I have a theory that journaling is "Rubber Ducky Debugging" but for yourself. There's a code debugging method, called "Rubber Ducky Debugging" - when a programmer is stuck on a problem with their code, they will take a rubber ducky and start explaining what the code does to it, line by line, assuming (rightfully so) that the rubber ducky knows nothing about programming. When they see that what they say doesn't match with the code, or when they struggle to explain something, they now know that's the part they have to dig deeper into. I think this happens with journaling, too. The journal is your rubber ducky, and you're telling it your side of the story, but then you feel like maybe it doesn't know something you assume to be obvious so you clarify things to it, and you add disclaimers, and you struggle to word things that you might feel deep down are not right (like it's always being *them/people*, for example). So you start changing that. And then the code works :)
yes yes yes!!! you are rigth omg!! when i was younger i had like rubber little animals and debugged myself using the figures, each one had a different take on the problem, i shoudl go back to that!
“No one has the attention span and dedication to read through the amateur fan fiction autobiography that is your life,” 💀 Always been paranoid about people reading my journal so thanks for the reality check, Dr. K
How about writing it on paper then taking a pic of it n then destroying or burning the paper? Further encrypting the pic then uploading to cloud for privacy
I'll be honest: Journaling has been more useful to me than working with a therapist. Doing both is amazing and I highly recommend it. However, journaling is way more easily accessible and you can start today. Please if you haven't given it a shot, just get a notebook, a pen, and choose to fill out one page with literally any of your thoughts TODAY.
I've had the same experience. In fact, when I had therapy I was already journalling a lot in between session because I was scared I would forget important stuff to talk about, and also because I have a much easier time to express myself on paper first (talking is difficult and tiring for me). By the time I ran out of sessions covered by my insurance, I realized I got a few tools from my psychologist but aside from that the weekly/daily journalling was the most useful part. And because I enjoy the act of writting itself, I allow myself to spend some money on nicer journals (because it will never be as expensive as therapy was anyway) and I bought my first fountain pen which encourages me even more to journal!
@@micheller3251 Same! Over a decade’s worth of Moleskine notebooks and Pilot V5 pens can attest to this. I literally enjoy the mechanical feeling of writing with those two items. It helps me organize my day, remember why yesterday was good or bad, and gives me space for optimism for the coming day. Plus coffee. Lots of coffee for me.
If I ever fell and had to be taken to the hospital and someone who needed to take care of me found a bunch of journals, I would have to find a way to die. I can't imagine ever being comfortable having anything I'd consider putting in a journal, physically written down for someone else to find.
My roommate read my journal and later used it against me. She said I didn't mention a traumatizing experience I had in my journal, and therefore it didn't happen. I stopped being friends with her, but it still makes me cautious about journaling.
Hey, bruv, genuinely sorry that happened to you. If that were me it would set me back emotionally in so many ways. Though, I am glad you did the tough thing of putting distance from that particular relationship. They can be messy and brutal in their own ways. I hope the experience of someone's actions doesn't get in the way of your growth as a mentally sturdy human being, and that you find something that truly works for you. And thanks for sharing the experience. I'm getting a lock box that fits at LEAST A5 notebooks. Stay safe out there!
I find it awful that your roommate read it in the first place (without your consent). Journals or diaries are one of your most private possessions and you may even claim it contains your heart in its most fragile state. Never hesitate to protect it, if your roommate thinks that confronting you about contents of your journal is the right thing to do, then fuck that person.
i'm sorry that happened to you! i know that for many people writing works better than typing but i think creating a document with a password is the safest way if you feel unsecure. also, i remember that in my childhood i saw diaries with little padlocks and now i understand what this is for
Its absolutely insane this high level of psychological thought and advice is just available for free. Thank you for all you've done, and all the people you continue to help.
@@Skoopyghost If you can't write then type. If you can't type then record yourself. If you can't do any of this then you probably need to seek other ways of getting help because it'd be a tough life.
@@Skoopyghost majority of people don't have dyslexia, the ones that do will probably need a different solution. Doesn't mean we can't talk about a solution that might work for us.
@@SkoopyghostYou can still journal. Those (few) grammar/spelling mishaps won't interfere with what you've got to say or write on paper, it's a personal thing, not a note to a boss or teacher that needs to check if "everything is correct". =)
As an avid lifelong journaler, here's my pro tip: Invest in the physical experience of writing. Find pens you love, use ink in fun colors, buy expensive notebooks with fancy paper. The more enjoyable the experience is, the more likely you'll be to stick with the habit. Also, don't be afraid to try new things. You're not locked into one format. Got a lined notebook, but you wanna try a dot grid next? Do it! Want to incorporate drawings into your entries? Go for it! The only rule is that there are no rules. Personally, I write using fountain pens on blank looseleaf paper that's designed for fountain pen writing (Tomoe river brand). When I'm done, I file my entry away into a file folder. But it took years of experimentation for me to land on this format.
Yes! Wholeheartedly advocate for fountain pens! Pilot has some really great, cute ones and ink bottles are nice and fun to display. I journal a lot on the go so my favorite journal I've found that has good paper for fountain pens is the Leuchtturm 1917 journal. Comes in a bunch of different sizes and colors
@M Soundous damn, that's a bad situation. I have found it's pretty easy to write my thoughts on my phone, like with Google keep notes or something. If you can't use paper, that's the next best thing. Alternatively, you could write the stuff and then crumple the paper up and destroy it. You don't need to keep the paper; the act of writing is where most of the benefit comes from. I hope this helps you in some way.
@@flopsnail4750 there are apps where you can write about your day and note how happy you were during the day, you can add a password. i've used the Pixel app for months it's on the play store and it's pretty cool
@M S if you can’t risk paper trail, then as others have suggested, move to digital notes for now until you are capable of escaping your situation. Since digital notes (ime) can be a lot easier to forget about, you need to set up some triggers to remind you to start building the habit. Put the notes app/service in a prominent place on your home screen, and/or set an alarm at a time of day which is good for taking notes BUT won’t collide with a time that prying eyes might see it. Silent alarms (and/or vibrate only) are also an option on iphone at least and probably most smart phones. Habitual timing will make an unconscious habit more easily as our body clock begins to remind us it’s time for that regular task after the routine begins setting it place. However, it would be good to be able to control the habit consciously too though, so maybe consider working on finding ways to remember it of your own volition, if you think that’d be better for you (meaning you’re more likely to think about taking notes when necessary as compared to waiting for a trigger which may come at a time when you’ve forgotten details or dont feel upto it). Best of luck with your situation. Keep looking to solutions, not focus on the setbacks. Wishing you progress and peace.
Used to journal all the time growing up. My mom would find and read my entries and tell my dad what she read, even if it was about him, or get angry at me or awkward when I got older if she caught me writing and I didn't let her read it. It's created a ton of baggage for me. But from all the benefits you've listed I think I'm going to try it again.
My experience with journaling is very similar, people would invade that privacy and use it against me. My parents, as a child/teen; partners, as an adult. Systematic betrayal of trust is so hard to move on from. I don't really have any words of advice or encouragement, just know that somewhere out there, a stranger is taking this journey with you. You aren't alone.
That's why I found the assumption "no one is gonna read your diary, they don't have the attention span" quite unrealistic when it comes to close relationships. It's mainly a matter of curiosity, respect for privacy and accessibility if someone reads it or not. So, yeah both physical & digital locks can be very useful if you have nosy people in your home. Normally telling them to respect your privacy & stay away from certain objects or areas that are not meant for other people's eyes should be enough though. It's like journalists not asking artists about details of their (very personal) lyrics because having to explain them would reduce the freedom to write them in the first place.
Nowdays I have over 200 entries in my journal and I can tell you all one thing: Nobody will ever read it and the more you do it the more you realise that's the case. Even when someone walked into my room while I was journaling it always went something like: "Whatcha doin?" "Writing" "Writing what? Why?" "Words" "Can I see?" "No" "Ok" *walks away* So don't be afraid to do it. I remember I was scared as shit when I first started out. And also: Number your entries because it will feel amazing when you get to something like day 100 and you can look back at how different of a person you were before.
I do something similar with my books. I put numbers on them. Now im on the nr18 and im going to make an handmade book for my 20th🥰 Like a little anniversary.
That's certainly true for most. There are some that will, but not many. Its happened to me twice by accident, and by the same person. My spouse still feels bad about it cause it made things awkward between us for a while. It did take me a while to feel safe enough to journal again, but it's certainly worth the effort/risk.
Rocketbooks are brilliant for writing when you want to process but have concerns it could get read. (Heat of the moment thoughts may not even be our true feelings, but could definitely create problems if read.) With a rocketbook, I write, then I wipe it clean over and over. It saves paper too.
Something I’ve started doing in my journal that I find really helpful is to track positive things I’ve done for myself each day, like meditating, journaling, making art and exercising. Rather than have one check box per item per day (meditated on Monday, did not meditate on Tuesday etc. - which also ends up highlighting the days on which I “fail” to meditate) I just note down all of the positive things I did that day in one box in a yearly overview spread (Monday 6 Feb: exercised and journaled; Tuesday 7 Feb: journaled, etc.) to show myself that I do work towards my goals, since a lot of my negative self-talk centres on how I “never do anything productive”.
I REALLY like this idea. One of my biggest sources of shame is my apparent inability to create any habits or consistency no matter how hard I try, and it's easy to feel like I get nothing done at all. I should try this!
That sounds really good. Also gratitude journaling is also proven to be very beneficial, so maybe write 1 to 3 things you are grateful every day. :) I'm usually negative and tend to get discouraged easily, so focusing on the positive motivates me a lot more.
Love this! Habit trackers bug me because of that daily binary choice; did you do the thing or did you not do the thing. Just list positive things that happened or positive things you've done. Brilliant.
Honestly Dr.K, I vastly prefer journaling over meditation. Meditation puts me at ease, but writing my thoughts down is what truly made me review my priorities and organize my mind.
I seriously hope you rethink that. That's like saying I like to work out my right arm but not my left. Journaling helps to exercise and let out your emotions. Then as you use logic to solve problems after you exhausted your emotions those new beliefs make it to your subconscious. Meditation gives you more control over your emotions by weakening the strength your emotions have and strengthening the power of you have to control them. So if you get anxious and say I'm ok. It will actually work instead of being empty words.
Certain kinds of meditation makes seeing your thoughts easier. Seeing your thoughts means you can see the problem more clearly, and seeing the problem more clearly means you can fix/avoid them.
@@mozy837 meditation has those benefits, but it actually doesn't work for everyone. I like meditating, and try to do it regularly, but I sometimes find that I can't do it for long before I feel physically uncomfortable, like something is tickling me all over but from the inside, and then I just want to get up and run to get rid of the feeling. Which is the opposite of what you might expect to feel when meditating.
As an Asian kid who grew up poor in a developing country where stress and mental health wasn’t just a thing in the 90s, this is so true. I kindof agree that my siblings and I survived a dysfunctional upbringing from a controlling mother and an emotionally detached father who values pride, saving face, hard work and success like no other. As an introvert, journaling was my escape as well as my refuge. I started in sophomore high school till before I graduated college. I wrote so much about my pain, my questions, things Ive read, quotes, poems, Bible verses, letters to my crushes, letters to my future husband and about traumas and abuse i have never even shared to anyone. I did not think of it as therapeutic at that time but when I was in medical school and no longer journaling I kindof miss it and realized that it was therapeutic and restorative as well as transformative. Ive survived my struggles as a teenager because of journaling and wish I never stopped the activity.
Hey ,just take a paper or smtjgn and fill it right now ,not even for 5 minutes....maybe you will get to reconnect with Journaling or just a try again cause u miss it
Reading your comments feels like you are writing my family dysfuntional system. Just started journalling recently and it does feel therapeutic. Even reading an old entry from a month ago could make me look at life differently.
journaling: - increases grade - improves physical health - helps us not avoid our problems & face them - might work as exposure therapy; accustoms to discomfort & be more perceptive & resilient - helps construct narrative → realize new insights from another perspectives - be consistent: 15min+, as frequent as possible - journal about emotions - read your journal sometimes - physical journaling is recommended
Journaling tip if you're worried about ruining a notebook or don't have a notebook: just use lined paper. put it in a stack. my current journal is 200 pages of lined paper sitting on a shelf near my bed because the notebook i purchased for journaling made a pressure of "what if what i want to write down isn't important enough to use a page for" but I'll write pretty much anything on a $0.001 cent sheet of paper. One sheet is just the date and "made soup today. it turned out good." and that's it lol
I read my old entries, and some of the older ones read like the inner monologue of someone who viscerally hates themselves and is physically sickened by themselves. Even the handwriting is hateful. And some of the more recent ones read like someone who is realising how unreasonable they’re being and is trying to reframe. And stepping back into the hateful headspace is scary stuff. I remember vividly what it felt like and to read about it just reminds me how much has changed and how much I have to be grateful for. It helps me see patterns and actually break them. I can begin to use journaling to tell my brain that it can learn and grow even if things suck. To actually gather evidence that says I’m not a crapy person.
I think the reason why journalling helps is because by writing down feelings etc on paper physically, in a way we are learning to accept the REALITY of what we experience. It’s easy to feel stuff or experience stuff and dissociate from how uncomfortable it makes us, or get swept away with other stuff to do before having processed those emotions or experiences. So by journaling we in a way give our experience and feelings more reality and that in turn helps us process what we’re writing about.
A hybrid of bullet journalling, daily planner and diary entries over a few years has helped me and my psychiatrist get a proper diagnosis. I used it as mainly a wholistic data collection tool that helped spot things we missed before.
Benefit 243: looking at a stack of your own journals, you realize how much time you spend thinking and worrying about stuff that’s in there,, and realize you’re out of your own mind. Perspective.
