Are you in recovery? You should be journaling!
Writing in a journal regularly can be a huge boost to your mental and emotional health.
As such, it’s an underrated tool that most people overlook.
Similar to exercise, writing in a journal takes a bit of effort, so it’s not a very sought out solution.
But a modest amount of effort pays huge dividends.
And the best part about journaling? It is perfect for introverts.
Make journaling a regular habit, and it becomes a massive upgrade for your brain’s “operating system.”
I believe that it helps with both your mental health as well as your emotional well being.
It also helps you get organized, clarify your thoughts, and generate new ideas.
Let’s dive in.
Finding your format
When you journal you just want to record your thoughts. Get your thoughts out onto paper, or onto the computer, or whatever.
Me, I tend to type. So I sit at the computer and I type my thoughts into a keyboard. That’s just how I feel comfortable.
Other people may write by hand in a loose leaf notebook, or get an actual leather bound journal.
There might even be some who would jot out notes on their phone, though I would personally find this a bit clunky.
I can sit down at a keyboard for 10 minutes and spill out 500 words or more as I dump my thoughts on the page. I don’t think I could do that on my phone.
But the point is, you need to find what works for you.
And that means finding the method that you will actually do on a regular basis. The method of journaling that you will stick with.
There are also lots of products now that seek to solve the journaling problem–journals, notebooks, or apps that have written prompts and suggestions in order to help get you writing.
So you may have to experiment a bit in order to find what works for you.
How to journal
So you may be wondering:
How do I journal?
No rules at all. Nothing to it. Just start writing.
As a general suggestion, start talking about your life, and report to the journal what has been going on lately. Such as “Things are decent at work lately, I’m doing better with my boss, not as annoyed, I’m able to get through the work day without too much internal complaining lately,” etc.
Then you might run off on a different tangent: “I need to get my leg checked out, I’m still getting that sharp pain after I jog, and it’s getting worse, I need to call the sports doctor.”
And so on. Just feel free to bounce around. Spill your thoughts onto the page with no rules at all. This can be a free-form brain dump if you want. Honestly, that’s all it has ever been for me. I just start “talking” to the journal, telling it about my life, where I’m at lately, what’s going on with me, all about the different issues I’m dealing with, and so on.
When I’m done talking about an issue, I move to the next paragraph. And then I start writing about the next issue I think of in my life.
That’s it. That’s my entire journaling process.
But again, no rules. Your process could look different.
You don’t need to force yourself to write for a certain length of time, or hit a certain number of words, or anything like that.
Just start writing. Do it regularly. Keep doing it, and I promise you will start to see real benefits.
Let’s take a look at what those benefits are exactly.
Self awareness and defining the problems
You may think:
“Of course I already know what my own problems are, I am the one who is living with them every day!”
Not exactly true.
Because our problems are not always our problems, per se–sometimes our problems are actually how we deal with our problems.
And sometimes our problems are how we feel about our problems. Or how we are reacting to our problems.
And so on.
So the “problem” may be that your boss is driving you crazy, because they are overhauling your system at work and you have to relearn everything and now everything must be done differently and they are threatening to let you go if you don’t just adapt and keep your mouth shut.
So you think the problem is your tyrannical boss.
And if you were a toddler who had the magic powers of an almighty being, you could snap your fingers and get rid of that boss. Obviously that’s not the case.
But if you are in the regular habit of journaling, this is the sort of problem that you will gain perspective on.
You will become aware of your role in the problem–not just of the problem itself. You will start to see that you are resistant to learning new things perhaps.
And not only can you gain self awareness through journaling, but you may also start to see potential solutions as you keep writing about the problem.
You may realize that you can make a plan to start learning the new job in your down time at work in the afternoons. Maybe you start to form a plan as to how you can streamline this process. Maybe you realize you can complete all of the course work with only a few hours on the weekends at home. Or that you can get help from a certain manager who always tries to help you out.
Self awareness increases from writing because as you write, you are forcing yourself to think about what to write next. You are forcing yourself to think about…..yourself. Of course it increases self awareness.
