The Unexpected Journaling
I started journaling in January 2022, and it is easily the best habit I have ever developed. And the most surprising habit too.
While journaling, I have discovered many oddities in my comprehension, attention, memory, and even my physical body. Let me share with you the five most shocking things I have discovered by scribbling with a pen (see my definition of journaling: 1)
Thoughts are physical
Everybody tells you that “journaling helps your mental state and peace of mind”.
I will tell you more: the most unexpected effect journaling had on me was that my physical health has improved. Every time I have a tension headache, I write for 1 hour and it is gone.
Insane quality of life improvement ❤️
Voids in your thinking
Surely, you know what you think. Surely, you are wrong.
“I write to find out what I think”, seemingly everyone says.
Only while writing, I find the gaps, the “silent defaults” in my thinking - and build the bridges for these gaps.
Time-travelcommunication is real
Reading my journals created a “communication channel between the past and the future me”, as CGPGrey brilliantly described it. Journal is a time machine to travel back in time, so that I can make data-driven decisions in the present about my future.
How hard would it have been to remember the past without this time machine? Impossible. I found that I have strong fake factual memory about the events in the past. And strong fake emotional memory about my feelings about these events.
And, by time travelling, I can borrow ready-to-use ideas from my past self. In fact, I pleasantly discovered that Dimitri-from-the-past was an exceptionally wise guy - and much wiser than he thought back then.
World affects you (subliminally)
It was also eye-opening to keep track of my mood and attitude. I noticed how many random things had affected my mood (and how little conscious control I had had over this process).
I discovered, for example, that my dreams have a large impact on my mood. The emotions I experience in these dreams define my mood for at least two hours after waking up.
Finally, moving a pen is incredibly hard
Journaling is like doing a workout or eating healthy. It is a good habit, and everybody knows they should be doing it… but people rarely do2. Many of my friends attempted to start - and failed.
I, too, struggled to start journaling. I tried multiple times and failed repeatedly for about two years. I have four different diaries that I started, wrote 10-20 pages in each, and then forgot about them3.
It is ok to try and fail a few times before it clicks, and you get started. Even though you may feel shame that you struggle to “just” put pen to paper.
Journaling is a habit. It requires fun, comfort, and time to develop (with the extra challenge that it is a habit induced by the valuable state of boredom).
And once I got into this habit, it gifted me a lot of unexpected positive experiences.
Discussion:
Do you have an experience to share or a question to ask? Drop a comment under my LinkedIn post to join the discussion.
Attribution:
- all “gray pencil” images were created with DALL·E 2
- screenshot with three stick figures is from CGPGrey video
- “thinking” picture is made by MilaniCreative
I define journaling as any writing without distractions about something that feels important at the moment:
- whether dumping a daily diary or processing philosophical ideas,
- whether writing for 10 minutes while waiting in a queue or during 2 hours allocated specifically for it,
- whether in a physical journal, on a sheet of paper, or on a laptop - though I, personally, prefer pen and paper almost exclusively to a keyboard.
Although journaling is different from workouts. Everybody has an idea of a workout from their school years. But people almost never practice journaling at school. I genuinely think that we need to teach everyone how to meditate (non-religiously), reflect, journal, etc. These are a great toolbox to have in the pocket. ↩︎
Still, they were surprisingly full of memories and ideas that I found useful three years later when I rediscovered them. Extra point to “communication-across-time”. ↩︎