My dad introduced me to journaling when I was 18. He has written two hand-written pages per day, five days a week, for over 20 years now and continues even though he's retired. After he finishes writing, he puts the journal pages directly into the paper recycling. I did it 5-ish days a week for my first two years of college. It was immensely helpful for me in reconnecting with my emotions. Then I stopped for 10+ years. During the pandemic, I started journaling once a week because I needed an emotional outlet for the stress. After your Alexithymia(?) 101 video, I started journaling 6-7 nights per week before bed. A few weeks in, I realized that I will probably benefit from journaling like that for the rest of my life, and knowing that feels good. I feel like I've made more progress on issues that have been bugging me in the last 4 months than I have in the last 6 years. Journaling is deceptively difficult and frustrating, however I think it is worth it.
This is amazing to read! I thought I journaled too much lol. I picked it back up in 2021, and now I journal 1-2 pages in the morning and 1 at night or at least 1 page if /busy with work. Changed my life heavily in 2022 and going strong.
I am glad to hear that, thanks for sharing. I started journaling kinda(just writing when I got really upset) and it did so much more than i imagined. I felt like I could look at the problem so much more objectively and come to terms with my emotions more easily.
It's such a tragedy that he'd immediately throw them away. Think of the gems you could find in there, or how your kids (or their kids, and so on) could have used those pages to get to know him after he's gone.
@@carriebartkowiak I'm struggling with this conundrum currently. The idea behind immediately throwing them away is that it gives you license to be more candid/open/vulnerable. You're not focusing on wording things just right for a future version of your self or someone who might read them in the future. That makes a lot of sense to me, but at the same time, I do want to have a record of my thoughts. I'm trying to figure out an approach that gives me the best of both worlds. I think what I've settled on is not allowing my self to cross out or correct anything once written. Anywho, I'm basically journaling in the comments at this point lol, so I'll wrap it up XD.
I think it's important to mention HOW you journal is the key. When I first started Journaling I thought it was stupid and useless because I'd write really meangingless stuff and what I did throughout the day. However, when I started Journaling as a way to advise myself as if I'm talking to a friend, it became super helpful.
I had a very strong inner critic and developed this "journaling technique" to let go of these thoughts. If you have this as well I would strongly recommend trying this out: I call it "The Inner Dialogue" (fancy, I know). Take a peace of paper and a pen. We always start with the inner critic. He probably has something bad to say about what you did or didn't do. So for this example I use that the inner critic says I always miss the gym although this time the excuse for not going is valid (e.g. being really sick). One thing before we start: Always write in the first person plural ("we") as the inner critic is part of you and I found out the issue he is having will be resolved a lot easier with this little trick. The important part is that you write everything exactly and as worse as your inner critic puts it on your paper. It may or may not be very emotional. In my example it would look like this: Inner Critic: What a complete load of sh*t! We always miss the gym. We can't even manage to go to the gym because we're oh so "sick". Hahaha, yeah. No wonder we are still fat. Look at our friends, they so much better... (etc. etc.) You get the point. Again, it's very important that you don't suppress something or hold back. Write is as your voice tells you how it thinks it is. All emotions need to get out of your system because only then we can go to the next step and being rational. Second step: Now we get to the fun part. You have an inner critic. But did you know you also have an "inner friend"? This is the guy that holds by your side, wants the best for you and is not controlled by emotions. I called it "The Inner Dialog" because your inner friend will now answer to your inner critic. This (for my example) can look something like this (and I will continue this dialog a little bit to show you how the issue of the inner critic could be resolved): Inner Friend: Wow, wow, wow... hold up. So you are saying going to the gym with 40°C/104°F fever is managable?? Inner critic: Well.. we always miss the gym. Don't you see it? Inner Friend: Last time we should have gone to the gym. I will give you that. But this time, no way. This wouldn't benifit us in any way and it would probably get worse. Now we enter the "resolution" stage. The inner friend will give the inner critic a solution to the problem. In my experience, the inner critic most of the time accepts this (and if not just continue the dialog to resolve the issue further) as we let him have a voice. Inner Friend: Look, first we heal from this fever and then we will go to the gym asap. How does that sound? Now, if you skip the gym lesson again because of laziness then the issue of the inner critic is valid and you should listen to it. This technique is mostly for things your inner critic demands that are way to extreme. With this way you (hopefully) can calm him down and reason with him and maybe even improve something in your life. Hope this helps someone out there!
Omg never thought of writing things like that but makes so much sense! I always write "I should have done this or that" and struggle a little with resolving things. Definitely will try this next time, thank you so much for sharing!! ❤
Came across this video randomly and this morning only I heard a little bit about inner critic and wanted to know more universe works wonderfully wow and thanks a lot for this info this is one of the powerful things you can do .
After I got married, my husband read my journals from before I met him. I was so mortified that I couldn’t even read it so see what he was uncovering about me. But now, journaling is no longer about crushes or dramatic relationship problems. I’m actually not shy about people reading them because it’s just me working out my thoughts and finding better solutions for my struggle of the moment. (Does that make me old and boring now??)
Not at all, maturity is a good thing. Most of us have known some adult person that never matured emotionally, socially, or intellectually. Aging or maturing is a good thing when you inner-self matures, learns healthy coping mechanisms, understand itself much better, has accepted its limitations, learned to improve where possible, learned how to communitcate better with others, has learned selfcontrol in a healthy balanced way, has tossed away the negative things of the past yet, acknowledges that those things occurred, and seeks new experiences in a more self aware and pleasant way. ( a lot of words to way = experience and wisdom )
Journalling became a fixture of my daily routine in October 2020, and it's difficult to express how much it has changed my life. It's helped to; highlight patterns, facilitate better communication, deepen my understanding of self and what makes me tick, improve my relationships, and enforce my boundaries. Having a space to navigate life issues, whether that be work, family, friendships, or personal trials and tribulations, on a daily basis has significantly improved my quality of life. Reading back over old entries has highlighted a change from (virtually) self-hatred to self-compassion. From my anecdotal experience: step-by-step, journalling really does help to change things.
Not only has narrative journaling been really helpful for processing emotions, but bullet journaling has been really helpful for my ADHD. Having a quick way to dump the wandering thoughts I want to follow up on out of my mind and a constant reminder of all the things I forget is enormously helpful.
Journaling without a set time has personally helped me a lot. I don’t enjoy schedules and planning that much, so writing whenever I had the time and felt like it during the day helped me a ton. I’ve been able to do it very consistently for around five years at this point.
I have bipolar and PTSD. Before I began therapy, journaling was a godsend for manic times, when I was up at all hours of the night and early morning, and no one was awake or available to talk to me. Today, now that I have the privilege of therapy twice a week, I mostly use journaling to manifest the good things in my life. I use journaling to express gratitude and to set goals. Sometimes, I use it between sessions with my therapist if things are intense, but my entries are usually brief enough that I can take a picture of them and send them to my therapist to discuss in the next session. Overall, journaling is amazing, and I don't think there's a wrong way to journal. Hell, I'd argue even vision boards and other artistic mediums are journaling too, to a degree.
To anyone who thinks even 15 minutes a day is daunting, you should try bullet journaling. Basically you jot down what needs to get down the next day as bullet points, and then at the end of the day check off the tasks you've finished and any thoughts you might have. Then you write the tasks for the next day. Keep doing this and for every month you complete you write a half page worth of how that month went for you, what you're looking forward to, what's on your mind, what stresses you out, etc. It's a great way of keeping up productivity (because checking things off at the end of the day is a good dopamine hit!) and a way to journal emotional thoughts without having it be too daunting of a task. It's also fun to go through your journals every now and then and see how you've grown as a person/what challenges you've overcome. Takes maybe 1 minute a day and 5-10 minutes a month. Very quick and easy! I've found that actually physically writing it into a journal, not typing it into a phone or computer, helped immensely! Good luck!
I feel like I need to give a disclaimer for bullet journaling, if you google it you will see a LOT of very artistic journals, your journals do NOT need to artistic, it is about you and what works for YOU.
@@alaaesong164 This is true but I think it sort of tends to head in that direction. Just thinking about presenting things as a list of bullet points is already in the domain of presentation/editing, far more than simple journaling is. Personally that's why I stopped. The whole editorializing thing detracts from just thinking my thoughts, and I don't personally find it practical to separate tasks into BuJo and thinking into a normal journal.
I tried the full bullet journal with the month/year planning etc but this is the only bit that stuck. I just have a week to a page diary, write in 6-8 things I need to get done that day and go from there.
I've derived a huge benefit I've gotten from journaling that I didn't anticipate. It has helped me tremendously in being able to empathize with myself and validate my own feelings. Normally, I have a hard time with this. I'm a classic case of "always there for my friends, never there for myself." When a friend is having a difficult time, it's easy for me to provide them with some of the compassion that they're having trouble giving themself. When I'm in a similar situation, though, I question all my thoughts and am initially skeptical that my feelings are valid responses to the situation I'm in. I treat my feelings with contempt and treat myself with cruelty by default. When I write down whatever I'm feeling or thinking, I can look at a page full of panicked thoughts and say to the person who wrote them: "It sounds like you're really scared. I'd be scared, too, if I was going through that. It's okay to be scared. But you're not in any real danger, and no matter what happens with this situation, you'll be okay in the end. You won't die, and you'll still have people who love and support you." The trick, of course, is that the "other person" is me! Once I have those feelings validated, everything gets much easier. Journaling makes it much easier to be compassionate to myself, which makes my relationship with myself much healthier than it would otherwise be. Then, I start to trust myself more and feel more confident and secure. It really does feel like magic, sometimes!
This makes a lot of sense. It's similar to the advice where: if you have a problem in your mind, respond with the same compassion you would to a friend. It's funny to think about this in a way. We're told at a young age to treat others like you would like the be treated. But we are not told that you should treat yourself how you would like to be treated. This is definitely just as valid.
I finally started journaling in December - it has made a huge difference in my negative thought loops. My therapist said it helps bring the unconscious conscious (Carl Jung). I've resisted journaling for so long now during my work days I look forward to coming home to journal... then read a little bit of a book prior to sleep :) Thanks Dr. K for all your videos!!
Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks was by far the most influential book I've read in my life. His 5 second moment daily entry has made my journalling a lot easier as it only takes me a minute or two to make it and helps my memory since he emphasizes on framing it as if you were telling a story, making it memorable, as well as reflective.
This book sounds intriguing. Writing stories sounds enjoyable to me, but I never sat down and knew where to start. I feel like this might be a great segway suss-out thoughts and struggles throughout the day as well as honing your creative writing skills. I look forward to reading this.
@@cgyang AS you mentioned, it really does help you put daily struggles and complications into a story perspective. And as we all know, a great story includes a great character development. I think putting a day to day life in a story perspective allowed me to see myself as a character who can have bad days or can have good days but the character is always building.
For me, journaling started out as a brain dump for therapy that week. That way, I didn't forget anything that needed to be discussed. There's something about getting it out of your head and onto a piece of paper that really does help.
I've been journaling every day for the last 16 years (started it when I was 11). It is basically a habit at this point, a part of my nightly routine before settling down for bed. Some days it's just a record of what I did that day, but on the rough days it's very helpful to get my thoughts out and help me work through things. I don't read through old entries very often, and I will admit there's parts of my life that reading back through is difficult, but it really does show how much things have changed for the better. It's also acts as a good record for times in my life when I maybe doubted my own memory, or an event that took place, or how I felt about something at the time. Journaling is a very useful tool! A tool I only started using out of fear of forgetting chunks of my life again, but it's became much more than just that.
I don’t write comments often but this has been one of my favorite videos ever. I’ve started to journal consistently because of it and I’ve grown so much. Im not new to the mental health space but very impressed by the way that you put things into perspective!
I've been doing it every day at 11 PM since January 2022. It's helped me get thoughts off my mind, record memories (good and bad) as well as see my frame of mind from the worst year of my life. I recommended journaling either by hand or on your phone if it's easier. This year has been so much better and it's partly because I saw my horrible mentality through journaling and started changing it.
I have ADHD, and I have pen and paper near me at all times because it's similar to glasses but for my working memory. If I get all the the things out on paper I can actually see the big picture, and often solutions to whatever it is I'm trying to do. As I always have pen and paper near me, I also journal, and I'm pretty sure it's why I'm not more messed up from going undiagnosed for 39 years.
📝 Benefits of Journaling: - Journaling can improve grades and academic performance. - Journaling has positive effects on physiological health, such as improving blood pressure and blood glucose control. - Journaling helps increase tolerance for negative emotions and discomfort. - Journaling can help construct a narrative and make sense of life experiences. - Journaling promotes self-reflection and learning from mistakes. - Journaling can have delayed effects, with benefits lasting up to six months. - There is no one-size-fits-all formula for journaling, but consistency is important. - Physically writing in a journal slows down thoughts and commits them to memory.
I’ve never looked into the studies but just from personal experience I can reflect on why I think it works - at least for me. I am someone who has a tendency toward obsessive or intrusive thoughts. I tend to ruminate on interpersonal conflicts or other frustrations. The problem is that this process is very disorganized. In a state of heightened anxiety, the imaginative side of your brain is engaged at the expense of your critical and logical side of your brain. A bunch of random noise basically. However, the moment you attempt to put these thoughts on paper, this immediately forces you to think more logically and concretely. This engages the more logical side to cooperate with your imaginative side. Both sides have to work together. This alone, gives you some relief but also a space for real self reflection. This in turn can produce real epiphanies into why you do or feel certain things. The reason why it took way too many years to get started was because I was so afraid to be honest. But the moment you free yourself from this hang up, a whole new world of self discovery opens up in unexpected ways.
