You're listening to season six of the Recovery Happy Hour Podcast.

Are you ready? Hold on to your headphones.

Let's do this. Hi everyone welcome to Recovery Happy Hour where we talk about life beyond

the bottle and what happens after we stop drinking I'm your host Tricia, and sometimes I lie awake at night wondering,

whatever happened to Jonathan Taylor Thomas.

Thank you for joining me.

I want to talk about journaling on today's introduction and why it could be a really powerful

tool for your recovery. I journaled for about 10 days when I first quit drinking and then

for some weird reason I just stopped and I deeply

regret that especially now going back and reading some of the things that I wrote.

So I started journaling again when I was about two years sober and it's become a really

critical part of my journey. I taught a workshop on journaling last January at the

beyond the bottle retreat and that gave me the opportunity to look at the science behind it and why it's proven to be beneficial for anyone

Whether you're in or out of recovery trust me this is way more than a dear diary Judy Bloom kind of activity.

First off, I'm going to get sciencey for just a second. We have two sides of our brain.

The left hemisphere, that's in charge of things like reasoning and

logic. The right hemisphere is in charge of creativity and emotions and often when

we get depressed or anxious or if we're triggered for example,

then we're thinking with that right side of the brain, the emotional one.

And I want to ask you this, how many times have you sat there

spinning out in your head over being mad at

someone or anxious about something or sad about a memory and you're just

...