Philosophy
It is simple. Seek within.
At INNATE we believe that self-reflection is a powerful tool for growth. By taking the time to reflect on our experiences, thoughts and emotions, we gain insight into ourselves and our lives. That is why we built a video journaling app designed to build a bridge between your past, present and future self.
What follows are the guidelines behind it. They are a framework for reflection, not a set of rules, and every one of them starts from the same place: you are wiser than you think.
Why is modern life so hard on our emotions?
Our brains evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Our world changed in a few decades. Every day we take in decisions, conversations, notifications and emotional stimuli at a pace our nervous systems were never designed for. Each one brings an emotional experience with it. If we do not process those experiences as they arise, they get suppressed, projected or deflected so we can keep up.
Nobody teaches us how to do this, so it is not surprising that so many of us are overwhelmed. In the largest UK survey of stress, 4,619 adults asked by the Mental Health Foundation with YouGov in 2018, 74% said that in the past year they had felt so stressed they were overwhelmed or unable to cope.
What does stress do to perspective?
The body runs the same stress response for a colleague who frightens us as it once did for a predator. The difference is that the predator leaves. The colleague is there every day, so the response never fully switches off. Living inside a prolonged stress response is hard on health, relationships, work and the plain enjoyment of life.
And while we are in it, we lose perspective. We cannot remember the good things in our life. We cannot think clearly or focus. It is hard to feel compassion or to connect with the people we love. That loss of perspective is the problem INNATE is built around, and it is the one part of this page with the strongest research behind it: see the section on self-distancing below.
Do we respond to what happens, or to what we think happened?
We do not respond to the present moment. We respond to our perception of it. Thousands of times a day we interpret an experience through a perspective that was shaped long ago, often in a single strong moment, sometimes in childhood, when a situation stirred a powerful emotion and we made meaning out of it. A story. Not necessarily a true one.
Say our mother snapped at us the one time we voiced a need, because she happened to be on a work call. In that moment we wrote a story, and the story became part of the framework we use to read every event that followed. Reflection is how you find those stories. Watching your own recording is how you see them from the outside.
What decides the quality of a life?
Not what we have. How we feel. Everything we do is done to evoke a certain feeling. We want money to feel secure, relationships to feel connected, success to feel accomplished, the new car to feel relevant. If how we feel decides the quality of our life moment to moment, why not work on how we feel directly?
If we rely on external events to determine how we feel, we will never be truly empowered. If we chase inner prosperity in the outer world, it keeps evading us.
Where do the answers live?
It is easy to believe the answers to our problems lie outside us. We believe that when we take responsibility for our experience, we reclaim our power. When we constantly blame and deflect how we feel onto situations, we never get closer to the root cause. We get stuck in a mirror maze of projection.
INNATE is built on self-realisation, and so on self-empowerment. You are wiser than you think.
Are some emotions bad?
No. An emotion is a signpost. It is energy in motion, and in an ideal world we can feel it, learn from it and let it move through us. We think of emotions as survival emotions and creative emotions. Fear, anger and grief are survival emotions: they arise from instinctive needs. They were meant to be fleeting. Now they can flood us. Creative emotions, such as joy, love, peace and power, tend to arrive when the survival needs are met.
Every emotional state carries information. Fear may reveal what matters. Anger may reveal a boundary. Grief reveals love. No emotional state tells the whole story, and the trouble starts when we believe that any one of them does.
Why do we have to feel it to move through it?
The only way out is through. To process and release an emotion, we first have to allow it and let go of the resistance. What we resist, persists. When we accept the emotion and give it our attention, there is often a pressure drop, a relief.
Many people who reflect this way report the same thing: attention on a survival emotion tends to soften it, and attention on a creative emotion tends to grow it. That is what people report. The research on naming emotions, below, points the same way, with a caveat we spell out.
What is pain for?
When painful emotions arise, the natural response is to hide from them or distract ourselves. But these experiences come with gifts. They guide us into corners of ourselves we did not know were there, and offer deeper self-understanding and compassion, and with it a richer and fuller life. Pain is a doorway.
What does the research actually show?
Fewer claims, stated precisely, each with a source. Where the evidence is modest we say modest. Where a study measured something narrower than the claim, we say that too.
- Self-distancing
- Looking at a difficult experience from an observer’s perspective, rather than reliving it through your own eyes, produces less emotional and physiological reactivity in the moment and less rumination afterwards. Watching a video of yourself is the observer perspective, literally, which makes this the best fit for what INNATE does.
- Kross & Ayduk (2011), Current Directions in Psychological Science; Ayduk & Kross (2010), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98(5); Kross & Ayduk (2017), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.
- Naming what you feel
- Putting a feeling into words is associated with lower amygdala response and more activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Every INNATE entry starts by naming the emotion. One caveat, so nobody has to catch it for us: in the key study, participants labelled other people’s facial expressions, not their own feelings.
- Lieberman, Eisenberger, Crockett, Tom, Pfeifer & Way (2007), Psychological Science 18(5), 421 to 428.
- Putting experience into words
- Expressive writing has a documented, much-replicated and modest effect on wellbeing. We cite it as support that disclosure matters, not as a dramatic claim, and we do not assume the writing research transfers wholesale to video. Spoken and recorded disclosure is far less studied. That is a reason for curiosity, not authority.
- Smyth (1998), 13 randomised trials; Frattaroli (2006), 146 randomised studies; Pennebaker’s later estimate across 100 or more studies.
INNATE is a reflection tool, not a treatment. It has not been clinically trialled, and it is not a substitute for care from a doctor or therapist. Where we say a practice is associated with something, we mean correlation, not proof of cause.