The Value of Journaling

I have journaled off and on for most of my life, but it wasn’t until I really started journaling consistently that I found the greater value in it. To see who you were yesterday from the viewpoint of today is no small thing. To do that day in and day out cultivates a kind of perspective a bit above yourself. It’s like a watcher who isn’t trapped in the day with you, but floats above. This watcher feels what you feel because it is you. There’s no avoiding that, but the watcher also sees more than you. It’s a bit more aware that the bad feelings will pass, and the good ones will too. It has a better sense of your likely future, because it sees your past more clearly. It can be frustrating to build this kind of awareness. To see how many patterns you repeat. That’s probably the worst part, actually. What we do over and over again. How we continue on in the strangest ways when we aren’t paying attention.

Who are we really? We don’t actually know. We have to teach ourselves. It’s our responsibility to teach ourselves who we really are. 

Watching yourself 

It’s also our responsibility to take care of ourselves, and that’s a nearly impossible task if you aren’t paying attention. We have inborn systems which will move us toward things we like and away from things we don’t like, but these are (for the most part) very basic drives. Animal drives. They seek out what feels good now, not a year from now or even tomorrow. It’s that basic. The animal in us doesn’t want to think about tomorrow. It wants the eternal now because that is where it lives. Even five minutes from now is often too far. 

When I first started looking back over my journals for the course of a week, I realized how easy it was for me to forget something that had happened on a Monday by the time it was Sunday. Just a few days away and what was overwhelmingly mind-occupying at the beginning of the week wasn’t something I even remembered by the end of it. This is how limited my mind is in keeping hold of things. Of course everything doesn’t work this way, but I think most things do. Your mind is doing its best to wipe away that which is not important in order to highlight what is. This is exactly why journaling is important. It’s your mind over time, laid out so you can see it and begin to understand who you are. This is important because it is likely you don’t really understand yourself all that well. It’s up to you to cultivate that understanding. This is what watching yourself can do. It can help teach you who you are, not just on any given day, but overall. 

Seeing the patterns repeat over time

We have an idea of the kind of person we want to be. In a sense, we are always striving toward that person. But who are we right now? Who are we as we take steps on the path to becoming the person we want to be? 

We have to work with ourselves as we are now if we are ever going to get someplace else. When we don’t, it’s like fighting against yourself. I’ve done that a lot in my life. Far more than I ever cared to. Far more than I was often ever really aware. I tried pushing myself over and over again to do the things I needed to do to get results, but every time I failed. I am a failure a thousand times over, and I’ll tell you why. I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t want to see why I was failing. I thought it was the method. I thought I wasn’t working hard enough or didn’t have the right technique. That was bullshit. 

I wasn’t paying attention. 

It’s strange to think in this way because, of course we are paying attention. We are ourselves, right? We should have perfect knowledge of who we are. It makes sense. And in a sense it’s true. I am me right now. But how well do I know me yesterday? The day before that? How different a man was he? It’s one thing to know yourself in this moment, it’s a very different thing to know yourself over time. To see the patterns of your being laid bare. To know your tendencies and fears. Almost everything we do is a part of a pattern. Seeing the patterns of our own behavior helps us to understand ourselves. 

There’s who you are in this moment, and then there’s a you that’s who you are across time. Today, Tomorrow, and Yesterday. That’s what this is really about. And if you aren’t looking at this you, it’s very hard to see it. It’s easy to let go and be in the moment. It’s harder to really dive into what you are feeling, put this into words, then go back days later and see who you were and how those things worked out. Creating this understanding of yourself over time is what journaling is good for.

The humility of it is understanding the kind of person you are. It’s a lot harder to avoid the parts of yourself you don’t want to look at when you do something like this. And it’s absolutely necessary not to ignore those parts. The things about yourself you don’t want to see are probably the most important pieces. If you are struggling, they are likely what is holding you back. 

Taking care of yourself 

Be careful with this. If you do begin this practice, you will see things you could not see before. You will begin to understand yourself in a new way, and parts of that are not going to be pleasant. So please, make it your highest priority to take care of yourself effectively. In fact, that’s the best way to start journaling. Make it a kind of journey where you are trying to understand how to take care of yourself well. Don’t beat yourself up for choosing habits which do not seem to serve you over and over again. Instead, attempt to understand how those habits do serve you. If you’re doing something over and over again, it is giving you something. And it’s likely not trivial. It’s something you need. So don’t throw it away or attempt to change it. Instead, try and understand it. 

That’s the best we can do. 

By best I don’t mean you’re limited by this. I mean it’s actually the best way to serve yourself. If you can effectively care for yourself, you will unlock your real potential. It seems a strangely lateral way of moving. To do your best, you don’t focus on pushing as hard as possible. Instead you focus on taking care of yourself as well as possible. 

What does that mean? Well it’s complicated. One way to describe it in a small form is to do things that serve you right now, and also serve you tomorrow. This way you are doing well for yourself now, you are doing well for yourself in the future, and you are inheriting what you have already done for yourself in the past. These three together are very powerful. 

What to do about habits that are only good right now? We’re inclined to push these away. That’s what we call, “kicking a bad habit”. We see its effect on our life and we don’t like it. But this “bad” habit is giving us something too. It’s paying off in some way we can’t see very well. My recommendation would be to look at it. Pay attention to this habit. Try to understand it as best you can. 

We have a responsibility to teach ourselves who we really are

Learning your patterns over time, understanding what it takes to really take care of yourself, these aren’t simple things. They are incredibly difficult things to do. And there’s one more catch as well. No one else can do these things for you. It’s up to you alone. Now, others can help, especially counselors, but even the best counselors can only assist your ability to understand yourself. They can’t do it for you. We each have a responsibility to understand ourselves as we are if we want to live our best possible lives. There’s no way around it. Journaling is the best path I know of to this end, and it isn’t an end that stops. It’s a journey that is a lifetime. 

A journal is a record of a journey. If you don’t write it down, in a sense, you’re only experiencing a portion of the journey you could be living. 

How to journal

Everybody has their own method, but I’ll tell you mine and you can feel free to use that if it helps. 

1. Answer a few questions every day. Having specific questions to answer really helps me focus myself and not meander around thinking about what I should be writing down. I use three questions primarily. I suppose the third is more of a prompt than a question, though. 
   1. How are you feeling?
   2. Anything hanging around in your mind?
   3. Tell me the story of yesterday. 
2. Do that every day. Take as much time as you need. Some days you’re going to have a lot to say, others not so much. I would recommend being as thorough as you can as often as you can.
3. Review your journals at the end of the week. This is a key aspect of really getting as much as you can out of this journaling process. Primarily what you are doing here is looking for patterns. Are there things you are avoiding over and over again? Are you falling into the same habits without meaning to? Pull out the patterns that seem to repeat over time and explore them. What are you getting out of these? 
4. Repeat over time. This is where it gets hard. Consistency is king. You will learn things about yourself very quickly when you start doing this, but you will only reap the real rewards after weeks and months of consistent practice. This isn’t something you do for a week then stop because you’ve got it made. You are living an entire life. This is a practice which will continue to provide value for the whole of it. That doesn’t mean you always have to journal. You don’t. But there’s always value to be found in it if you do.