When you were in high school, what did you do to relax and calm down after a stressful day? Take a hot bath? Eat comfort foods? Call a friend? Go for a walk in a park? Watch a TV show? Read a novel?
Back then, you had a go-to list of comforts to unwind, but as an expat, finding those same comforts in a new environment can be challenging. Our lifelong friends are in impossible timezones, the comfort foods we were raised on are probably not available locally, hot baths may not be an option (hot water may not even be an option!), parks may be too far away, and even books or movies may not be available in a comfort language.
Part of the challenge of cross-cultural living is that you have to learn new patterns of dealing with stress even as there are more things to stress you out.
I’ve written extensively about how to maintain your emotional and mental health as an expat. I’m glad today to add another tool to that toolbox of ways to help you stay emotionally healthy as an expat despite the stressors you face: reflective journaling.
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Why journaling is crucial to thriving
Reflective journaling isn’t anything fancy—many people just call it journaling—but it’s a method of intentionally reflecting on the emotions that you’ve faced during the day so that you and your brain can process them and be ready for the next day. The reason you need to do this is so that your brain can process emotions and events that you’ve encountered. If you’d like to explore more why your brain needs to process emotions, I recommend reading Emotional Agility by Dr. Susan David. She addresses the topic extensively with loads of research and I found it very helpful.
Here is a brief summary of some of the benefits that journaling gives to expats:
1. Journaling processes emotions
The reality is that, when there are unprocessed emotions, particularly “negative” ones (anger, grief, sadness, loss, etc.), the failure to address and process them causes them to create underlying stress on our minds. That stress which never goes away builds up and results in burnout or depression. Though our expat lives are full of joy—enough joy that it’s worth the difficulties!—they also inherently come with grief and losses (disconnection from friends, distance from family, etc.). If you fail to process that grief and loss, you can expect a faster path to burnout and depression. I even heard one counselor who specializes in working with expats, say that the biggest challenge in expats she counsels stem from unprocessed grief.
When we fail to process grief, hurt, anger, frustration, it shows up as unending stress, Raging Expat Syndrome, burnout, or depression. When it happens, we often blame it on the culture and limp back to our passport countries frustrated and sad at the loss of a dream. Then, when we do better in our passport culture, we have further confirmation that our host culture was the problem when, in reality, the issue was the unprocessed grief we’d endured. This could have been avoided, however, with intentional, proactive, reflection and processing of our emotions and experiences.
Dr. Susan David addresses this extensively in Chapter Four of Emotional Agility, but one reason journaling is so helpful is because you become aware of your feelings and experiences. Too often people “stuff” their emotions or “stew” over an event, but neither action helps you be self-aware of what you’re feeling and then be able to process it. Merely “labeling” an emotion has immense power for helping you deal with it in a helpful manner. This is one reason I have an emotion wheel printed and in my journal. Looking at it can help me label my emotion, become self-aware, and process the emotion and the implications of it.
2. Journaling improves self-awareness
In addition to helping us process our experiences, journaling improves your self-awareness: What were you feeling when that happened? Why did that event frustrate you so much? Why did you respond with such anger when that driver cut you off? What are the recurring patterns?
Especially when you first enter a culture and go through a period of transition and are bombarded with new stimuli, journaling gives you a moment to slow down, reflect, and evaluate them and yourself inside those experiences.
3. Journaling cultivates gratitude
It’s not merely processing uncomfortable emotions or events, but intentionally recording positive experiences for which you’re grateful has massive mental and emotional health benefits. I’ve written an entire article on this topic, so I won’t repeat it all here (see: The Art of Gratitude: An Expat’s Journey to Joy).
When you’re busy and overwhelmed, especially when overwhelmed by negative emotions and new experiences, taking just a few minutes to reflect on the positive things for which you’re grateful can provide you with the stability and endurance to keep going.
How to reflectively journal
There is no right or wrong way to journal; the important thing is to do what works for you and makes sense to you. The goal of reflective journaling isn’t to record the events of a day but, instead, to record and explore your emotional responses to the events of the day, week, month, or year.
Here’s one specific method of reflective journaling that has been scientifically studied with powerful results. The method summarized here is called “expressive writing” and was developed and popularized by James Pennebaker. You can read more analysis of it and its proven psychological benefits here and here, but below is a brief summary of the technique as described by Dr. David in Emotional Agility.
1. Open a notebook, a new document on your computer, or a voice recorder. Remove or close anything that might distract you.
2. Start a timer for 20 minutes. You can write longer than this, but don’t do less than 20 minutes so that your brain has enough time to “wander” and contemplate.
3. Write about an emotional experience. This could be anything from today, the last week, month, or even year. As you write, don’t worry about punctuation, coherence, or clarity—don’t edit as you go, and don’t write for someone else to read it. Just explore where your mind takes you, “curiously and without judgment.” Don’t shut down or judge the feelings that arise because you “shouldn’t feel them”; acknowledge what you’re feeling.
4. Do this several days. Most typically do it for 3-4 days; some methods give some additional structure to each day, but you don’t have to follow this structure if you don’t want to.
5. Be done. Burn the document or save it, it doesn’t matter. The point of the exercise is to get the emotions and experience “outside of yourself” to get perspective about it.
Conclusion
Journaling, especially reflective journaling, is a valuable tool that every expat should have in their emotional health toolbox. That doesn’t mean you’ll need to use the tool every day for it to be helpful. While I try to do gratitude journaling each day (though I fail more often than I do it!), I find that I do reflective journaling about once a month as part of my habits of rest. Whether you practice it regularly or not, just knowing about the tool is helpful so that, if you have a particularly emotional event and aren’t sure what to do, you can use the tool to help you process your emotion, stay healthy, and deal with the ups and downs of cross-cultural life that are sure to come.
There have been times as an expat when I’ve wanted to quit, throw in the towel, and just go back to my passport country where “life makes sense.” Invariably, each arose after an emotional event and, just as invariably, my desire to quit arose because I wasn’t processing that emotion but was stewing on it or stuffing it inside. Instead of making plans to leave, I’ve pulled reflective journaling out of my emotional health toolbox and processed what happened. Somehow, it feels almost magical; labeling the emotion I’m feeling and writing about it enables me to stay sane, safe, and in my host country.
The science suggests the same will happen to you, so give it a try and do some reflective journaling.
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Looking for footnotes? I think this is the first article I’ve ever written without them. I don’t know if I should be proud or sad…