How to Reason With Your Emotions Through Comic Journaling
Beat procrastination and other struggles through humor and visualization
COMIC JOURNALING
Beat procrastination and other struggles through humor and visualization
We’ve all been there. Whether you are struggling with a mental disorder or not, you have most likely struggled with procrastination at some point in your life. In fact, maybe you are also struggling with negative self-talk, which only makes everything so much harder. In addition to therapy and all the other good old professional help out there, my comic journaling method, suited for both artists and non-artists, is here to help further!
I first described comic journaling for mental health in this article, also linked below. The main idea behind comic journaling is to visualize something that is bothering you by drawing it in a very simple way and then using humor against it. And the whole point of this method is to be fast and not necessarily super pretty, so don’t worry about your artistic skills and draw those stick men and women.
Comic Journaling for Mental Health
Did you know that making comics can make you feel better?medium.com
In this article, I will show you how you can expand this method beyond just illustration and humor, and attempt to solve some life problems you might have, typically caused by recurrent thought patterns. Our case study today is procrastination.
(Keep in mind that this method, just like any other self-help method, might not work for everyone, and its effects are not immediate. You need to make it a routine to see if it works. It also often takes more than one method to solve complex problems like procrastination. In case of doubt, seek help from a psychologist or a psychiatrist!)
1. Recognize the problem.
First things first. Getting into a habit of making a short comic or a one-panel vignette about your day is good for two reasons. First, you give yourself time to reflect on how you feel and evaluate how things are going in general. And second, you give yourself the opportunity to react to whatever you are going through, and eventually maybe take action.
When you start drawing a situation that’s bothering you right now, this helps you to see the problem from a certain distance. Maybe there are some aspects of the problem that will emerge in a different light, or maybe the problem won’t look so scary anymore, now that it is on paper.
For example, when I was struggling with procrastination, I drew the comic below, and after the first 3 panels, my problem didn’t look so scary anymore, so I decided to add the extra panel where I make fun of it. Now we enter the realm of “humor as a weapon”, which I explore in more detail in the next section.
2. Use humor to feel better about your situation.
I noticed that humor often comes as a natural reaction to me, as a coping mechanism, when I’m struggling with something. The irony of procrastination is the contradiction between really wanting to work (because you have to) and not being able to make yourself work. The existence of this contradiction is so weird (because if you want to work, why don’t you, hm?) that I felt that the only possible explanation for my inability to work is alien abduction.
I had this alien abduction joke linger in my mind for some time and recently I made another short comic (below) exploring this idea further: What if there are aliens whose job is to kidnap you from your job? This would explain why so many people struggle with procrastination.
So far, exploring this joke didn’t make my procrastination disappear, but just the fact that I’m using humor as a response, instead of sadness, is already a good thing. Humor is in this case our weapon against other less decent emotions, such as sadness and anxiety. Humor is probably the only phenomenon that can take you from a place of despair to a certain kind of joy.
3. Identify underlying emotions and thoughts patterns
After we’ve dealt with an uncomfortable situation with humor, we are ready to embark on our next step. This step is a bit harder, but you can do it! You need to identify what you feel and think when you are procrastinating. What kind of thoughts prevent you from starting to work?
If you are unsure, just wait for the next workday and wait to see how you feel in the moment in which you start procrastinating. You will notice that maybe you feel frustrated or sad about something, maybe you are afraid something won’t go well at work, maybe you just feel bored at work… Everyone’s reasons are different.
Now that you identified the thoughts and emotions that predominate in your mind at that moment, you need to turn them into a character that can be drawn. Again, super simple, some of them can be just geometric shapes that remind you of what they represent. If you are feeling inspired, you can give them a look similar to Pixar’s Inside Out characters. Whatever works for you will be fine for the purpose of this exercise.
In the comic below you can see how I approached this part of the process. I found 2 predominant reasons why I don’t feel like working: 1. I want to do something more fun, and 2. I was sad about it for some reason.
The idea here is to draw these emotions and thought characters and just give them a few speech-bubble lines explaining why they don’t feel like working. Again, you don’t have to come up with any stories. This is more of an introspective dialog that should represent whatever you identify as happening in your mind.
The idea of creating emotions and thoughts as characters was inspired by a coaching session I had, where we explored this method of assigning different roles in a fictitious company that is my brain to different thought patterns I have. You, as your rational and objective self, are a mediator between these different wants and need you have and you have to make all these characters work together in bringing you to a place in life where you want to be.
I came across a similar idea in Your Head is a Houseboat: A Chaotic Guide to Mental Clarity, which takes this character-based method to a whole other level of self-reflection. Crucially though, the reason why I am advocating for you to draw this method in form of a comic, instead of just reflecting on it, is because I think the drawing process itself makes it easier to recognize your problems, emotions, and thoughts, and it also makes it easier to deal with them.
This is because solely by transferring your problems on a blank page, comic journaling allows you to zoom out of yourself and look at these issues more objectively. The added bonus is that you can make fun of them, as we did in the previous step, which is not as easy to do just by thinking or even writing about something.
4. Talk to your emotions and reason with them
Now that the characters are here and have voiced their opinions on why they don’t let you work, you need to talk to them inside your comic. And this is where the magic happens. When you ask your characters more directly about why they don’t share your feeling of obligation to work, you will find some of the real reasons why you are procrastinating.
You are basically drawing and writing whatever comes to your mind first, no need to think about it for too long. As you make new comics, there will probably be other reasons for procrastination that will occur to you as you are drawing these interactions between you and the emotion and thought characters.
Now that you know what’s holding you back from working, how does that help you to actually start working? You basically have to look at your characters and their needs and find a way to satisfy them to some extent. For instance, the fact that one of my characters wanted to have fun and was bored at work showed me that I didn’t incorporate enough fun things both during my working schedule and outside of it, in form of hobbies and downtime. So, in my comic below I tell them that we will schedule some time for drawing comics and that’s what I did.
Regarding emotions, for many people it might be trickier to tame them without professional help. I also later figured out that my sadness was just my emotional reaction to the “playful” character not being satisfied. I also have to mention that in the meantime I learned that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), so that explains a lot.
Conclusion
I would lie if I said that comic journaling alone solved my procrastination problem (I still struggle with it sometimes), but it definitely helped me in realizing just how important it is for me to have fun, and just how easily I get bored of things. It also helped me to get closer to realizing I might have ADHD and seek a professional diagnosis.
If you are struggling with procrastination, it doesn’t mean you have ADHD. Your reasons and underlying causes might be completely different, but comic journaling can help you figure out what they are and set you on the right path to address them. And even better, at the end of the process you might have content that you are willing to share with others. Good luck and happy comic journaling!
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