Introspection

I was thinking yesterday about how blogging is changing my life.  It seems to be providing me a clarity and structure to my thoughts. I think one of the things that is happening is that the process of blogging is providing me the opportunity to analyze and decipher my own thoughts and moods.  For me, blogging is a form of introspection.  Whereby my blogging attempts to capture moods and thoughts and spill them onto paper in a coherent structure, the process of blogging illuminates the inner workings of the cognitive process - how thoughts evolve into feelings and feelings into moods, and how moods influence thoughts.  The basic tenets of Cognitive Therapy come to mind: There is a feedback loop from thoughts to moods to behavior and back again.  Blogging is allowing me to break the feedback loop via observation.  The mere act of observing and monitoring the feedback loop means I can stop it at any time.

This hearkens back to the early days of psychology via introspection.  Turn of the century psychology was plagued with introspection, with such psychological luminaries as William James and Wilhelm Wundt engaging in it.  I always thought of turn-of-the-century introspection as a psychologist or subject sitting there and thinking things out.  That's not exactly what's going on in my blogging, though. The difference lies in the fact that my blogging as introspection occurs over a more prolonged period of time, and the thoughts are crystallized and refined via the process of communication.  Pure thought in and of itself leaves things too nebulous and indistinct. I suppose the sitting there as introspection would eventually have to be communicated via diary or essay or writing, but that's as a lump sum.  One of the things I'm doing while blogging is thinking things out part and parcel and communicating it all.