The Value of Truth Journaling

If you haven’t done my Bible study, you may be wondering what I mean when I say truth journaling. Ephesians 4:22-24 speaks of the importance of renewing our minds. Truth journaling is simply a practical way of doing that.

My first brownie post gave you a sample of how it works. You write down what you believe, then look at each sentence to determine the truth of what you believe. Let me explain how this works with a simple diagram.

Beliefs ® Feelings ® Actions

(Note: This is only a simple diagram if you are a techie. For someone like me, it's a very complicated diagram, because I can't figure out how to turn those little R's with circles around them into arrows. I'm afraid you'll have to use your imagination. Picture an arrow starting at beliefs and going toward feelings and another arrow starting at feelings and going toward actions. While you're imagining the arrows, you might as well imagine that it's indented, because that's what I really wanted, but I couldn't make it happen.)

Behavioral scientists use this diagram to show how our thoughts affect our behaviors. Here’s an example: If I believe the plane is going to crash, I’m going to be terrified of flying, and I probably won’t fly. I might be able to force myself to fly, but it will always be a painful struggle.

How much easier it would be if I could convince myself that flying really isn’t all that dangerous. Then I would actually have good feelings about it, and I wouldn’t even have to make myself fly. I’d want to fly, because I could get places so much faster.

Now look at that diagram again. I also believe things about eating that aren’t true—things that my friends who don’t struggle with emotional eating have never believed. These lies make me want to eat, and because I feel like eating, I eat. Wouldn’t my life be much better, if I could learn to believe the right things about food so that I didn’t feel like eating for emotional reasons?

That’s what my Bible study, Freedom from Emotional Eating, is about—learning how to change the way we think about food so we won’t feel like overeating.