This is part of a two post series on journaling. Part 1 discusses the benefits I have seen from journaling over the last decade, [Part 2](/notes/how-i-journal) discusses the process I have developed to reap those benefits.
Journaling has been unequivocally my highest value habit of the last decade. At first just an experiment in self reflection and gratitude, it quickly became the de facto way I “process” the good and bad of life. Thoughts & moments come in, I write about them, and in doing so I find myself thinking more rationally, clearly, and maturely than my default, streaming mental process which can take me down rabbit holes and force me into loops. Over time, my journal has become a rich log of who I’ve been, who I am, and who I want to be, which I find to be a remarkably helpful north star in navigating the complexity of 21st century life and all its distractions.
I’m documenting my process because many friends of mine are intrigued at details I remember from previous vacations, projects, phases of my life, or challenges I've been through - always able to whip up quotes, anecdotes, and photos to provide colored commentary on times thought long forgotten. It became a topic of conversation enough times I thought it would be helpful for me and others to document how I go about my journal, in case others want to take aspects and apply them to their lives.
Before going further that if this is something you have considered doing (and I think it is well worth experimenting with!), just get started. Don’t wait, just make a goal to begin writing each day. My recommendation is a simple gratitude journal, where you write three bullet points you are thankful for - even if it’s just small nuggets. Eventually these bullets will become sentences, and those sentences will become paragraphs and voila - you have a journal cooking. A quick example of three gratitudes you might write:
- "Grateful that I was able to get a good workout in this morning - really made me feel more alert at the office."
- "I was glad I was able to connect with Matt tonight, good to hear his job is going well. Plus we got to meet at that restaurant I’ve been meaning to try!"
- "Really enjoyed some of the jokes tossed around in our design meeting at work today; I’m pretty fortunate to work with a solid team and we all get along."
These are the seeds of something much more and only take a few moments to jot down.
Mentality
All the benefits here stem from the same principle - my journal is how I get thoughts out of my brain and onto paper. Simple as that. Once something is no longer a broad stroke in my brain but is instead a coherent sentence, I can react to it, I can deconstruct it, I can add to it, I can reject it, I can meditate on it. While I can certainly do this without the aid from writing, I’ve found that it is analogous to swimming in turbulent seas versus sailing in a vessel. Both are theoretically possible, but one is purpose built tool and process for the job at hand.
This audit log that streams from my brain offers many different opportunities for introspection, which for years has made me more thoughtful and resilient than I otherwise would be. The benefits of this are legion.
Benefits
I start with benefits not as a sale, but to describe positive outcomes I’ve optimized my process around. In understanding the net results I’m going for, the methods I describe later will look a little less like madness and instead an orchestrated system.
Here are a few of top outcomes I’ve optimized for over the years through journaling:
Building resilience in both good and bad times
Whether I’m dealing with ups or downs in life, I have found taking the time to write what happened and how I felt with it helps me draw more value out of an experience. In good times, I’m actually able to better savor the emotional upswing by writing what happened, how it made me feel, how I got to that point, and what it means to me. Additionally, it lets me “bottle up” those positive vibes for a rainy day when I don’t feel quite so strong, ambitious, or positive; I find it enormously affirming to be able to flip back even a couple days, weeks, or years and see countless moments where I have laughed, loved, succeeded, and grown. In some ways I have seen journaling about my good times as a bit of an insurance policy against future struggles, that I can take solace in concrete examples of how I’ve been incredibly fortunate in my life and these rough patches will (and have) pass.
I also journal just as much, if not more, about frustrations, setbacks, and challenging circumstances I’m dealing with. Without journaling, I sometimes feel like life’s cocktail of stresses hovers like a cloud of dread or anxiety floating over my head - I can’t quite name why I feel uneasy, it’s likely because my subconscious brain is contending with a host of problems I haven’t yet acknowledged or been specific about. It takes effort to surface these thorns with clarity. Writing down what’s bothering me, why, and how I’m contending with the problems helps me specifically understand where those points of psychic pain are coming from, which in itself is a victory even if I don’t present immediate solutions. Once the problem is identified in writing, I can begin to think a bit more clearly over time about how I’ll address it. My negative subconscious is subdued and my positive subconscious can begin plucking away at the problem.
