Journaling with Brain Fog

Has anyone else with brain fog found journaling difficult? Any advice you can give me?

"Just write what comes to mind" they say. I have brain fog, so nothing ever comes to mind. I just sit mindlessly over a blank piece of paper as I think of what to write about, and then to avoid further stressing over a choice of topic, I start writing anything. And it feels forced and uninspired. I tell myself, maybe once I get my pen moving, an important topic will come to me - I'll recall something, and I'll just know by the reaction of my body it is something worth exploring. But the moment never comes. Nothing significant ever comes up, and I eventually become detached from the exercise.

I then try to elicit some of the anger that I know I have inside, and just start writing curse words. With pen and paper, I scorn everyone that comes to mind, before I can even think of anything they did wrong to me. This actually works to an extent. I do physically feel some anger. But the juices usually don't flow for long, as I never end up recalling anything specific these people did wrong, and continuing to curse them out starts to feel silly.

Any advice on how to overcome my complete lack of memory and recall?

Lastly, there is something I want to vent. I get the impression that, when people ask if they are doing an exercise right, the response usually sounds like "you're doing it right when it starts to work". This is not helpful. Just like you can't use a word in its own definition, you can't define something in terms of its outcome, otherwise the definition becomes useless. It's like being told "X is the solution to your problem", and when you ask what X is, they say "X is something that solves your problem". Evidently, the solution to your problem is something that solves your problem. Not helpful. It might be better to just point out that, the act of asking if something is "right" is a demonstration of fear over the possibility of being wrong, and since our goal is to eliminate fear, there is no way to ask if you're doing something right without being wrong to some extent.

 

Starting by building three columns of topics as Sarno instructs. Childhood, daily life stressors and personality. You can add and remove as you like, but this at least helps you to pick a topic.
I find it varies from day to day how journalling works for me, but keeping at it helped the brain fog. I felt like the fog was another protection mode to keep me away from journaling and feeling the hard stuff.
One of the hardest things for me is the “doing it right” - you have to let that go. I still have issues with it, but that’s a personality trait and ushers in a lot of self- negatives. The main thing is to give little space to the story and maximum space about your own feelings. You don’t have to stay on topic.
This may help: https://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/How_do_I_journal%3F (How do I journal?)

 

Guiseppe, did you ever find a way to get past your brain fog in order to journal? Did the brain fog ever go away?