I started journaling after delaying it for months and months, after watching a Carrie Ann Moss's interview. She explained how writing "I am enough" over and over again in her journal helped her to believe it and thrive in a low point in her life. Something in the way she explained was very compelling, she wasn't apologetic or shy about it.
Journaling helps me, I sometimes overshare and I'm doing my best to be more closed-minded as a person. Journal helps in this case, I write it down and it's like I told someone else about it ( to myself) . It also helps me to not overthink my problems. It's basically being a best friend with your innerself.
To seek better development I think it's better seeking to be more open-minded and not close-minded. Just a friendly observation. There are much more benefits to being open minded, at least in my opinion.
@realDominik586 I write them down and as I do it the problem becomes more understandable and simple. For you to write thoughs from your head you must slow them down first. Slower like that as you write them you see that the actual problem is most of the time not that big . It's you brain that's oversizeing it . And suddenly you realize that it's not something you need to waste your energy and time.
I have kept a daily journal for the past 34 years straight, I can say with 100% certainty its been on of the most transformative tools in life. Your video confirms my experience
i've been journaling for 4 months now. and a cool thing is that whenever i think "oh it'd be cool if i did this" i can write it down, and judge it later. So i'm both not doing stuff by impulse and not forgeting good moves. Really fire. another thing is that if you write down your gratitudes and good stuff that happened it gets really hard to believe you're miserable and shit, cuz you can go back and be like "oh ok these good things happened actually"
What a GREAT breakdown about journaling. I've journaled off and on all my life, knowing how generally reflective and helpful it could be but never heard about all of these studies know knew the intricacies of how it was so helpful. going to watch the video again to make sure I got all the details. Not even a gamer, but the was such a great explainer.
When depression and anxiety swept me away in 2013, journaling was all I had keeping the threads of my sanity together. I wrote to my journal begging for help for years in secret. When I became unemployed in 2022 and isolated myself…I journaled my entire 8 months of unemployment until I had written myself out of any fear and finally took action and moved across country restarting my life from the bottom up. I wrote my heartbreak away. I wrote my confusions about life with ADHD into understandings and solutions. My life completely changed in 3 months. To journal is to study the curriculum of one’s own mind…to understand what the mind has been doing, what it needs to do, and what it wants to and why. (Right now I’m journaling my anxious attachment style into secure attachment because I got ghosted and that shit hurted. Ironically the first and only gift I was able to get them was a really nicely made journal and pen..encouraging them to write down their thoughts.)
As someone who has taken up this habit more recently I can tell you that I don't necessarily feel the benefits every time I open the book to write but there have been a couple of times where forcing myself to slow down my thought speed to my writing speed alone has helped me process the issue but other times just putting it on paper I felt tension leaving my body.
It actually works.. The key is to keep it private and sometimes you need to write your deepest and darkest thoughts and read it loud twice and burn it.. This will release all the trapped emotions
In about August of last year I finally got myself committed and prepared to start learning another language. And I made it my goal to at least journal in it once a day and see how my thoughts progressed over the course of the week. It has been a wild ride so far but like 130+ days in and I can tell you I know so much more about how I phrase things to myself and how I approach situations in real life now
I have been writing a complete diary every day since 1994 with not a page-a-day missed. This amounts to about 11,000 pages in yearly Moleskin books. I have never myself made the process that you describe so clear in my mind. I am very grateful that you have done so for me, because I believe that what you describe as a habit of addressing problems in a progressive and more thoughtful way is exactly what I have been doing unknowingly all that time. I do not believe that I could be so patient if I did not write everyday and spell out in correct prose what the issues of the day are. This, after a while, becomes a need because it does bring satisfying advancement toward resolution. It is a form of meditation helped by the methodical process of writing it out in structured sentences and logical paragraphs. Thank you for being so articulate and intelligent in this explanation. It is amazing how it suddenly brings together to clarity thirty years of instinctual introversion.
I've had periods in my life where I did try journaling. It'd usually come out as long stream of consciousness type rambles, and writing with pen and paper didn't slow me down one bit (I'd just write really, really sloppy). But for me, I tended to spiral into the journal entry, making mountains out of molehills and coming up with problems that didn't exist; winding up my own anxiety and depression and digging myself into a hole. After journaling, I typically felt isolated and unhappy, rather than feeling relieved to have "gotten things off my chest". I'd spend days after thinking about the journal entry obsessively, going over everything I'd written in my head and trying to come up with anything I'd missed. Journaling ended up adding to the noise in my head, making it more difficult for me to notice or identify my real thoughts and feelings. Since I stopped journaling, I've felt calmer in my day to day life. My anxiety is lessened, my depression is a little lighter, and I'm taking better care of myself than I have in years. I'm finally starting to learn who I am and what I want! I think the issue is that I was journaling wrong. I don't know how to write in a way that it relieves my mental burden rather than adding to it.
I have been Journaling for 5 months now recovering from Child Abuse. I am 52. I was so lost as how to recover from PTSD. And when I started Journaling, I started seeing my emotions on the outside, viewing them, contemplating them. It changed my thinking. I emotionally evolved. Now I journal every time I am emotionally overwhelmed.
I recently broke up with my girlfriend of 3+ years, and that was the motivator to make me finally start journaling. Along with beginning therapy again, journaling has been such a great supplemental tool for keeping track of my thoughts, and cutting to the heart of what I feel. I haven’t really loved myself ever, and a big issue in my relationships, romantic or not, has been that I don’t bring up boundaries because I don’t want to frustrate the other person in fears that they would hate me and abandon me. I place a lot of guilt on myself easily regardless of whether or not my actions were wrong or misinterpreted. It truly helps you confront discomfort, offer yourself sympathy, and helps you understand why you feel uncomfortable and how to accept that and sometimes move past it. It’s become an outlet for me to look at my emotions in the mirror, not get distracted, and be blunt but kind to myself. I feel like I’m on the road to becoming a totally different and overall healthier person simply by understanding my motivations over the past mere 3-4 weeks. I highly recommend it, I’m glad Dr.K is spreading the word journaling is the best thing I’ve done for myself in a long time and I hope everyone here can give it a shot ❤
Journaling makes me feel heard and valued. It also helps me identify why I feel how I feel, what triggers why i felt it, and provides a plan for a possible solution in the events that a similar event occurs. I recommend it to everyone.
Pro tip: I, too, always worried about other people being able to read my journal, which would prevent me from being completely open and honest in writing, but I find that using OneNote (free) is really helpful since you can password protect a "Journal" section. I'm also able to organize each journal entry by date or title. Also if you have a stylus, you can write into OneNote or just type, whichever you prefer. Personally my mind tends to get extra ADHD when I get anxious, so I prefer typing since I'm able to get thoughts into text faster before I forget the thought(s) that I'm having. Then I'll pause and reflect on the string of thoughts I just wrote down, which has been quite helpful for me!
Journaling has helped me greatly, and I have a very off and on relationship with it. Frequently I'd write my goals for the day and then notes for the day. My memory improved, my moon improved, and I started getting better at predictions and long term planning. It also helped me put things down that I know I need to remember. It forces you to slow down your thoughts and write them down, opening your mind to new ways to think about them. Being able to go back and re-read similar experiences is insightful too, because they show a clear path of what happened after that experience as well.
Wow! This honestly sold me on journaling way better than most therapists have. I appreciate you explaining why and how it works, not all professionals care to do that, which makes a world of difference. Admittedly it was a bit confusing at first when you described pronoun usage because I was like, "but I use both they and I," but when you followed up explaining that it's showing change & growth, that was really validating. I have been working to change, and to me, that proves it is working. Great video all around. I will definitely work at journaling more often.
I've been journalling since 2019, and it has helped me recognize patterns in my thought process. It's also nice to have traces of who you were, to compare with who you are now.
Been journaling about as long as you. Now it's it's a comfort for me. I start journalling just because I know I'm going to forget the thing because I like how I worded it in that moment. Also, I want to emphasize how important it was for me to read back through stuff. I do it about twice a year. But it's interesting how much I forget.
“From a narrative perspective Narcissists commonly use they, ‘They don’t respect me,’ ‘Those people don’t value me,’ while people with depression tend towards saying I, ‘I’m a waste of space,’ ‘I don’t belong here.” What happens with journaling is that it leads to a healthier mix of the two.” “They don’t accept me, because I am a freak.”
@@ponternal just because they journaled that doesnt mean journaling leads to acts of violence...haha. Did they wear shoes? Do shoes make you violent? Taxi Driver had personality disorders and didn't sleep. Joker is what manifests in a a corrupted cesspool like Gotham City.
To be fair, I am an ESL person in a society of monolinguals. Add the fact that I am learning Ancient Greek , latin and Japanese. What we get? No one is realistically going to read my manuscripts. I probably still have either a mental blockage from school or I am bad at structuring thoughts on paper. To all of you that think "just write" is the answer, understand: having many thoughts at the same time and wanting to write them all, involves you getting rid of some of them for the sake of the better ones, i.e. prioritization. I am autistic and I suffer from many prioritization problems thanks to that. The only way I thought of getting this better would be an infinite canvas on a tablet, I guess. Gotta stop trying to dream with the "perfect setup" and working with what I have. Also, Some structure is needed, since I get stuck too much without some prompts. EDIT: thanks for all the likes and the responses! I wasn't looking for any of that, I was just "self-talking". I tend to talk out loud or type to understand or decide things on my life. I was going to do it anyways, but y'all gave me more insight about what to do. I changed stuff on my environment to help me journal more. I decided on 3 levels: braindump, reorganization and extraction. braindump is just writing badly on pieces of scrap paper. In reorganization, I analyze my day to see how much of it aligned with my goals(like a diary). In extraction, I write nicely (in a summarized way) key ideas from earlier writings for daily usage and store them. Seriously, Thank you all, specially: micheller3251, charliekowittmusic7965, brandonn4332, guntera3845 , Demaen666 and anyone that read my comment till here :D
You don’t need an infinite tablet. You should try just writing the thoughts down as they come into your mind. What will happen is eventually your mind will start to calm down. At the beginning you might feel frustrated and exhausted, but if you keep trying it will make you feel better. Think of journaling as an outlet for your thoughts. What you write down doesn’t have to make sense. It can be all over the place, that’d okay. Just whatever is in your mind. You can also try writing down they key points from all your different thoughts and then try to write a story that connects them all. It doesn’t have to go on forever, just keep going until you want to stop.
HI, I'm autistic too, with prioritization issues. Here's my experience in case it can help you in any way. When I have too many directions of thoughts at once and can't choose (often because I'm scared of forgetting important parts by choosing only one thought to focus on), I let myself jump from one to the other without even finishing my sentences. Kinda like a braindump... but in half-sentences. I go back to previous ideas, draw arrows, skip lines to leave space in case I want to add more (even though we would always need more space, which is where arrows are usefull, or color codes, or symbols), etc. Just putting all of it on paper is sometimes enough to liberate my mind enough to go forward with less different thoughts, or to physically see the different thoughts and maybe afterward dedicate a different page/section to each thought now that I don't have to remember them all at once. And sometimes words aren't even enough to express thoughts, which is where "drawing your feelings" can help evacuate the extra intense feelings and sensations (look up Peter Draws' video about it if it sounds like something helpfull to you).
"The only way I thought of getting this better would be an infinite canvas on a tablet". Have you thought of getting an iPad? If u could save money and get one down the line, it can really help you since the amount of space you get to write on certain apps is soo much. it's been so helpful for me and I only just got one after finishing college. I did research and the best canvas note taking apps are Notability and GoodNotes. I've been using Notability for over a year now and it's saved me so much paper and allowed me to put to much in a document.
You may be surprised to find that when you journal daily, and/or jot down all thoughts during the day, that the infinite mass of thoughts actually decreases. For example, how much of your infinite thought mass is made up of thoughts you also had yesterday/last week? Good luck! I started using this app called Diarium and journaling once a week has helped me process a lot of experiences and emotions. I also keep a memo pad in my shirt pocket to jot during the day. Yes, Diarium sounds a lot like “diarrhea” 😂
I'm developing a habit of journaling when my anxious state kicks in using CBT pattern: event (what is happening or happened, in non-judgemental way), body reaction (usually my anxious state of frequent heartbeat and uncomfortable feeling chest), emotions and finally thoughts which are being produced. It gives relief right IN THE MOMENT, something like reconnecting with reality in addition to what dr.K said. The hardest thing is to catch this state and to make yourself start, but if you can do it, I can suggest this approach.
Journaling may possibly be the best thing i got out of therapy. I get to explore what my day/s looks like, what's bothering me and have a general assessment of my state of mind. Kind of like what Dr K said I noticed I've been questioning my own thoughts and judgements of my situations. Although I don't necessarily reach a conclusion for every train of thought, the fact that writing gives me a way to unspool my thoughts has been tremendously helpful in the way I process situations.
I have an anxiety disorder and I’ve been journaling for a year now. it’s been very good for me! I can see my anxiety go down every time I put my thoughts on paper, it makes brain fog a lot less strong and I can think for myself a lot more often! It also makes it more clear whenever my boundaries have been crossed or if a boundary even exists in some situations. Helps understand where I was wrong and where I was wronged by someone. Definitely would recommend! :D
Never been to your channel before, but I've been thinking about journaling recently. You could have only posted this an hour or so before I started looking and so far it's the best video I've found explaining the benefits and process. Just wanted to say thank you for the work you put into it and let you know you've got a new subscriber.
I felt like journaling every day was too big of a commitment but I do journal in times of immense stress or happiness and sometimes just for fun and that works for me. :) I think it's immensely helpful for honoring the way you feel and processing. Sometimes I'm too scared to tell someone, or too mad to say how I feel and I use journaling especially in those moments. If you're someone who gets mental block when talking about your feelings I totally recommend it!
