On naming what’s swelling inside you before you try to write about it.
One of the companion tools to the 90-day reset is mood journaling. I’d describe mood journaling with Renew90 as structured. That design was chosen after realizing that for some people, writing isn’t just writing. It’s a release, a way to process their inner world. Someone who’s seeking release is usually driven by a primary urge to explore a specific feeling about something in their life. Giving someone like that a blank page and a vague “what’s on your mind?” is such a turn-off, honestly. There’s pressure mounting, and not knowing how to attack it is frustrating.
Why structure matters more than a blank page
So at Renew90, we ask you to first get in touch with your feeling as a starting point, and we don’t move forward until you can name that feeling. We provide examples to help. I believe getting past that place is crucial to how a journaling session starts, because now you’re attacking the pressure with a precise tool. It forces your mind to stop and ask: what am I truly feeling? Can I name it?
The power of naming what you feel
There’s power in naming things that feel like they’re swelling inside you. Tremendous power. There’s a quote that says something to the effect of: what you name doesn’t hold power over you. That first step, naming your mood, is a bold move from the unknown into the known. We all know the unknown is terrifying, because how do you even know how to handle something you can’t identify? It’s virtually unknown. But once you collapse it into a named word, suddenly all your resources for processing it have a direct shot at the target.
It’s a bit like being blindfolded and asked to shoot an arrow at an animal lurking nearby, about to attack. You don’t know what this animal is. You just know it’s there. You shoot randomly and waste your shots, and that gives it a chance to attack you as it wishes. But once you’re handed the tool and told, this is an arrow. You can determine how to use it, and whether it can actually reach the target. You know you’re looking for a specific animal, so you conserve your shots and strategize a little. You have a plan of attack.
Where beginners can start
That’s what naming an emotion before reflecting and writing is aimed at, at Renew90. Even if you’re not an experienced hunter, so to speak, if you’re just starting out in your journaling journey, you don’t have to ask “how is this done, what do I write about?” You can simply start with how you’re feeling in that moment.
What six months of patterns revealed
I’ve noticed, interestingly, over my half-year of somewhat consistent journaling, that my mood tends to move in seasons. That freaked me out a little at first. Honestly, my journaling has experienced varied moods around just three key life areas: career (building Renew90), spirituality, and mental health. The pattern recognition feature let me know that in the first half of the year, those three areas were the stars of the show. And rightly so, I’d say. I’m doing something from the ground up. I’m learning about building a product and running a business. It doesn’t get more grounding, or more mundane, than that. And it really is true that entrepreneurship is self-development. For me, it’s so deeply linked with my spirituality. Not only am I building this and pouring all my energy into it, it’s also revealing to me all the unlocked capacity I have, and all the ways I’m having to break out of the mould.
When April got hard
The first three months were joyful, and when it got tougher in April (my overall mood summary read as anxious, from navigating a different stage of app development, which was marketing it), I realized I needed to step back and re-examine the blocks I had in this area that were showing up as anxiety. So for the month of May, I was truly back at the drawing board. I chose to take the patterns in my mood seriously, mostly because I knew that pushing through anxiety just to keep showing up wasn’t worth it, especially since I’m not working toward a fixed deadline. I’m directing this journey, and I’ve been very deliberate about not promising launch dates. So I realized there was an invisible pressure in just being stuck on a new frontier, along with my own expectations of what this new stage was supposed to look like versus what it actually turned out to be.
What this journey has really been about
Building Renew90 hasn’t only been about bringing a product to market. It’s genuinely been of huge benefit to me in this journey of actually making it. I had to reset after a full build and go back to basics, and I was only able to admit that once my pattern clearly showed I was particularly anxious around the three predominant areas I journal about. Frankly, I learned that in this phase of building, I’m quite boring, to myself, not to others. I even started a K-drama series, just to spice up my life a little. All I was doing was work. And that realization helped me re-evaluate my relationship with, and boundaries around, work during my break in May and part of June.
FAQ
What’s the difference between emotional wellbeing and mental wellbeing? The two overlap heavily, but emotional wellbeing usually refers more specifically to your ability to notice, understand, and process your feelings, while mental wellbeing is the broader umbrella: covering emotional health alongside things like cognitive function, stress management, and overall psychological resilience.
If this resonated, Renew90 Journal is available on iOS and Android.