An example of the above two processes working come from 2018 I documented the emotional toll after I suffered a back injury while working out - this sidelined me for a few months as I became more lethargic; putting on weight without my regular activity levels. I’d write in one paragraph
“It just frustrates me, because I’m trying to set some level of sustainable fitness goals to carry me into my 30’s, 40’s and my responsibility seems to be betraying me... I just feel a bit trapped. When I workout, I usually eat better, when I eat better I usually sleep better, think better, work better. So in all of this, especially when I need to be firing on all cylinders at my job, I feel like I am fighting this fight with a hand behind my back.”
Although it doesn’t seem like much, writings like this helped me isolate a few mental hurdles:
- I was more clear with why I felt frustrated, I moved from general rage to specific fears
- I identified my specific fears - that such an injury has cascading affects around my life
- I hinted that such an injury is actually an affront to who I want to become in the decades to come
Though not immediate, this lone catalyst my mind slowly set in motion a pursuit of a wider portfolio of exercises in the following year, so even when I couldn’t physically perform some workouts, I had others to fall back on using other muscle groups or skills. By leaning into the discomfort in my writing, I was able to turn that specificity of pain into specificity of solution; something I don’t think I would accomplish just letting my mental wheels turn by their lonesome.
Grounding My Perspective
I’m a pretty imaginative person. As a kid I would draw maps of vast worlds I’d dream of exploring, I’d come up with elaborate back-stories for my toys, I would pretend the tiny streams by my house were raging rivers worthy of daring adventures. To that end, I am very capable of making any molehill into a mountain when thinking of the implications of my day to day. If I get stuck troubleshooting buggy code, I extrapolate a life in which I’m pushing this Sisyphean boulder for the rest of my life. If I have a tense conversation with a colleague, I envision a world in which the situation deteriorates beyond repair. If I miss the deadline for a unique opportunity, I chastise myself for depriving myself of a big break that would radically alter my life.
Realistically none of those scenarios are true. But left unchecked my thought process can often spiral out of control. By writing about these thoughts, I actually find myself holding myself more accountable for the things I think and the tales I tell myself. Why do you think that? Is that really true? Are you going to feel that way in a month? A year? Ten years? I’m reminded of the Shower Thought “your future self is watching you right now through memories”.
The fact that future me will eventually read my thoughts is a very damning concept. To be honest, when I come back and read how I handled some of my most stressful times, I want to be proud of the maturity and perspective I showed in the face of adversity, not look back at how whiny and overwhelmed I was. To see a more youthful, vibrant you being steamrolled by circumstances if a tough reality to level with. Knowing all this, it actually forces me to keep a longer term perspective in all aspects of my life. I’m more patient, more level-headed, slower to anger, quicker to be grateful, keener to look for opportunities, and swift in reckoning with obstacles. Initially this began as a song and dance as I read early journal posts and thought to myself, “wow was I immature,” but over time I could feel my brain warping to be more holistic and responsible in my thinking. It was an unexpected accountability mechanism for how I think.
Reducing Rumination
While it can be toxic if unchained, I personally believe rumination is a natural part of life. I find best way to move forward in life is to come to acceptance with where you are today, which requires some soul searching of how you ended up there. This process plays into our human strengths of planning complicated “what-if” scenarios and allows us to tinker with different variables in different circumstances. I find it helpful to to ask yourself “what if I said this?” “what if I had prepared more?” “what if I hadn’t dismissed that idea?” as it helps strengthen my decision making in future circumstances. Yet unrestrained rumination can be debilitating, as we’ve all experienced after a long day when you still can’t fall asleep as the mind races.