To me writing is creating a whole new world, you literally have no limits. Still, I write about simple things, like the way I feel that day or things that worry me. But if I want I can draw whatever or try writing some poetry. I can't find anything that brings more sense of freedom to me that journaling, so for those of you who haven't tried it, I just hope you do and create the universe you want :)
I don't do it as often anymore, but journaling helps me remember things that happened and how I felt about them. My memory sucks (adhd) so I often forget how events occurred or how I felt during/after/ about them. And it helped me track my medical symptoms have changed over time.
Journaling has benefitted me greatly. In the A.'.A.'. we must write everything down - our emotions, our physical conditions, even the weather! Anything that might influence our performance. And it really does help a lot with understanding and improving yourself.
Guys you can also try audio journaling for people who do not like writing. Just open the voice memo app/specific audio journaling app/or speech to text on notes and then talk about everything that’s on your mind, bothering you etc. it’s like talking to a friend, you get things off your chest, understand problems, brainstorm solutions etc. it makes you feel better and you don’t even have to talk to someone or make them promise secrecy. It’s a win win
What a perfect timing. My girlfriend and I decided to give each other a journal for valentines since we want to record our relationship and since we both deal with some mental issues, use it to help with that.
@@lilym8033 what a couple did that day and what they felt during situations together. Its really not a complicated idea. They can also right down romantic ideas or plans. Write poems. Even during fights, writing down what caused it how far they argued for how long. Its can be about anything reallly. And when it comes to arguments i think it be good to write them down then look back and see if theres a pattern. Seeing the pattern may help in the future to improve their relationship and themselves
I've been journaling for 3 years now and it really just helps you take the edge off of Is current stresses. When I 1st started journaling I didn't know what I was doing I was just writing down how I felt and I found out It helped me process the emotions through a logical viewpoint
I am a physics Ph.D student working in a lab, every student has a lab notebook where we write down what we do in the lab on a daily basis. That really helps because when you get stuck or forget something you can easily go back to your previous notes, the information is there. It also helps us leave a sort of a guide to new students after we graduate. It is a lot like journaling. However, unlike journaling, they are literally written for someone else to read :D
The only thing I disagree about is people not having the attention span to read your journal. The thrill of knowing your secrets will motivate them to read it.
I was never able to journal, and I didn't know how to start, I was never able to be consistent with it and do it every day which would demoralize me... I'm gonna try once a week, thanks for the advice
I'm super inconsistent at journaling too. Now that I've gotten into it, it's something I do when I remember but usually at least once a week. Here's some things you can try of you want, take what you need, leave what you don't. When you journal, give yourself a very relaxed minimum requirement: to write one sentence. That's it. If you have a problem with the motivation, one sentence is a lot easier to convince yourself to do than a whole entry. Some of my journal entries are short or in deeply condensed writing style because I just didn't have the time and motivation to write it out all the way. But that still says something, and can be a writing prompt for when I feel up to it later and I want to talk about it. Second look into something like the "every day calendar" by simone giertz. It doesn't make you do the thing, it just lets you see when you last did the thing. I use an app that is close enough (ez habit on android). But if you are really hard on yourself for missing a day it doesn't pile the guilt on. or if you just have trouble building habits (like I do), that sort of input helps a lot in letting my brain figure out how to estimate when I need to do it next. Being able to see a full month calendar page at once of how I am doing helps a lot. Ez habit lets me see a full year too, which helps some. And lastly, it can help to record things you don't think you should journal about, meaningful moments with friends, or creative ideas. When I first started journaling, I put in bad poetry, story ideas etc. That replaced some days, but even still i find I have to write a couple scenes out to process certain more complicated feelings.
I do it because I'm a firm believer that emotions not only affect my point of view, it also affects in the conclusions or actions I take in a situation, even if I am the same person. I treat my journal as an analysis on me and what I did and why, sometimes I end thinking "Now that I think about it, that acting was not like i'd expect of me...Emotions/Situations got the better of me...Or Sloth". Sometimes I don't do that, sometimes I just vent about something and that makes me feel better, because I end thinking about what and why happened and I tend to see that it was not as bad as it seemed, it was the intensity of living something more than the objective way of it being.
@HealthyGamerGG I was actually looking for more coverage on this topic. Thank You! Most of the posts in the journaling groups on Reddit don't say much about how to use journaling, those groups are usually just about posting pictures of the pretty journals you bought! So many ways to journal, it is shame more people don't talk about the various techniques and benefits. Logging, stream of consciousness, CBT exercises, bullet journaling, etc etc.
ive been journaling for about 2 weeks now and have figured a ton out about myself and been able to work through a lot. its helped a TON with my depression, more than antidepressants did back when i tried them. (maybe i was just on the wrong meds for me, but the point stands)
This is kind of like emotional dumping, which is not great when you do it to another person, but won't make you feel guilty to do it on a journal. It's like you're sharing the burden of responsibility, not particularly one of fixing the problem itself but of feeling bad about the problem which gives that sense of "I'm not alone with my pain." And sharing the emotional burdens, even with a piece of paper, infinitely feels better than taking on everything by oneself.
Im a college student taking a psychiatric internship for credits and we have to journal our experiences and how we feel, and honestly considering that alot of what we cover is of actual confidential clinical cases, writing out my thoughts is such an engaging way to make me feel like im not alone in noticing the things we do and see. Deep down I always want to tell my friends "hey man so theres this poor patient and heres some stuff about it and cool stuff we learned" even though I know im not supposed to. I dont want to gossip, I just want to conversate on how interesting the experience was, but I dont want to breach confidentiality even if its more than likely it'll never come bacl to haunt me. Having a journal really helps. Just wanted to say that, also great vid!
Yup, I can confirm it helps. I noticed that my mental health is in a way better condition when I do journal than when I don't for a long period of time. My first attempt at "journaling" was when I was 6. It was just a simple diary then, with drawings and a little of text. But over the 19 years of this practice (I feel old writing it like this 😂) it became a very important part of my life that led to many insights about myself and my surroundings and helped me to go through difficult moments and grow.
I recomend ro write every day. It could be a half a page it doesn't matter. Its a good idea to draw into them. And they don't need to je perfect. I have there skribbles and so much of weird stuff there. Don't focus on filling them. They are like skechchbook. You just write and write and write and write until they are filled. My usual journal is 2 months wroting around 4 pages every day. So yeah. It takes a lot of time
I have found that journalling has helped get my thoughts onto pages and it helps me process things especially when i am stressed or overthinking. I always thought it was a placebo effect, but then when i started doing it consistently since October last year, things have been improving mentally and physically!
I've often heard friends talking about journaling being super useful but never fully got it, so this was interesting! 2 minor points of feedback on the vid: - The audio is weird. It's been like this in a couple of your recent vids - Showing specific stuff Dr K references makes sense, but the random stock clips kinda disrupt the flow imo.
Amazing to hear what I've been doing is actually a thing. Although I've been journaling (and to some extent forcing it on people) in technical area - work related. Works wonders if you're solving highly unstable/complex/long term challenges.
when i was 7 or 8 i use to have a journal, and i always write in english. I'm only a child back then so my english is bad, my older sister read it aloud and it traumatized me making fun of my writings and read aloud all my secrets in front of my mom and my other siblings. And that made me stop journaling for years, but im trying to get better rn so i continue journaling. My sister and I arent talking anymore i hate her so much.
I also find it just helps getting thoughts out of my head that I otherwise would keep going round and round about. And yeah, I tried writing on my PC before, but there's something about writing with pen that makes it more effective.
00:00 📝 Journaling can initially seem daunting, as it involves putting down deep thoughts on paper, but it has shown to be effective in problem-solving. 00:28 📚 There is strong evidence suggesting that journaling can have a positive impact on various aspects of life, including academic performance and physiological responses. 02:21 💭 Journaling helps individuals confront and process emotional challenges by gradually exposing them to their emotions, teaching them to tolerate discomfort. 04:51 🔄 Journaling aids in changing perspectives and constructing narratives, potentially leading to post-traumatic growth instead of prolonged stress. 05:20 🗣️ The use of pronouns injournaling can shift from self-focused (I) to considering others (they), indicating a change in narrative and perspective. 08:49 🤔 Journaling serves as a form of "replay analysis," allowing individuals to gain deeper insights and learn from their experiences, much like reviewing gameplay to improve performance. 12:25 📆 Consistency in journaling, whether daily or weekly, is important for reaping its benefits, which may manifest over time, even up to six months after initial entries. 14:18 🖋️ Physical writing in a journal slows down thoughts, allows for deeper processing, and aids in memory retention, making it a valuable practice over digital alternatives.
Yo me journaling activates something like "cameraman never dies" effect. What I mean is you can't be inside of an emotional experience and describe it in your journal simultaneously. You either live through painful experience without escape or you write about it. And when you write you get into another plane of psyche. Maybe you even switch between "symbolic and phantasm" planes in terms of postfreudian analysts.
I noticed that journaling helped me to process and heal from the grief of losing a loved one. I didn't start to do it for that reason, but I noticed afterwards that it actually helped a lot.
I started journalling about a year ago and it's become one of the most important things I do to look after myself, and a part of my day that I always look forward to. I can't imagine living without it now.
I recently(about 6 months ago) started keeping a private sketch journal. And it's been so good for my mental health. I not only write about my feelings/experiences but draw them too. I wonder what kind of benefits art as therapy provide?
I went to a clinic for an eating disorder and the first thing they told me is to start a journal, the one where you write down everything you eat in a day, it didn't fix my issue right away, but later I tried it again, and it helped me develop healthy eating habits that stick.
Not you only! I’m thinking of getting back to it without lingering much about who will read it, cus..honestly? idgaf anymore. So, if u want to get back to it,DO IT. Best of luck to U.
@@kiko813 Well, I no longer live with siblings, or in contact with anyone I knew would do the same thing, so I should be safe to try again for the first time in around 13 years....
I love journaling. I scrapbook, bullet journal, draw, and keep a diary. I started really slowly, and then just took off a few years ago. It’s been so helpful, I recommend everyone try different types of journaling.
I tried journaling years ago, but my fear was if I died suddenly, there was stuff in there that I didn't care to share with anyone. Sometimes there are things that people don't need to know about other people because their relationship with them is different from yours. So I destroyed them and have peace of mind, it's a catch 22 damned if you do, damned if you don't. I agree that rereading it later can give you a clearer picture of whether you made the right decision or not.
In that case, journaling digitally would be a smart thing. Because you would have an id and password. Unless you share it with someone, it goes down with you. Hope it helps. :)
Get a rocketbook and erase it regularly. Get paper for things worth keeping, but I erase anything that I need to process but I wouldn't want seen later.
I throw out my stream of conscious writing the moment I'm done with my notebook. They're only small 64 page ones so it happens fairly often, but in I don't see the value of keeping them around. I havr a digital journal that I go back to documenting what I do actually want to remember though, but the physical books are just used to be "throw thoughts on the page in an archaic way"
What's wrong with the sound? Sounds like there are 2 sound sources phasing each other. This makes it also sound boxed. You can hear the difference between the CTA and the rest of the video
I started journaling about 2 years ago when i was in the depths of grief. I found it really useful to basically brain-dump everything that kept going round in my brain and noticed that when I had written it down, it not only stopped it from bothering me for a short time, but I was able to question my feelings more, ask myself the questions that were muddled amoungst the grief and make sense of it all. In my brain it was like this huge knotted bundle that was a mix of feelings, thoughts and questions etc but once I wrote it down i could make sense of it and work through my grief more logically without everything in my head being all knotted together. I don't journal every day, but when I have something on my mind that is really bothering me and keeps distracting me, I write it all down and I feel so much calmer. Everything makes much more sense on paper than when it's swirling around in my head like a tornado and like I said, I use it as a brain-dump so my thoughts aren't distracting me from getting on with my day.
Is it normal to look back and read through journals from 5 years ago, and feel embarrassed - for feeling / thinking those ways?!! Is this growth? Or weird?
Totally normal! I'm a huge journaller too and I get like this. I think this is an advantage of journalling: you get to see the ways you've grown and changed. It's a great opportunity to practice being open and sympathetic towards other view points. I think if we realize and accept how changeable we are we can be more accepting of the differences in others.
![[UNCUT] The Loyal Pin ปิ่นภักดิ์ EP.6 (1/4)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/m05kZ2GDKXg/mqdefault.jpg)
![โฮ่ง! (SUGOI) - LYKN [ OFFICIAL MV ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nFp4zjAARFs/mqdefault.jpg)
I have a theory that journaling is "Rubber Ducky Debugging" but for yourself.
There's a code debugging method, called "Rubber Ducky Debugging" - when a programmer is stuck on a problem with their code, they will take a rubber ducky and start explaining what the code does to it, line by line, assuming (rightfully so) that the rubber ducky knows nothing about programming. When they see that what they say doesn't match with the code, or when they struggle to explain something, they now know that's the part they have to dig deeper into.
I think this happens with journaling, too. The journal is your rubber ducky, and you're telling it your side of the story, but then you feel like maybe it doesn't know something you assume to be obvious so you clarify things to it, and you add disclaimers, and you struggle to word things that you might feel deep down are not right (like it's always being *them/people*, for example). So you start changing that. And then the code works :)
That's a brilliant analogy!
I really like this analogy!
yes yes yes!!! you are rigth omg!! when i was younger i had like rubber little animals and debugged myself using the figures, each one had a different take on the problem, i shoudl go back to that!
Ah this is great
Never thought about it like that, thats genius
“No one has the attention span and dedication to read through the amateur fan fiction autobiography that is your life,” 💀
Always been paranoid about people reading my journal so thanks for the reality check, Dr. K
Me, planning on getting a security clearance and expecting a through inspection of my life: 👀
I see an app on my phone with a fingerprint.
