1. What happens in your head when something hits a nerve
Imagine: your partner cheated on you. Or your boss said something sharp at a meeting. Or a parent once again voiced disapproval of your choices. In that moment, a dense, compressed mass rises inside you — hurt, fear, anger, shame, guesses, conclusions, memories. It all spins together at once, like a tangled ball of thread that can't be unwound by hand, because it's all inside your head rather than lying on a table in front of your eyes.
Dr. Andris Saulītis, a psychiatrist with forty years of practice, explains that our minds, by nature, mix different types of information together. A fact — what actually happened — and an evaluation of that fact — what we thought and felt about it — fuse in our consciousness into a single whole. We don't notice the seam between them. It feels to us as though "my husband came home late" and "he doesn't love me" are one and the same thought, one single fact. In reality, these are two statements of entirely different natures: one can be verified, the other cannot.
Psychiatry, in the doctor's words, is essentially the science of thinking. If thinking functions incorrectly, a person's life begins to stall, even if on the surface everything looks more or less fine. It's like a computer: if you feed it bad data, you get garbage on the output, no matter how well the hardware itself is tuned.
The first step toward untangling this knot is surprisingly simple. You don't need to analyze, search for the right words, or try to be fair to yourself and others. You simply need to write down everything spinning in your head onto paper — as it is, without filtering, without order, without trying to tidy up the thought. All your judgments, all your facts, all your fears — one after another, just as they come.
This is called the "record of what happened." It's important to understand: at this stage, you're not analyzing anything. You're simply transferring your internal dialogue into external space. And this transfer alone brings enormous relief — because inside your head, all of this exists as an undifferentiated mass, while on paper it suddenly becomes separate sentences that can be examined one at a time.
Imagine a conflict at work: a colleague publicly criticized your project in front of everyone. In your head, it sounds something like: "He humiliated me, everyone now thinks I'm incompetent, no one will take me seriously anymore, I've ruined everything, this is a catastrophe." If you keep this inside, you'll spend the evening — or even the week — in a state of anxiety and resentment, replaying the same thing over and over. If you put it down on paper, already at this step the thought stops being an endless loop and becomes a finite set of lines that can be examined.
The practical step for this section is simple: take a sheet of paper and describe the situation currently troubling you — everything that comes to mind, without order and without self-censorship. Don't analyze anything yet. Just write it down. Then set the sheet aside for at least fifteen to twenty minutes, have some tea, take a walk. Analysis done in a state of strong emotion, as the doctor has observed, is never sound — emotions need to settle a bit before reason can engage.
2. The record of what happened — the first step toward clarity
Why write, rather than simply "thinking it through properly"? The thing is, as long as a thought stays inside the head, it remains fluid and slippery. It changes shape depending on your mood, your fatigue, whether you slept well or not. Today you feel one hundred percent right; tomorrow you already doubt yourself; the day after, you're certain again — but in the opposite direction. A thought without being fixed is fog, in which it's impossible to draw a line between what happened and what you thought about it.