Is introspection helping or hurting you?

There's one personality trait that makes all the difference

Nov 01, 2023

Do you have the one specific personality trait that determines whether self-reflection helps or hurts you? This is how to tell, and what you can do about it, if not.

We hear a lot about the mental health benefits of expressive writing about your thoughts, feelings, traumas. But it turns out the research on this isn't so conclusive. In fact, evidence shows that while for one specific group of people expressive writing can significantly reduce anxiety, for another it can exacerbate it.

So, what makes the difference?

Emotional Expressiveness

It comes down to whether or not you have the trait of emotional expressiveness. In a nutshell, you’re emotionally expressive if you show your emotions to other people – by talking your feelings through or just plastering them all over your face.

If you hide your feelings and dislike being seen as emotional, however, or if others find you a bit indifferent, then you’re probably emotionally inexpressive.

Now you might think that it would be those who don't share their emotions with others that'll most benefit from a private practice of journaling because it gives them the chance go there. But it's the other way around. People who already feel comfortable talking about their feelings can significantly reduce their anxiety and stress through journaling. But for those of you who don't, writing about your deepest feelings can actually make things worse.

What to do if you're emotionally inexpressive

So what should you do if you’re in that second group? I'm not going to tell you to just start talking about your feelings, because there's a reason you don't. But does this mean you should give up on self-help, stuff down your emotions even further and just never go near them? Obviously, that's not the answer either.

The research isn’t very clear on why journaling can be detrimental for the emotionally inexpressive, but one possibility is that if you have difficulty sharing your feelings, journaling can be too much of a baptism of fire. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the blank page, and to feel paralyzed or unable to process all the feelings coming out at once.

Seek more structured practices

In this case, you may benefit from a more structured and guided way to make sense of your inner experiences – something that feels more like a drip feed than chucking yourself into the deep end.

Think outside the box

Additionally, you might want to look into different ways of accessing your feelings. Metaphor and visual imagery can be especially powerful because they offer a less direct – but arguably more nuanced and holistic – route to explore your emotions than language. Art therapy, for example, is enormously popular, and has also been shown to be effective for a number of different demographics. For many, it seems, putting feelings into images feels more natural than putting them into words. And it's just as viable.

Creative self-reflection in the safe space of story

These ideas and the research behind them were at the front of our minds when we decided, four years ago, to create Betwixt – an adventure story set in a weird world that allows anyone who visits to explore their inner experience through both words and images. We wanted to create a new method for introspection that would help both the emotionally expressive and inexpressive. So, in Betwixt, you can represent your emotions as fantastical creatures or natural elements, while discussing your experiences in a gentle, guided way that helps you really make sense of them, instead of putting on common labels to something so personal and unique.

Whichever method you choose to improve your self-awareness through introspection, the key is to honour the fact that you’re an individual and you may need something different from what popular culture tells you. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions and when in doubt, it often pays to listen to what resonates with you.

Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.