That remark felt personal though
How about writing it on paper then taking a pic of it n then destroying or burning the paper? Further encrypting the pic then uploading to cloud for privacy
I remember trying to make my depression spiels in my diary sound poetic back when I was 12 just in case I published it one day.
I'll be honest: Journaling has been more useful to me than working with a therapist. Doing both is amazing and I highly recommend it. However, journaling is way more easily accessible and you can start today.
Please if you haven't given it a shot, just get a notebook, a pen, and choose to fill out one page with literally any of your thoughts TODAY.
Same here! It's amazing how it makes me feel so much better and calmer about myself and life!
I've had the same experience. In fact, when I had therapy I was already journalling a lot in between session because I was scared I would forget important stuff to talk about, and also because I have a much easier time to express myself on paper first (talking is difficult and tiring for me). By the time I ran out of sessions covered by my insurance, I realized I got a few tools from my psychologist but aside from that the weekly/daily journalling was the most useful part. And because I enjoy the act of writting itself, I allow myself to spend some money on nicer journals (because it will never be as expensive as therapy was anyway) and I bought my first fountain pen which encourages me even more to journal!
@@micheller3251 Same! Over a decade’s worth of Moleskine notebooks and Pilot V5 pens can attest to this. I literally enjoy the mechanical feeling of writing with those two items. It helps me organize my day, remember why yesterday was good or bad, and gives me space for optimism for the coming day.
Plus coffee. Lots of coffee for me.
If I ever fell and had to be taken to the hospital and someone who needed to take care of me found a bunch of journals, I would have to find a way to die. I can't imagine ever being comfortable having anything I'd consider putting in a journal, physically written down for someone else to find.
Journalling simulates a conversation - with extra time to talk and no correction.
I guess the issue is if you need genuinely new information.
My roommate read my journal and later used it against me. She said I didn't mention a traumatizing experience I had in my journal, and therefore it didn't happen. I stopped being friends with her, but it still makes me cautious about journaling.
Well they shown the true color that they are not your friends they are snakes
Hey, bruv, genuinely sorry that happened to you. If that were me it would set me back emotionally in so many ways. Though, I am glad you did the tough thing of putting distance from that particular relationship. They can be messy and brutal in their own ways. I hope the experience of someone's actions doesn't get in the way of your growth as a mentally sturdy human being, and that you find something that truly works for you. And thanks for sharing the experience. I'm getting a lock box that fits at LEAST A5 notebooks. Stay safe out there!
@@descendantofsomeone Thanks for that 🙏🏻 Appreciate it
I find it awful that your roommate read it in the first place (without your consent). Journals or diaries are one of your most private possessions and you may even claim it contains your heart in its most fragile state. Never hesitate to protect it, if your roommate thinks that confronting you about contents of your journal is the right thing to do, then fuck that person.
i'm sorry that happened to you! i know that for many people writing works better than typing but i think creating a document with a password is the safest way if you feel unsecure. also, i remember that in my childhood i saw diaries with little padlocks and now i understand what this is for
Its absolutely insane this high level of psychological thought and advice is just available for free. Thank you for all you've done, and all the people you continue to help.
Maybe journaling is helpful. What if you have dyslexia, and struggle with writing?
@@Skoopyghost
If you can't write then type.
If you can't type then record yourself.
If you can't do any of this then you probably need to seek other ways of getting help because it'd be a tough life.
@@Skoopyghost majority of people don't have dyslexia, the ones that do will probably need a different solution. Doesn't mean we can't talk about a solution that might work for us.
@@SkoopyghostI'm dyslexic and I journal so I can improve my critical thinking and it works
@@SkoopyghostYou can still journal. Those (few) grammar/spelling mishaps won't interfere with what you've got to say or write on paper, it's a personal thing, not a note to a boss or teacher that needs to check if "everything is correct". =)
As an avid lifelong journaler, here's my pro tip:
Invest in the physical experience of writing. Find pens you love, use ink in fun colors, buy expensive notebooks with fancy paper. The more enjoyable the experience is, the more likely you'll be to stick with the habit.
Also, don't be afraid to try new things. You're not locked into one format. Got a lined notebook, but you wanna try a dot grid next? Do it! Want to incorporate drawings into your entries? Go for it! The only rule is that there are no rules.
Personally, I write using fountain pens on blank looseleaf paper that's designed for fountain pen writing (Tomoe river brand). When I'm done, I file my entry away into a file folder. But it took years of experimentation for me to land on this format.
Yes! Wholeheartedly advocate for fountain pens! Pilot has some really great, cute ones and ink bottles are nice and fun to display. I journal a lot on the go so my favorite journal I've found that has good paper for fountain pens is the Leuchtturm 1917 journal. Comes in a bunch of different sizes and colors
@M Soundous damn, that's a bad situation. I have found it's pretty easy to write my thoughts on my phone, like with Google keep notes or something. If you can't use paper, that's the next best thing.
Alternatively, you could write the stuff and then crumple the paper up and destroy it. You don't need to keep the paper; the act of writing is where most of the benefit comes from. I hope this helps you in some way.
@@flopsnail4750 there are apps where you can write about your day and note how happy you were during the day, you can add a password. i've used the Pixel app for months it's on the play store and it's pretty cool
Bang on
@M S if you can’t risk paper trail, then as others have suggested, move to digital notes for now until you are capable of escaping your situation.
Since digital notes (ime) can be a lot easier to forget about, you need to set up some triggers to remind you to start building the habit.
Put the notes app/service in a prominent place on your home screen, and/or set an alarm at a time of day which is good for taking notes BUT won’t collide with a time that prying eyes might see it. Silent alarms (and/or vibrate only) are also an option on iphone at least and probably most smart phones.
Habitual timing will make an unconscious habit more easily as our body clock begins to remind us it’s time for that regular task after the routine begins setting it place. However, it would be good to be able to control the habit consciously too though, so maybe consider working on finding ways to remember it of your own volition, if you think that’d be better for you (meaning you’re more likely to think about taking notes when necessary as compared to waiting for a trigger which may come at a time when you’ve forgotten details or dont feel upto it).
Best of luck with your situation. Keep looking to solutions, not focus on the setbacks. Wishing you progress and peace.
Used to journal all the time growing up. My mom would find and read my entries and tell my dad what she read, even if it was about him, or get angry at me or awkward when I got older if she caught me writing and I didn't let her read it. It's created a ton of baggage for me. But from all the benefits you've listed I think I'm going to try it again.
My experience with journaling is very similar, people would invade that privacy and use it against me. My parents, as a child/teen; partners, as an adult. Systematic betrayal of trust is so hard to move on from. I don't really have any words of advice or encouragement, just know that somewhere out there, a stranger is taking this journey with you. You aren't alone.
@@perplexingHodgepodge Solidarity my friend. Thank you.
That's why I found the assumption "no one is gonna read your diary, they don't have the attention span" quite unrealistic when it comes to close relationships. It's mainly a matter of curiosity, respect for privacy and accessibility if someone reads it or not. So, yeah both physical & digital locks can be very useful if you have nosy people in your home. Normally telling them to respect your privacy & stay away from certain objects or areas that are not meant for other people's eyes should be enough though. It's like journalists not asking artists about details of their (very personal) lyrics because having to explain them would reduce the freedom to write them in the first place.
Heads up, Im glad to read you feel like giving it a try again :)
I'm sorry you went through that
Nowdays I have over 200 entries in my journal and I can tell you all one thing: Nobody will ever read it and the more you do it the more you realise that's the case. Even when someone walked into my room while I was journaling it always went something like:
"Whatcha doin?"
"Writing"
"Writing what? Why?"
"Words"
"Can I see?"
"No"
"Ok" *walks away*
So don't be afraid to do it. I remember I was scared as shit when I first started out.
And also: Number your entries because it will feel amazing when you get to something like day 100 and you can look back at how different of a person you were before.
I do something similar with my books. I put numbers on them. Now im on the nr18 and im going to make an handmade book for my 20th🥰
Like a little anniversary.
That's certainly true for most. There are some that will, but not many. Its happened to me twice by accident, and by the same person. My spouse still feels bad about it cause it made things awkward between us for a while.
It did take me a while to feel safe enough to journal again, but it's certainly worth the effort/risk.
Rocketbooks are brilliant for writing when you want to process but have concerns it could get read. (Heat of the moment thoughts may not even be our true feelings, but could definitely create problems if read.) With a rocketbook, I write, then I wipe it clean over and over. It saves paper too.
How do you divide them? Since i write per day i would count each day as one, so.i have a few moe than 400 entries now
@@juhbenward18 I also count days but sometimes I do a few entries a day so I subdevide them usually into 1-3 entries
Something I’ve started doing in my journal that I find really helpful is to track positive things I’ve done for myself each day, like meditating, journaling, making art and exercising. Rather than have one check box per item per day (meditated on Monday, did not meditate on Tuesday etc. - which also ends up highlighting the days on which I “fail” to meditate) I just note down all of the positive things I did that day in one box in a yearly overview spread (Monday 6 Feb: exercised and journaled; Tuesday 7 Feb: journaled, etc.) to show myself that I do work towards my goals, since a lot of my negative self-talk centres on how I “never do anything productive”.
I REALLY like this idea. One of my biggest sources of shame is my apparent inability to create any habits or consistency no matter how hard I try, and it's easy to feel like I get nothing done at all. I should try this!
That sounds really good. Also gratitude journaling is also proven to be very beneficial, so maybe write 1 to 3 things you are grateful every day. :) I'm usually negative and tend to get discouraged easily, so focusing on the positive motivates me a lot more.
Love this! Habit trackers bug me because of that daily binary choice; did you do the thing or did you not do the thing. Just list positive things that happened or positive things you've done. Brilliant.
Honestly Dr.K, I vastly prefer journaling over meditation. Meditation puts me at ease, but writing my thoughts down is what truly made me review my priorities and organize my mind.
I seriously hope you rethink that. That's like saying I like to work out my right arm but not my left.
Journaling helps to exercise and let out your emotions. Then as you use logic to solve problems after you exhausted your emotions those new beliefs make it to your subconscious.
Meditation gives you more control over your emotions by weakening the strength your emotions have and strengthening the power of you have to control them. So if you get anxious and say I'm ok. It will actually work instead of being empty words.
Certain kinds of meditation makes seeing your thoughts easier. Seeing your thoughts means you can see the problem more clearly, and seeing the problem more clearly means you can fix/avoid them.
@@mozy837extremely judgemental
@@Amaling that makes no sense
@@mozy837 meditation has those benefits, but it actually doesn't work for everyone. I like meditating, and try to do it regularly, but I sometimes find that I can't do it for long before I feel physically uncomfortable, like something is tickling me all over but from the inside, and then I just want to get up and run to get rid of the feeling. Which is the opposite of what you might expect to feel when meditating.
As an Asian kid who grew up poor in a developing country where stress and mental health wasn’t just a thing in the 90s, this is so true. I kindof agree that my siblings and I survived a dysfunctional upbringing from a controlling mother and an emotionally detached father who values pride, saving face, hard work and success like no other.
As an introvert, journaling was my escape as well as my refuge. I started in sophomore high school till before I graduated college. I wrote so much about my pain, my questions, things Ive read, quotes, poems, Bible verses, letters to my crushes, letters to my future husband and about traumas and abuse i have never even shared to anyone. I did not think of it as therapeutic at that time but when I was in medical school and no longer journaling I kindof miss it and realized that it was therapeutic and restorative as well as transformative. Ive survived my struggles as a teenager because of journaling and wish I never stopped the activity.
Hey ,just take a paper or smtjgn and fill it right now ,not even for 5 minutes....maybe you will get to reconnect with Journaling or just a try again cause u miss it
You are me
That's raw, thanks for sharing! Hope you can find the time to pick it up again, and everyone else who feels the same, cheers 🥂
Reading your comments feels like you are writing my family dysfuntional system. Just started journalling recently and it does feel therapeutic. Even reading an old entry from a month ago could make me look at life differently.
journaling:
- increases grade
- improves physical health
- helps us not avoid our problems & face them
- might work as exposure therapy; accustoms to discomfort & be more perceptive & resilient
- helps construct narrative → realize new insights from another perspectives
- be consistent: 15min+, as frequent as possible
- journal about emotions
- read your journal sometimes
- physical journaling is recommended
don’t forget about pronoun usage as sign of POV alteration
Journaling tip if you're worried about ruining a notebook or don't have a notebook: just use lined paper. put it in a stack. my current journal is 200 pages of lined paper sitting on a shelf near my bed because the notebook i purchased for journaling made a pressure of "what if what i want to write down isn't important enough to use a page for" but I'll write pretty much anything on a $0.001 cent sheet of paper. One sheet is just the date and "made soup today. it turned out good." and that's it lol
❤
lovely prose
I read my old entries, and some of the older ones read like the inner monologue of someone who viscerally hates themselves and is physically sickened by themselves. Even the handwriting is hateful. And some of the more recent ones read like someone who is realising how unreasonable they’re being and is trying to reframe. And stepping back into the hateful headspace is scary stuff. I remember vividly what it felt like and to read about it just reminds me how much has changed and how much I have to be grateful for. It helps me see patterns and actually break them. I can begin to use journaling to tell my brain that it can learn and grow even if things suck. To actually gather evidence that says I’m not a crapy person.
I think the reason why journalling helps is because by writing down feelings etc on paper physically, in a way we are learning to accept the REALITY of what we experience.
It’s easy to feel stuff or experience stuff and dissociate from how uncomfortable it makes us, or get swept away with other stuff to do before having processed those emotions or experiences.
So by journaling we in a way give our experience and feelings more reality and that in turn helps us process what we’re writing about.
And also the act of writing it down means that we acknowledge it which is like a step away from accepting it. Journaling is really nice.
