert can’t settle. Speaking kindly to yourself uses different circuits, the soothing ones. Perfectionism sits firmly on the alarm side. “No rules” is a step towards calm.

4:48 Doing what works

So in this case, I didn’t like how the heart turned out. So what I did is I went over it with a different marker, and then a different one, and then I used decorative tape. Then I put some stickers. There’s always a chance to “sticker bomb”. And I did it until I was happy with the results. It looks pretty to me. It has to make me happy, so it’s fine.

When you repair something rather than give up, you’ve just proved to yourself that you had some control. In animal studies, sensing control is exactly what switches off the giving up response that sits close to low mood. That’s the idea behind small, doable repairs.

5:37 A smile on purpose

In this page I glued photos of my favourite creature, my doggy Wednesday. She is my emotional support creature and she’s someone who’s really, really important to me. Someone who always improves my mood. So even when I’m not with her, now I have her on that page. So for me, it’s a comforting page. And that’s something that you can do. You can have a page with things that when you just look at them, they’re going to make you feel better.

There’s a technique from DBT called half smile, willing hands, used to calm the nervous system. In this case, I’m relieving stress by making myself smile while working on this page.

Does a smile change how you feel? A little when you do it on purpose. The biggest test yet, nearly 4,000 people in 19 countries, found a small but real lift. And time with a dog you love, eye to eye, has been linked to the bonding hormone oxytocin in both of you. A photo can’t do all that, but it can call up the feeling of that bond.

6:54 Every time I open the journal

Tonight, I managed to shift my thoughts from the things that were worrying me to what I was doing. And by the end, I had a page that has made me smile every time I’ve opened the journal since.