Journaling is something that I have always wanted to do but haven't quite gotten to the action part of making it a habit – similar to wanting to eat your daily greens but taking one look at kale and deciding that it's really not worth it. I first started my junior year of college and gave it a 1-2 month trial run but ended up losing my discipline and scrapping it altogether. I took the "bullet" journal approach of reflecting on my day, the ups and down, and what I wanted to improve on. I do think that this nightly reflection was beneficial but it's hard to quanitfy the impact – maybe I would've been better off writing narratives of my day or full-fledged letters of gratitude or typing out my main takeaway for the day.
This ambiguity is the beauty of journaling, though. You can make what you want of it. Some people may intertwine their goals, calendar, to-do-list, and diary all in one place while others may decide to only include their innermost thoughts and reflections. I tend to lean towards the latter, similar to Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, whereby I find it beneficial to put pen to paper and flesh out my thinking by jotting it down. This helps me by both piecing the 1000+ directions my brain is trying to take me in to one, coherent train of thought and also keeps me sane. I didn't realize how optimistically I'd write about journaling but it seems to have a clear, positive effect on your mind, functioning as an internal measure for homeostasis.
Now, why can't I consistently journal for 5-10 minutes every night?? The pros seem so obvious! Unfortunately, I've been really tired or sick or have lots of homework to do. These things tend to serve as a good enough excuse to skip another day of journaling. However, I'm setting out to challenge myself to journal every night until the New Year and then determine if I should keep this tradition up or not. It definitely can't hurt and my time at night would be much more well-spent writing on paper than scrolling YouTube or watching TV. And according to mal paper, journaling is very beneficial to both your mental and sleep health – something we all struggle with here and there.
Mal paper goes on to give numerous excellent prompts from lisiting your biggest daily challenge to letting out your built-up emotion on paper to citing what you are looking forward to the most. I plan on utilizing these simple heuristics throughout the next month-and-a-half and I hope you will too if you get stuck.
If you are reading this, I encourage you to start your journaling journey – one that I wouldn't have picked back up myself if it weren't for my dear friend gifting me an a journal for my birthday. Invite a friend to do the same and then talk to each other about what you learned from the experiene each week. Even if you don't find any immediate benefits, it may still be interesting to look back on what you valued each day.
Here are some things to thing further about:
How does journaling benefit me?
What do I want my journal to focus on?
Do I need to allocate specific time each night to make sure I actually journal?
What do I want to get out of journaling?
Do I need an accountability partner?
Where can journaling show up in my daily life?
What am I most grateful for?
What did I learn today?
I know that journaling is sometimes mundane and abstract, but please let me know how your journey goes and remember that it is totally OK if you miss one day, but the bigger goal is to shoot for consistency!