A hybrid of bullet journalling, daily planner and diary entries over a few years has helped me and my psychiatrist get a proper diagnosis. I used it as mainly a wholistic data collection tool that helped spot things we missed before.
Hey there can you show me an example of your system seem to be in line with what I need thanks!
Benefit 243: looking at a stack of your own journals, you realize how much time you spend thinking and worrying about stuff that’s in there,, and realize you’re out of your own mind. Perspective.
That is a big part of what helps lol. It gives you a chance to think about things and clarify some thiughts if you are lucky too.
I just started journaling and this point is illuminating. I’m halfway into a notebook I started two weeks ago already
My dad introduced me to journaling when I was 18. He has written two hand-written pages per day, five days a week, for over 20 years now and continues even though he's retired. After he finishes writing, he puts the journal pages directly into the paper recycling.
I did it 5-ish days a week for my first two years of college. It was immensely helpful for me in reconnecting with my emotions. Then I stopped for 10+ years.
During the pandemic, I started journaling once a week because I needed an emotional outlet for the stress.
After your Alexithymia(?) 101 video, I started journaling 6-7 nights per week before bed. A few weeks in, I realized that I will probably benefit from journaling like that for the rest of my life, and knowing that feels good. I feel like I've made more progress on issues that have been bugging me in the last 4 months than I have in the last 6 years. Journaling is deceptively difficult and frustrating, however I think it is worth it.
This is amazing to read! I thought I journaled too much lol. I picked it back up in 2021, and now I journal 1-2 pages in the morning and 1 at night or at least 1 page if /busy with work. Changed my life heavily in 2022 and going strong.
I am glad to hear that, thanks for sharing. I started journaling kinda(just writing when I got really upset) and it did so much more than i imagined. I felt like I could look at the problem so much more objectively and come to terms with my emotions more easily.
Here we go again *Whips out journal*
It's such a tragedy that he'd immediately throw them away.
Think of the gems you could find in there, or how your kids (or their kids, and so on) could have used those pages to get to know him after he's gone.
@@carriebartkowiak I'm struggling with this conundrum currently. The idea behind immediately throwing them away is that it gives you license to be more candid/open/vulnerable. You're not focusing on wording things just right for a future version of your self or someone who might read them in the future. That makes a lot of sense to me, but at the same time, I do want to have a record of my thoughts. I'm trying to figure out an approach that gives me the best of both worlds. I think what I've settled on is not allowing my self to cross out or correct anything once written. Anywho, I'm basically journaling in the comments at this point lol, so I'll wrap it up XD.
I think it's important to mention HOW you journal is the key. When I first started Journaling I thought it was stupid and useless because I'd write really meangingless stuff and what I did throughout the day. However, when I started Journaling as a way to advise myself as if I'm talking to a friend, it became super helpful.
I had a very strong inner critic and developed this "journaling technique" to let go of these thoughts. If you have this as well I would strongly recommend trying this out:
I call it "The Inner Dialogue" (fancy, I know). Take a peace of paper and a pen.
We always start with the inner critic. He probably has something bad to say about what you did or didn't do. So for this example I use that the inner critic says I always miss the gym although this time the excuse for not going is valid (e.g. being really sick). One thing before we start:
Always write in the first person plural ("we") as the inner critic is part of you and I found out the issue he is having will be resolved a lot easier with this little trick.
The important part is that you write everything exactly and as worse as your inner critic puts it on your paper. It may or may not be very emotional. In my example it would look like this:
Inner Critic: What a complete load of sh*t! We always miss the gym. We can't even manage to go to the gym because we're oh so "sick". Hahaha, yeah. No wonder we are still fat. Look at our friends, they so much better... (etc. etc.)
You get the point. Again, it's very important that you don't suppress something or hold back. Write is as your voice tells you how it thinks it is. All emotions need to get out of your system because only then we can go to the next step and being rational.
Second step:
Now we get to the fun part. You have an inner critic. But did you know you also have an "inner friend"? This is the guy that holds by your side, wants the best for you and is not controlled by emotions. I called it "The Inner Dialog" because your inner friend will now answer to your inner critic. This (for my example) can look something like this (and I will continue this dialog a little bit to show you how the issue of the inner critic could be resolved):
Inner Friend: Wow, wow, wow... hold up. So you are saying going to the gym with 40°C/104°F fever is managable??
Inner critic: Well.. we always miss the gym. Don't you see it?
Inner Friend: Last time we should have gone to the gym. I will give you that. But this time, no way. This wouldn't benifit us in any way and it would probably get worse.
Now we enter the "resolution" stage. The inner friend will give the inner critic a solution to the problem. In my experience, the inner critic most of the time accepts this (and if not just continue the dialog to resolve the issue further) as we let him have a voice.
Inner Friend: Look, first we heal from this fever and then we will go to the gym asap. How does that sound?
Now, if you skip the gym lesson again because of laziness then the issue of the inner critic is valid and you should listen to it. This technique is mostly for things your inner critic demands that are way to extreme. With this way you (hopefully) can calm him down and reason with him and maybe even improve something in your life.
Hope this helps someone out there!
you are a genius
Omg never thought of writing things like that but makes so much sense! I always write "I should have done this or that" and struggle a little with resolving things. Definitely will try this next time, thank you so much for sharing!! ❤
It's amazing man...thank you so much for sharing with us 🤗
Came across this video randomly and this morning only I heard a little bit about inner critic and wanted to know more universe works wonderfully wow and thanks a lot for this info this is one of the powerful things you can do .
This is amazing thank you
After I got married, my husband read my journals from before I met him. I was so mortified that I couldn’t even read it so see what he was uncovering about me. But now, journaling is no longer about crushes or dramatic relationship problems. I’m actually not shy about people reading them because it’s just me working out my thoughts and finding better solutions for my struggle of the moment. (Does that make me old and boring now??)
Not at all, maturity is a good thing.
Most of us have known some adult person that never matured emotionally, socially, or intellectually. Aging or maturing is a good thing when you inner-self matures, learns healthy coping mechanisms, understand itself much better, has accepted its limitations, learned to improve where possible, learned how to communitcate better with others, has learned selfcontrol in a healthy balanced way, has tossed away the negative things of the past yet, acknowledges that those things occurred, and seeks new experiences in a more self aware and pleasant way.
( a lot of words to way = experience and wisdom )
Journalling became a fixture of my daily routine in October 2020, and it's difficult to express how much it has changed my life. It's helped to; highlight patterns, facilitate better communication, deepen my understanding of self and what makes me tick, improve my relationships, and enforce my boundaries. Having a space to navigate life issues, whether that be work, family, friendships, or personal trials and tribulations, on a daily basis has significantly improved my quality of life.
Reading back over old entries has highlighted a change from (virtually) self-hatred to self-compassion. From my anecdotal experience: step-by-step, journalling really does help to change things.
Not only has narrative journaling been really helpful for processing emotions, but bullet journaling has been really helpful for my ADHD. Having a quick way to dump the wandering thoughts I want to follow up on out of my mind and a constant reminder of all the things I forget is enormously helpful.
Journaling without a set time has personally helped me a lot. I don’t enjoy schedules and planning that much, so writing whenever I had the time and felt like it during the day helped me a ton. I’ve been able to do it very consistently for around five years at this point.
I have bipolar and PTSD. Before I began therapy, journaling was a godsend for manic times, when I was up at all hours of the night and early morning, and no one was awake or available to talk to me. Today, now that I have the privilege of therapy twice a week, I mostly use journaling to manifest the good things in my life. I use journaling to express gratitude and to set goals. Sometimes, I use it between sessions with my therapist if things are intense, but my entries are usually brief enough that I can take a picture of them and send them to my therapist to discuss in the next session. Overall, journaling is amazing, and I don't think there's a wrong way to journal. Hell, I'd argue even vision boards and other artistic mediums are journaling too, to a degree.
To anyone who thinks even 15 minutes a day is daunting, you should try bullet journaling. Basically you jot down what needs to get down the next day as bullet points, and then at the end of the day check off the tasks you've finished and any thoughts you might have. Then you write the tasks for the next day. Keep doing this and for every month you complete you write a half page worth of how that month went for you, what you're looking forward to, what's on your mind, what stresses you out, etc.
It's a great way of keeping up productivity (because checking things off at the end of the day is a good dopamine hit!) and a way to journal emotional thoughts without having it be too daunting of a task. It's also fun to go through your journals every now and then and see how you've grown as a person/what challenges you've overcome. Takes maybe 1 minute a day and 5-10 minutes a month. Very quick and easy!
I've found that actually physically writing it into a journal, not typing it into a phone or computer, helped immensely! Good luck!
I feel like I need to give a disclaimer for bullet journaling, if you google it you will see a LOT of very artistic journals, your journals do NOT need to artistic, it is about you and what works for YOU.
Hey thanks bro. I'm going to do this exactly. 😃
Bullet journal is the best discovery I had in at least 20 years
@@alaaesong164 This is true but I think it sort of tends to head in that direction. Just thinking about presenting things as a list of bullet points is already in the domain of presentation/editing, far more than simple journaling is.
Personally that's why I stopped. The whole editorializing thing detracts from just thinking my thoughts, and I don't personally find it practical to separate tasks into BuJo and thinking into a normal journal.
I tried the full bullet journal with the month/year planning etc but this is the only bit that stuck. I just have a week to a page diary, write in 6-8 things I need to get done that day and go from there.
I LOVE the metaphor of journaling being the diet version of emotions
I've derived a huge benefit I've gotten from journaling that I didn't anticipate. It has helped me tremendously in being able to empathize with myself and validate my own feelings.
Normally, I have a hard time with this. I'm a classic case of "always there for my friends, never there for myself." When a friend is having a difficult time, it's easy for me to provide them with some of the compassion that they're having trouble giving themself. When I'm in a similar situation, though, I question all my thoughts and am initially skeptical that my feelings are valid responses to the situation I'm in. I treat my feelings with contempt and treat myself with cruelty by default.
When I write down whatever I'm feeling or thinking, I can look at a page full of panicked thoughts and say to the person who wrote them: "It sounds like you're really scared. I'd be scared, too, if I was going through that. It's okay to be scared. But you're not in any real danger, and no matter what happens with this situation, you'll be okay in the end. You won't die, and you'll still have people who love and support you." The trick, of course, is that the "other person" is me!
Once I have those feelings validated, everything gets much easier. Journaling makes it much easier to be compassionate to myself, which makes my relationship with myself much healthier than it would otherwise be. Then, I start to trust myself more and feel more confident and secure. It really does feel like magic, sometimes!
This makes a lot of sense. It's similar to the advice where: if you have a problem in your mind, respond with the same compassion you would to a friend. It's funny to think about this in a way. We're told at a young age to treat others like you would like the be treated. But we are not told that you should treat yourself how you would like to be treated. This is definitely just as valid.
I finally started journaling in December - it has made a huge difference in my negative thought loops. My therapist said it helps bring the unconscious conscious (Carl Jung). I've resisted journaling for so long now during my work days I look forward to coming home to journal... then read a little bit of a book prior to sleep :) Thanks Dr. K for all your videos!!
Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks was by far the most influential book I've read in my life. His 5 second moment daily entry has made my journalling a lot easier as it only takes me a minute or two to make it and helps my memory since he emphasizes on framing it as if you were telling a story, making it memorable, as well as reflective.
Not to mention, I've had stories in my entries that have helped me with job interviews.
This book sounds intriguing. Writing stories sounds enjoyable to me, but I never sat down and knew where to start. I feel like this might be a great segway suss-out thoughts and struggles throughout the day as well as honing your creative writing skills. I look forward to reading this.
@@cgyang AS you mentioned, it really does help you put daily struggles and complications into a story perspective. And as we all know, a great story includes a great character development. I think putting a day to day life in a story perspective allowed me to see myself as a character who can have bad days or can have good days but the character is always building.
@@GianDON12 that's nicely phrased. :)
For me, journaling started out as a brain dump for therapy that week. That way, I didn't forget anything that needed to be discussed. There's something about getting it out of your head and onto a piece of paper that really does help.
I've been journaling every day for the last 16 years (started it when I was 11). It is basically a habit at this point, a part of my nightly routine before settling down for bed.
Some days it's just a record of what I did that day, but on the rough days it's very helpful to get my thoughts out and help me work through things.
I don't read through old entries very often, and I will admit there's parts of my life that reading back through is difficult, but it really does show how much things have changed for the better. It's also acts as a good record for times in my life when I maybe doubted my own memory, or an event that took place, or how I felt about something at the time. Journaling is a very useful tool! A tool I only started using out of fear of forgetting chunks of my life again, but it's became much more than just that.
I don’t write comments often but this has been one of my favorite videos ever. I’ve started to journal consistently because of it and I’ve grown so much.
Im not new to the mental health space but very impressed by the way that you put things into perspective!
I've been doing it every day at 11 PM since January 2022. It's helped me get thoughts off my mind, record memories (good and bad) as well as see my frame of mind from the worst year of my life.
I recommended journaling either by hand or on your phone if it's easier. This year has been so much better and it's partly because I saw my horrible mentality through journaling and started changing it.
I have ADHD, and I have pen and paper near me at all times because it's similar to glasses but for my working memory. If I get all the the things out on paper I can actually see the big picture, and often solutions to whatever it is I'm trying to do. As I always have pen and paper near me, I also journal, and I'm pretty sure it's why I'm not more messed up from going undiagnosed for 39 years.
📝 Benefits of Journaling:
- Journaling can improve grades and academic performance.
- Journaling has positive effects on physiological health, such as improving blood pressure and blood glucose control.
- Journaling helps increase tolerance for negative emotions and discomfort.
- Journaling can help construct a narrative and make sense of life experiences.
- Journaling promotes self-reflection and learning from mistakes.
- Journaling can have delayed effects, with benefits lasting up to six months.