To that end, I’ve found my journal is often a “pressure valve” for getting rumination out of my head and onto paper, freeing up my mental RAM to be allocated to other tasks. The release of this pressure has a number of benefits:
- It allows me to be exceptionally crisp about what items I had control over and didn’t have control over
- It lets me come to terms with the decision that was made and strengthen the case that I did what I could with what I had
- It provides a log of my thinking that I can revisit should I face similar circumstances
If the outcome was suboptimal, it gives me space to learn from it and document those learnings, which makes it feel less like a loss. I find this helpful when I complete something stressful, whether it’s a salary negotiation, an altercation or disagreement, a big presentation, a sensitive conversation, or when I experience something totally outside my comfort zone. In a lightly organized stream of consciousness I’ll write what was on my mind at the time of the event, how I felt I handled it and why I might have done so, some of the implications, and what I might have done differently. This sort of personal debrief is usually enough to get the monkey off my back and move on to the next thing, ensuring I don’t have rumination revisit baggage I have already accounted for in my head space.
I usually feel I can dump my thoughts and then move on, which certainly has not always been the case. Being able to officially do a post-mortem of something in my life and turn the page has been critical for “getting over” certain life events or recovering from the downside of a poor experience.
Tracking my thinking over time
My brother once said he didn’t trust himself to get a tattoo because he can’t extrapolate what he will hold dear decades from now. As a thought experiment he says if he had gotten one as a child the tattoo likely would have been a giant Red Power Ranger - a concept that didn’t have deep staying power in his life despite being so important to him long ago.
As a person, I’ve accepted that I’m far from a “finished product” at any given time. Things I hold dear and true today may be falsehoods and misguided tomorrow. It’s jarring to go back in time and see that something you think you have always believed wasn’t always so true or known to you, but rather was an acquired taste after much thinking, discussion, and exposure to fresh ideas. Who we are, I’ve come to find, is actually a fairly messy process, and given we are the ones in the driver’s seat it’s hard to keep track of what ground we have covered and how we arrived at our current disposition on certain topics.
I have found journaling to be an interesting mechanism for exploring how I feel about a certain topic over time, and I’m able to track my thinking over time. On some topics, it’s interesting to see what changes; on others, what stays the same? These have been as far-ranging in my journal as
- My career and its purpose, what I hope to get out of it
- Friendships and what aspects I value in them; how I invest my time in others
- Social topics from inequality to education to housing policy to taxes
- Technology’s role in society, and how software I develop plays into its better or worse aspects
- My relationship with my family and its evolution as we age
- Traveling, and what I find noteworthy in countries I travel to
- Nutrition & fitness
What’s remarkable is finding a topic and going back to see how I might have felt about it four to six years ago. Is what I think still valid? If not, why was I off? If I still think the same thing, it’s often interesting to refine the picture further, taking something from a fuzzy blob of a thought into a higher fidelity.
John Stuart Mill, building on Thomas Paine’s work, defended freedom of speech as the freedom to correct errant thoughts and replace them with "clearer perception and livelier impression of truth.” Freedom of speech is therefore a process by which truth replaces error via these collisions in thought. I have been caught off guard to find things in my own writing I no longer agree with; or thoughts I thought were but musings had grown into core tenets of mine. What’s scarier to me is that such changes occur silently over time, undetected - kind of like when you get so used to a smell you no longer notice it. To see them in writing forces me to mentally account for the change or the calcification. What new information made me change my mind? What experiences further confirmed this belief? What different ways do I now view this problem? Words on a page help facilitate such an internal dialogue. My journal becomes a similar, personal idea factory as envisioned by seminal American thinkers.
Closing
The above makes journaling seem daunting. It isn’t. It’s simply the process of putting on paper those little thoughts you have while looking out the window of a plane, driving with the radio off, or having trouble falling asleep. It starts small, as simple descriptions of what happened today - who you talked with, where you went, what you did - and it slowly expands into something deeper - how they made you feel, what that place reminded you of, why you chose to spend your time on something. I look back at my first few years of entries to be crushed by how juvenile and simple they were, only to be heartened by the occasional vista where I didn’t just describe what happened that day, but _who I was_ on that day. If you write consistently enough, you’ll come to realize the benefits above.
In my next post, I’ll explore the actual tools and processes I found to enable my journal, with the hope of giving you a few hard lessons I learned along the way.