Potential solutions appear from this because as you are writing, your brain is making connections between various things as you are thinking about what to write next. It also works because after you have “brain dumped” everything into your journal, you free up your brain from being “problem focused” so that it can now start to consider possible solutions.
Real anxiety relief
We just mentioned the concept of a “brain dump.”
This is huge.
So our process is this: We just “talk” to our journal and tell it whatever we want, all of our various issues, and get it all out on the page. Everything that is swirling around in our head lately, all of our problems, put it all out there. When you run out of topics, you’re done. Brain dump complete.
What does this do for us?
Your brain can now say “okay good, now all of that stuff that I was worrying about is written down, so it will not be forgotten. I can stop worrying about it so much.”
It is like a volume knob for your anxiety.
It can become even more powerful for anxiety when you pair it with the fact that your writing will often reveal some potential solutions for your problems, as outlined above.
So you write about a problem and an issue that is giving you anxiety. Getting it down on paper gives your brain permission to stop focusing on it constantly.
Second of all, while you are writing about that problem, you figure out a potential solution, and you decide to act on that solution and start moving forward with it.
This is huge. It can become a quadruple whammy of anxiety relief:
1) Becoming aware of the anxiety (some people don’t even know what is causing their anxiety!)
2) Putting it on paper and giving your brain a chance to stop worrying.
3) Allowing the process of writing to unlock potential solutions that target the anxiety.
4) Putting one or more of those solutions into action.
All of that can be unlocked just by writing your thoughts into a journal on a regular basis. Simple yet powerful.
Journaling helps deal with unwanted emotions
Much like with anxiety, journaling can help reduce the intensity of unwanted emotions in your life.
Again, some people don’t even own the emotions as their own, or see them for what they are, so they lack self awareness in that area.
Second, you may need to gain some perspective about a situation to see if maybe you are reacting unfairly to something, or overreacting.
And if you are just sad or going through pain about an event in your life, writing about it regularly can at least provide some sense of distance from it.
If you are upset and you don’t want to be feeling emotions about a certain situation, then you need to process that situation further. You need to resolve it further and start to move past it in order to lessen the intensity of the emotions. Journaling can help you do that.
Consider making it a habit
Writing in a journal can easily become something that you experience once or twice, see some small benefit from, and then let it fall by the wayside before you truly see the full effects of it kick in.
Obviously we want to avoid that. In order to do so, we want to establish it as a habit. At the very least, you should consider giving it a fair 30 day trial.
If you happen to be seated at your designated journal location every single day, then journaling daily might work for you. For a lot of us though, that is going to be overkill (myself included).
Two or three times a week is the sweet spot for me. I feel I get a lot of benefit with that amount of journaling, and anything more starts to give diminishing returns.
So how do you make it a habit if it is only a few times per week?
My preferred method is using the phone alarm system. Set the day of the week and a time of day to give me a specific reminder.
At one point in my life, I noticed that I had a lot of down time on Friday afternoons at the office. So I slotted that time for a journal session, and I set a phone alarm to remind me to do it. Some time later I started doing the same thing on Monday afternoon, again using a phone alarm.
This was a good pace for me–journaling on Friday to catch up the week’s events, and then again on Monday to recap the weekend.
Another thing you might do if you don’t like using phone alarms is use the habit stacking method as outlined by James Clear of Atomic Habits.
See how far you’ve come
One of the neat things about journaling is that you get to look back at it someday and see how far you’ve come.
This is just sort of a nice little treat, to get to see how much you have learned, matured, and grown over time.
It can give you incentive to keep pushing forward in terms of personal growth and your recovery efforts.
And it can help clarify what is really important in your recovery today. You might read what you had written from 5 years ago and think “really, that is what I was so focused and worried about back then?” And that will seem silly to you today. And you will think: Wow, I have grown.
And finally, there may be events in your life that you want to look back on one day with clarity, and remember the details about. Things that you want to cherish and enjoy. Journaling can help you to preserve those details.
Give journaling a chance
Give it a chance–do a 30 day trial.
You don’t have to write every single day. Try doing Mondays and Fridays.
Just a quick, 5 minute brain dump. Tell your journal what’s been up in your head lately. That’s it.
I promise it will be worth the 5 minute time investment.
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