- There is no one-size-fits-all formula for journaling, but consistency is important.
- Physically writing in a journal slows down thoughts and commits them to memory.
I’ve never looked into the studies but just from personal experience I can reflect on why I think it works - at least for me.
I am someone who has a tendency toward obsessive or intrusive thoughts. I tend to ruminate on interpersonal conflicts or other frustrations. The problem is that this process is very disorganized. In a state of heightened anxiety, the imaginative side of your brain is engaged at the expense of your critical and logical side of your brain. A bunch of random noise basically.
However, the moment you attempt to put these thoughts on paper, this immediately forces you to think more logically and concretely. This engages the more logical side to cooperate with your imaginative side. Both sides have to work together. This alone, gives you some relief but also a space for real self reflection. This in turn can produce real epiphanies into why you do or feel certain things.
The reason why it took way too many years to get started was because I was so afraid to be honest. But the moment you free yourself from this hang up, a whole new world of self discovery opens up in unexpected ways.
I started journaling after delaying it for months and months, after watching a Carrie Ann Moss's interview. She explained how writing "I am enough" over and over again in her journal helped her to believe it and thrive in a low point in her life. Something in the way she explained was very compelling, she wasn't apologetic or shy about it.
Journaling helps me, I sometimes overshare and I'm doing my best to be more closed-minded as a person. Journal helps in this case, I write it down and it's like I told someone else about it ( to myself) . It also helps me to not overthink my problems. It's basically being a best friend with your innerself.
To seek better development I think it's better seeking to be more open-minded and not close-minded. Just a friendly observation. There are much more benefits to being open minded, at least in my opinion.
How does it help you not to overthink your problems? Aren't you thinking about them more as you are writing them out?
@realDominik586 I write them down and as I do it the problem becomes more understandable and simple. For you to write thoughs from your head you must slow them down first. Slower like that as you write them you see that the actual problem is most of the time not that big . It's you brain that's oversizeing it . And suddenly you realize that it's not something you need to waste your energy and time.
Been journaling for 6+ years, going back in time and reading how much I've changed is a beautiful thing.
I have kept a daily journal for the past 34 years straight, I can say with 100% certainty its been on of the most transformative tools in life. Your video confirms my experience
i've been journaling for 4 months now. and a cool thing is that whenever i think "oh it'd be cool if i did this" i can write it down, and judge it later. So i'm both not doing stuff by impulse and not forgeting good moves. Really fire.
another thing is that if you write down your gratitudes and good stuff that happened it gets really hard to believe you're miserable and shit, cuz you can go back and be like "oh ok these good things happened actually"
What a GREAT breakdown about journaling. I've journaled off and on all my life, knowing how generally reflective and helpful it could be but never heard about all of these studies know knew the intricacies of how it was so helpful. going to watch the video again to make sure I got all the details. Not even a gamer, but the was such a great explainer.
When depression and anxiety swept me away in 2013, journaling was all I had keeping the threads of my sanity together. I wrote to my journal begging for help for years in secret. When I became unemployed in 2022 and isolated myself…I journaled my entire 8 months of unemployment until I had written myself out of any fear and finally took action and moved across country restarting my life from the bottom up. I wrote my heartbreak away. I wrote my confusions about life with ADHD into understandings and solutions. My life completely changed in 3 months.
To journal is to study the curriculum of one’s own mind…to understand what the mind has been doing, what it needs to do, and what it wants to and why.
(Right now I’m journaling my anxious attachment style into secure attachment because I got ghosted and that shit hurted. Ironically the first and only gift I was able to get them was a really nicely made journal and pen..encouraging them to write down their thoughts.)
I hope you’re doing better ❤
As someone who has taken up this habit more recently I can tell you that I don't necessarily feel the benefits every time I open the book to write but there have been a couple of times where forcing myself to slow down my thought speed to my writing speed alone has helped me process the issue but other times just putting it on paper I felt tension leaving my body.
It actually works.. The key is to keep it private and sometimes you need to write your deepest and darkest thoughts and read it loud twice and burn it.. This will release all the trapped emotions
This is morning pages
In about August of last year I finally got myself committed and prepared to start learning another language. And I made it my goal to at least journal in it once a day and see how my thoughts progressed over the course of the week. It has been a wild ride so far but like 130+ days in and I can tell you I know so much more about how I phrase things to myself and how I approach situations in real life now
I have been writing a complete diary every day since 1994 with not a page-a-day missed. This amounts to about 11,000 pages in yearly Moleskin books. I have never myself made the process that you describe so clear in my mind. I am very grateful that you have done so for me, because I believe that what you describe as a habit of addressing problems in a progressive and more thoughtful way is exactly what I have been doing unknowingly all that time. I do not believe that I could be so patient if I did not write everyday and spell out in correct prose what the issues of the day are. This, after a while, becomes a need because it does bring satisfying advancement toward resolution. It is a form of meditation helped by the methodical process of writing it out in structured sentences and logical paragraphs. Thank you for being so articulate and intelligent in this explanation. It is amazing how it suddenly brings together to clarity thirty years of instinctual introversion.
I've had periods in my life where I did try journaling. It'd usually come out as long stream of consciousness type rambles, and writing with pen and paper didn't slow me down one bit (I'd just write really, really sloppy). But for me, I tended to spiral into the journal entry, making mountains out of molehills and coming up with problems that didn't exist; winding up my own anxiety and depression and digging myself into a hole. After journaling, I typically felt isolated and unhappy, rather than feeling relieved to have "gotten things off my chest". I'd spend days after thinking about the journal entry obsessively, going over everything I'd written in my head and trying to come up with anything I'd missed. Journaling ended up adding to the noise in my head, making it more difficult for me to notice or identify my real thoughts and feelings.
Since I stopped journaling, I've felt calmer in my day to day life. My anxiety is lessened, my depression is a little lighter, and I'm taking better care of myself than I have in years. I'm finally starting to learn who I am and what I want!
I think the issue is that I was journaling wrong. I don't know how to write in a way that it relieves my mental burden rather than adding to it.
If you havent, look into bullet journaling. It might be helpful to you.
I have been Journaling for 5 months now recovering from Child Abuse. I am 52.
I was so lost as how to recover from PTSD. And when I started Journaling, I started seeing my emotions on the outside, viewing them, contemplating them. It changed my thinking. I emotionally evolved. Now I journal every time I am emotionally overwhelmed.
I recently broke up with my girlfriend of 3+ years, and that was the motivator to make me finally start journaling.
Along with beginning therapy again, journaling has been such a great supplemental tool for keeping track of my thoughts, and cutting to the heart of what I feel. I haven’t really loved myself ever, and a big issue in my relationships, romantic or not, has been that I don’t bring up boundaries because I don’t want to frustrate the other person in fears that they would hate me and abandon me. I place a lot of guilt on myself easily regardless of whether or not my actions were wrong or misinterpreted. It truly helps you confront discomfort, offer yourself sympathy, and helps you understand why you feel uncomfortable and how to accept that and sometimes move past it. It’s become an outlet for me to look at my emotions in the mirror, not get distracted, and be blunt but kind to myself. I feel like I’m on the road to becoming a totally different and overall healthier person simply by understanding my motivations over the past mere 3-4 weeks.
I highly recommend it, I’m glad Dr.K is spreading the word journaling is the best thing I’ve done for myself in a long time and I hope everyone here can give it a shot ❤
Journaling makes me feel heard and valued. It also helps me identify why I feel how I feel, what triggers why i felt it, and provides a plan for a possible solution in the events that a similar event occurs. I recommend it to everyone.
Pro tip:
I, too, always worried about other people being able to read my journal, which would prevent me from being completely open and honest in writing, but I find that using OneNote (free) is really helpful since you can password protect a "Journal" section. I'm also able to organize each journal entry by date or title. Also if you have a stylus, you can write into OneNote or just type, whichever you prefer.
Personally my mind tends to get extra ADHD when I get anxious, so I prefer typing since I'm able to get thoughts into text faster before I forget the thought(s) that I'm having. Then I'll pause and reflect on the string of thoughts I just wrote down, which has been quite helpful for me!
Journaling has helped me greatly, and I have a very off and on relationship with it. Frequently I'd write my goals for the day and then notes for the day. My memory improved, my moon improved, and I started getting better at predictions and long term planning. It also helped me put things down that I know I need to remember. It forces you to slow down your thoughts and write them down, opening your mind to new ways to think about them. Being able to go back and re-read similar experiences is insightful too, because they show a clear path of what happened after that experience as well.
Wow! This honestly sold me on journaling way better than most therapists have. I appreciate you explaining why and how it works, not all professionals care to do that, which makes a world of difference. Admittedly it was a bit confusing at first when you described pronoun usage because I was like, "but I use both they and I," but when you followed up explaining that it's showing change & growth, that was really validating. I have been working to change, and to me, that proves it is working. Great video all around. I will definitely work at journaling more often.
I've been journalling since 2019, and it has helped me recognize patterns in my thought process. It's also nice to have traces of who you were, to compare with who you are now.
Been journaling about as long as you. Now it's it's a comfort for me. I start journalling just because I know I'm going to forget the thing because I like how I worded it in that moment.
Also, I want to emphasize how important it was for me to read back through stuff. I do it about twice a year. But it's interesting how much I forget.
“From a narrative perspective Narcissists commonly use they, ‘They don’t respect me,’ ‘Those people don’t value me,’ while people with depression tend towards saying I, ‘I’m a waste of space,’ ‘I don’t belong here.” What happens with journaling is that it leads to a healthier mix of the two.”
“They don’t accept me, because I am a freak.”
Journaling didnt work for Taxi Driver or the Joker. In fact im pretty sure it made them worse until they commited acts of violence.
@@ponternal Kurt Cobain kept a journal, that worked out oh wait a second…
@@ponternal Those are movies, reality is different
@@ponternal just because they journaled that doesnt mean journaling leads to acts of violence...haha. Did they wear shoes? Do shoes make you violent? Taxi Driver had personality disorders and didn't sleep. Joker is what manifests in a a corrupted cesspool like Gotham City.
Anecdotal evidence. And fictional characters
To be fair, I am an ESL person in a society of monolinguals. Add the fact that I am learning Ancient Greek , latin and Japanese. What we get? No one is realistically going to read my manuscripts. I probably still have either a mental blockage from school or I am bad at structuring thoughts on paper. To all of you that think "just write" is the answer, understand: having many thoughts at the same time and wanting to write them all, involves you getting rid of some of them for the sake of the better ones, i.e. prioritization. I am autistic and I suffer from many prioritization problems thanks to that. The only way I thought of getting this better would be an infinite canvas on a tablet, I guess. Gotta stop trying to dream with the "perfect setup" and working with what I have. Also, Some structure is needed, since I get stuck too much without some prompts.
EDIT: thanks for all the likes and the responses! I wasn't looking for any of that, I was just "self-talking". I tend to talk out loud or type to understand or decide things on my life. I was going to do it anyways, but y'all gave me more insight about what to do. I changed stuff on my environment to help me journal more. I decided on 3 levels: braindump, reorganization and extraction. braindump is just writing badly on pieces of scrap paper. In reorganization, I analyze my day to see how much of it aligned with my goals(like a diary). In extraction, I write nicely (in a summarized way) key ideas from earlier writings for daily usage and store them. Seriously, Thank you all, specially: micheller3251, charliekowittmusic7965, brandonn4332, guntera3845 , Demaen666 and anyone that read my comment till here :D
You don’t need an infinite tablet. You should try just writing the thoughts down as they come into your mind. What will happen is eventually your mind will start to calm down. At the beginning you might feel frustrated and exhausted, but if you keep trying it will make you feel better. Think of journaling as an outlet for your thoughts. What you write down doesn’t have to make sense. It can be all over the place, that’d okay. Just whatever is in your mind. You can also try writing down they key points from all your different thoughts and then try to write a story that connects them all. It doesn’t have to go on forever, just keep going until you want to stop.
HI, I'm autistic too, with prioritization issues. Here's my experience in case it can help you in any way.
When I have too many directions of thoughts at once and can't choose (often because I'm scared of forgetting important parts by choosing only one thought to focus on), I let myself jump from one to the other without even finishing my sentences. Kinda like a braindump... but in half-sentences. I go back to previous ideas, draw arrows, skip lines to leave space in case I want to add more (even though we would always need more space, which is where arrows are usefull, or color codes, or symbols), etc. Just putting all of it on paper is sometimes enough to liberate my mind enough to go forward with less different thoughts, or to physically see the different thoughts and maybe afterward dedicate a different page/section to each thought now that I don't have to remember them all at once. And sometimes words aren't even enough to express thoughts, which is where "drawing your feelings" can help evacuate the extra intense feelings and sensations (look up Peter Draws' video about it if it sounds like something helpfull to you).
What about A3 size sketchbooks? Much bigger paper
"The only way I thought of getting this better would be an infinite canvas on a tablet".
Have you thought of getting an iPad? If u could save money and get one down the line, it can really help you since the amount of space you get to write on certain apps is soo much.
it's been so helpful for me and I only just got one after finishing college. I did research and the best canvas note taking apps are Notability and GoodNotes. I've been using Notability for over a year now and it's saved me so much paper and allowed me to put to much in a document.
You may be surprised to find that when you journal daily, and/or jot down all thoughts during the day, that the infinite mass of thoughts actually decreases.
For example, how much of your infinite thought mass is made up of thoughts you also had yesterday/last week?
Good luck! I started using this app called Diarium and journaling once a week has helped me process a lot of experiences and emotions.
I also keep a memo pad in my shirt pocket to jot during the day.
