Journaling 101

Finding order within the trillions of chemical and electric signals buzzing through the 3-poind meat lump in your skull

Let’s talk about journaling.

Please don’t roll your eyes--just hear me out.

Journaling isn’t homework. It’s not scary. It’s just a thing, a simple habit. Think of it as a conversation with your brain. Private. And written. 

You know that friend who your conversations seem to bypass small talk and go straight to the meaty parts of life? The kind of talks that leave you feeling like you just found a new piece of the puzzle of life. You may not know what to do with it or where that piece fits, but the chat with that friend opened your brain up. 

That’s what journaling can do for you. 

If you google “benefits of journaling” you’ll be offered lists of between 5 and 118 possible positive attributes of scribing your thoughts. Let me save you the work.

Journaling helps you work shit out. It’s basic problem solving. You may not find solutions after your first 5-minute writing session, but over time you’ll build up a skill set that allows you to take a step back and look at your life. 

Journaling offers clarification. This is another great by-product of looking critically at your life and your responses to it. You may start to recognize patterns you’d never seen before. You will slowly find order emerge from the chaos created by trillions of chemical and electric signals flashing and popping around in the three-pound meat lump nestled in your skull. With some work, you can learn which shit just needs ignoring. Perhaps the shit you thought was the problem wasn’t really the problem. Think of how much drama and trouble you’ll be spared by calling your own self out on your own shit. Or realizing that dwelling on other people’s shit isn’t worth the time it takes to type it out. 

Journaling is a mood booster, reduces anxiety, stress and depression. Well, duh—the act of writing allows you to take the bad shit and get it literally out of your head, either by hand or keyboard. You’ve just worked through a whole bunch of shit and realized nothing was as bad as you thought it was, or it is that bad, but you have a new perspective and some ideas for solutions. This crap is no longer stuck inside of you, festering. Your brain can let it go and move on. 

Journaling helps you heal faster and boosts your immune system. There’s actual science for this. In a random, controlled study, participants who journaled before and after a biopsy healed significantly faster than those who didn’t. This has been replicated in heaps of other studies. You don’t need to know how electricity works to appreciate that when you flip a switch, light comes on. Same here. Flip the switch in your brain with daily journaling. 

Journaling helps process trauma. Yup, science for this too.  This doesn’t mean a venting rant, you actually have to do the work of expressive writing, of discussing what happened and what’s going on in your head and heart. 

You don’t have to write a novel. You don’t even need to be grammatically correct, a spelling bee champ, or, even legible. You just need to sit down and let the words start spewing. 

Science says that journaling helps all manner of things, from better sleep, better overall health, better immune system, better mood, better self-confidence and even wait—what? A better IQ? 

Things to think about before you get started

Paper or plastic? It’s up to you, whatever you’re more comfortable with. You want to write with a fountain pen on handmade mulberry paper handstitched in a leatherbound journal? Have at it. You into the clickety clack of typing your woes into a password protected file on your computer? It’s all you.  You want to rock an old school composition book with a mechanical pencil? You do you, boo.  The point is to get into the habit of conversing with yourself and your brain regularly. Experts suggest three to five 15-minute sessions per week. It still works if you have 3-5 minutes daily.

There are all sorts of scientific studies about how writing by hand (specifically cursive) fosters a strong connection between the hand and the brain, it paces the brain and allows for more creative thought. 

Morning or evening? Proponents of morning pages believe that for the first 45 minutes after you wake, your ego is still a little snoozy and you have a better chance of connecting to a deeper version of yourself. Writing morning pages is a journaling concept introduced by Julia Cameron in the book The Artists Way. She encourages acolytes to wake up and immediately scrawl three pages of whatever comes out of their brains. It could be about what they just dreamed about, problems their working out. Seriously, whatever comes out. 

Or you could set out to work through something—a problem with a friend or partner, a difficult decision, general malaise, or whatever isn’t feeling right in your world. 

Evening writing gives you a whole day of stuff to process and explore. 

What do you write about? That is 100% up to you. If you're a morning writer, you can examine your dreams for symbolism. You can work through your feelings about the day ahead. If you're an evening journaler, you can talk about your day, what worked and what didn't.

Some days you’ll find you’ll have a lot of tea to spill to yourself, other days not so much. That’s what journal prompts are for. You’ll find a handful every in your mid-week snack break. 

Time or distance: Morning pages people write three pages. What does that even mean? Three loose-leaf pages? Three typed pages? Is a page front and back or both sides? What if your journal is tiny?

Or you can set a timer for 3 or 5 or 10 or 20 minutes and just let it flow. 

This is your journal. It’s your life. You get to decide.

Don’t force it. Like all relationships, you need to work into a comfort level. If you’ve never journaled before, your first entries may seem strange to you. You may feel self-conscious. You may not know what to talk about, that’s okay. Again, journal prompts are always a good idea. You’re not getting graded on this, so you can go off topic to whatever suits you. 

There is a participation trophy for journaling. As long as you’re doing it, you’re doing it right. Can you journal every day for a week? A month? Who’s up for a journal challenge?  

Journal prompts for the newbie and the veteran

• Introduce yourself to yourself, as if you were introducing two of your BFF’s. Include the best things about you.

• Brainstorm ideas for a Ted talk based on your life experience

• Write a Ted talk.

• Write a letter to your awkward tween self about a great experience of your life.

• Write a letter to your awkward teen self about a difficult experience they were going through.

Happy writing, more prompts on Wednesday!

(and don’t worry, we’ll be talking more about journaling again.)