“I feel bad” is a fog. “I feel left out of Saturday’s plans” is a map. Get specific.

Vague feeling is hard to act on because it names nothing you could change. A general badness spreads over the whole day and turns into a statement about your life, while the same feeling described precisely turns out to be about one event, one person, one hour. Precision does not make it smaller. It makes it locatable.

When something is heavy, write one sentence that says what happened and what it did to you. Keep narrowing until it names something specific. Very often the specific version comes with an obvious next move, and sometimes having a name is enough to stop it spreading.