Yes, Diarium sounds a lot like “diarrhea” 😂
I'm developing a habit of journaling when my anxious state kicks in using CBT pattern: event (what is happening or happened, in non-judgemental way), body reaction (usually my anxious state of frequent heartbeat and uncomfortable feeling chest), emotions and finally thoughts which are being produced. It gives relief right IN THE MOMENT, something like reconnecting with reality in addition to what dr.K said. The hardest thing is to catch this state and to make yourself start, but if you can do it, I can suggest this approach.
Journaling may possibly be the best thing i got out of therapy.
I get to explore what my day/s looks like, what's bothering me and have a general assessment of my state of mind.
Kind of like what Dr K said I noticed I've been questioning my own thoughts and judgements of my situations. Although I don't necessarily reach a conclusion for every train of thought, the fact that writing gives me a way to unspool my thoughts has been tremendously helpful in the way I process situations.
I have an anxiety disorder and I’ve been journaling for a year now. it’s been very good for me! I can see my anxiety go down every time I put my thoughts on paper, it makes brain fog a lot less strong and I can think for myself a lot more often! It also makes it more clear whenever my boundaries have been crossed or if a boundary even exists in some situations. Helps understand where I was wrong and where I was wronged by someone. Definitely would recommend! :D
Never been to your channel before, but I've been thinking about journaling recently. You could have only posted this an hour or so before I started looking and so far it's the best video I've found explaining the benefits and process. Just wanted to say thank you for the work you put into it and let you know you've got a new subscriber.
I felt like journaling every day was too big of a commitment but I do journal in times of immense stress or happiness and sometimes just for fun and that works for me. :) I think it's immensely helpful for honoring the way you feel and processing. Sometimes I'm too scared to tell someone, or too mad to say how I feel and I use journaling especially in those moments. If you're someone who gets mental block when talking about your feelings I totally recommend it!
To me writing is creating a whole new world, you literally have no limits. Still, I write about simple things, like the way I feel that day or things that worry me. But if I want I can draw whatever or try writing some poetry. I can't find anything that brings more sense of freedom to me that journaling, so for those of you who haven't tried it, I just hope you do and create the universe you want :)
I don't do it as often anymore, but journaling helps me remember things that happened and how I felt about them. My memory sucks (adhd) so I often forget how events occurred or how I felt during/after/ about them. And it helped me track my medical symptoms have changed over time.
Journaling has benefitted me greatly. In the A.'.A.'. we must write everything down - our emotions, our physical conditions, even the weather! Anything that might influence our performance. And it really does help a lot with understanding and improving yourself.
Guys you can also try audio journaling for people who do not like writing. Just open the voice memo app/specific audio journaling app/or speech to text on notes and then talk about everything that’s on your mind, bothering you etc. it’s like talking to a friend, you get things off your chest, understand problems, brainstorm solutions etc. it makes you feel better and you don’t even have to talk to someone or make them promise secrecy. It’s a win win
What a perfect timing. My girlfriend and I decided to give each other a journal for valentines since we want to record our relationship and since we both deal with some mental issues, use it to help with that.
how do you ,,record a relationship" ? honest question
Thats really cute actually
@@lilym8033 what a couple did that day and what they felt during situations together. Its really not a complicated idea. They can also right down romantic ideas or plans. Write poems. Even during fights, writing down what caused it how far they argued for how long. Its can be about anything reallly. And when it comes to arguments i think it be good to write them down then look back and see if theres a pattern. Seeing the pattern may help in the future to improve their relationship and themselves
That’s so sweet. Relationships rely on good communication and this is definitely another way to better communicate. Love the idea!
I've been journaling for 3 years now and it really just helps you take the edge off of Is current stresses. When I 1st started journaling I didn't know what I was doing I was just writing down how I felt and I found out It helped me process the emotions through a logical viewpoint
I am a physics Ph.D student working in a lab, every student has a lab notebook where we write down what we do in the lab on a daily basis. That really helps because when you get stuck or forget something you can easily go back to your previous notes, the information is there. It also helps us leave a sort of a guide to new students after we graduate. It is a lot like journaling. However, unlike journaling, they are literally written for someone else to read :D
The only thing I disagree about is people not having the attention span to read your journal. The thrill of knowing your secrets will motivate them to read it.
I was never able to journal, and I didn't know how to start, I was never able to be consistent with it and do it every day which would demoralize me... I'm gonna try once a week, thanks for the advice
I'm super inconsistent at journaling too. Now that I've gotten into it, it's something I do when I remember but usually at least once a week. Here's some things you can try of you want, take what you need, leave what you don't.
When you journal, give yourself a very relaxed minimum requirement: to write one sentence. That's it. If you have a problem with the motivation, one sentence is a lot easier to convince yourself to do than a whole entry. Some of my journal entries are short or in deeply condensed writing style because I just didn't have the time and motivation to write it out all the way. But that still says something, and can be a writing prompt for when I feel up to it later and I want to talk about it.
Second look into something like the "every day calendar" by simone giertz. It doesn't make you do the thing, it just lets you see when you last did the thing. I use an app that is close enough (ez habit on android). But if you are really hard on yourself for missing a day it doesn't pile the guilt on. or if you just have trouble building habits (like I do), that sort of input helps a lot in letting my brain figure out how to estimate when I need to do it next.
Being able to see a full month calendar page at once of how I am doing helps a lot. Ez habit lets me see a full year too, which helps some.
And lastly, it can help to record things you don't think you should journal about, meaningful moments with friends, or creative ideas. When I first started journaling, I put in bad poetry, story ideas etc. That replaced some days, but even still i find I have to write a couple scenes out to process certain more complicated feelings.
I love this guy, he's smart and genuinely want to help people, thank you Healthy Gamer.
I do it because I'm a firm believer that emotions not only affect my point of view, it also affects in the conclusions or actions I take in a situation, even if I am the same person.
I treat my journal as an analysis on me and what I did and why, sometimes I end thinking "Now that I think about it, that acting was not like i'd expect of me...Emotions/Situations got the better of me...Or Sloth".
Sometimes I don't do that, sometimes I just vent about something and that makes me feel better, because I end thinking about what and why happened and I tend to see that it was not as bad as it seemed, it was the intensity of living something more than the objective way of it being.
Journaling is literally me "watching my replays".
My mind is officially blown. That made so much sense
@HealthyGamerGG I was actually looking for more coverage on this topic. Thank You!
Most of the posts in the journaling groups on Reddit don't say much about how to use journaling, those groups are usually just about posting pictures of the pretty journals you bought! So many ways to journal, it is shame more people don't talk about the various techniques and benefits. Logging, stream of consciousness, CBT exercises, bullet journaling, etc etc.
ive been journaling for about 2 weeks now and have figured a ton out about myself and been able to work through a lot. its helped a TON with my depression, more than antidepressants did back when i tried them. (maybe i was just on the wrong meds for me, but the point stands)
This is kind of like emotional dumping, which is not great when you do it to another person, but won't make you feel guilty to do it on a journal. It's like you're sharing the burden of responsibility, not particularly one of fixing the problem itself but of feeling bad about the problem which gives that sense of "I'm not alone with my pain." And sharing the emotional burdens, even with a piece of paper, infinitely feels better than taking on everything by oneself.
This is the best journaling video I’ve ever watched I’m crying. I’m sending this video to all of my friends.
Im a college student taking a psychiatric internship for credits and we have to journal our experiences and how we feel, and honestly considering that alot of what we cover is of actual confidential clinical cases, writing out my thoughts is such an engaging way to make me feel like im not alone in noticing the things we do and see. Deep down I always want to tell my friends "hey man so theres this poor patient and heres some stuff about it and cool stuff we learned" even though I know im not supposed to. I dont want to gossip, I just want to conversate on how interesting the experience was, but I dont want to breach confidentiality even if its more than likely it'll never come bacl to haunt me. Having a journal really helps. Just wanted to say that, also great vid!
Yup, I can confirm it helps. I noticed that my mental health is in a way better condition when I do journal than when I don't for a long period of time. My first attempt at "journaling" was when I was 6. It was just a simple diary then, with drawings and a little of text. But over the 19 years of this practice (I feel old writing it like this 😂) it became a very important part of my life that led to many insights about myself and my surroundings and helped me to go through difficult moments and grow.
Me, who bought 4 journals a month age didn't even filled one of them since :')
I recomend ro write every day. It could be a half a page it doesn't matter. Its a good idea to draw into them. And they don't need to je perfect. I have there skribbles and so much of weird stuff there. Don't focus on filling them. They are like skechchbook. You just write and write and write and write until they are filled. My usual journal is 2 months wroting around 4 pages every day. So yeah. It takes a lot of time
I have found that journalling has helped get my thoughts onto pages and it helps me process things especially when i am stressed or overthinking. I always thought it was a placebo effect, but then when i started doing it consistently since October last year, things have been improving mentally and physically!
I've often heard friends talking about journaling being super useful but never fully got it, so this was interesting!
2 minor points of feedback on the vid:
- The audio is weird. It's been like this in a couple of your recent vids
- Showing specific stuff Dr K references makes sense, but the random stock clips kinda disrupt the flow imo.
Amazing to hear what I've been doing is actually a thing. Although I've been journaling (and to some extent forcing it on people) in technical area - work related. Works wonders if you're solving highly unstable/complex/long term challenges.
when i was 7 or 8 i use to have a journal, and i always write in english. I'm only a child back then so my english is bad, my older sister read it aloud and it traumatized me making fun of my writings and read aloud all my secrets in front of my mom and my other siblings. And that made me stop journaling for years, but im trying to get better rn so i continue journaling. My sister and I arent talking anymore i hate her so much.
I also find it just helps getting thoughts out of my head that I otherwise would keep going round and round about. And yeah, I tried writing on my PC before, but there's something about writing with pen that makes it more effective.
00:00 📝 Journaling can initially seem daunting, as it involves putting down deep thoughts on paper, but it has shown to be effective in problem-solving.
00:28 📚 There is strong evidence suggesting that journaling can have a positive impact on various aspects of life, including academic performance and physiological responses.
02:21 💭 Journaling helps individuals confront and process emotional challenges by gradually exposing them to their emotions, teaching them to tolerate discomfort.
04:51 🔄 Journaling aids in changing perspectives and constructing narratives, potentially leading to post-traumatic growth instead of prolonged stress.
05:20 🗣️ The use of pronouns injournaling can shift from self-focused (I) to considering others (they), indicating a change in narrative and perspective.
08:49 🤔 Journaling serves as a form of "replay analysis," allowing individuals to gain deeper insights and learn from their experiences, much like reviewing gameplay to improve performance.
12:25 📆 Consistency in journaling, whether daily or weekly, is important for reaping its benefits, which may manifest over time, even up to six months after initial entries.
14:18 🖋️ Physical writing in a journal slows down thoughts, allows for deeper processing, and aids in memory retention, making it a valuable practice over digital alternatives.
Yo me journaling activates something like "cameraman never dies" effect.
What I mean is you can't be inside of an emotional experience and describe it in your journal simultaneously.
You either live through painful experience without escape or you write about it.
And when you write you get into another plane of psyche. Maybe you even switch between "symbolic and phantasm" planes in terms of postfreudian analysts.
I noticed that journaling helped me to process and heal from the grief of losing a loved one. I didn't start to do it for that reason, but I noticed afterwards that it actually helped a lot.
I started journalling about a year ago and it's become one of the most important things I do to look after myself, and a part of my day that I always look forward to. I can't imagine living without it now.
I recently(about 6 months ago) started keeping a private sketch journal. And it's been so good for my mental health. I not only write about my feelings/experiences but draw them too. I wonder what kind of benefits art as therapy provide?
I went to a clinic for an eating disorder and the first thing they told me is to start a journal, the one where you write down everything you eat in a day, it didn't fix my issue right away, but later I tried it again, and it helped me develop healthy eating habits that stick.
Anyone else grow up with sibling who read your diary once and you stopped journaling cold-turkey and never returned because of it? Just me?
Not you only! I’m thinking of getting back to it without lingering much about who will read it, cus..honestly? idgaf anymore. So, if u want to get back to it,DO IT. Best of luck to U.
@@kiko813 Well, I no longer live with siblings, or in contact with anyone I knew would do the same thing, so I should be safe to try again for the first time in around 13 years....
I love journaling. I scrapbook, bullet journal, draw, and keep a diary. I started really slowly, and then just took off a few years ago. It’s been so helpful, I recommend everyone try different types of journaling.
I tried journaling years ago, but my fear was if I died suddenly, there was stuff in there that I didn't care to share with anyone. Sometimes there are things that people don't need to know about other people because their relationship with them is different from yours.
So I destroyed them and have peace of mind, it's a catch 22 damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I agree that rereading it later can give you a clearer picture of whether you made the right decision or not.
Thank you so much! My thoughts exactly!!
In that case, journaling digitally would be a smart thing. Because you would have an id and password. Unless you share it with someone, it goes down with you. Hope it helps. :)
I have this fear too so I journal in my second language no one around me speaks lol
Get a rocketbook and erase it regularly. Get paper for things worth keeping, but I erase anything that I need to process but I wouldn't want seen later.
I throw out my stream of conscious writing the moment I'm done with my notebook. They're only small 64 page ones so it happens fairly often, but in I don't see the value of keeping them around. I havr a digital journal that I go back to documenting what I do actually want to remember though, but the physical books are just used to be "throw thoughts on the page in an archaic way"
I absolutely love this! It seems like a do-able way to deal with my extreme avoidance and anxiety. Thank you.
What's wrong with the sound? Sounds like there are 2 sound sources phasing each other. This makes it also sound boxed. You can hear the difference between the CTA and the rest of the video
I started journaling about 2 years ago when i was in the depths of grief. I found it really useful to basically brain-dump everything that kept going round in my brain and noticed that when I had written it down, it not only stopped it from bothering me for a short time, but I was able to question my feelings more, ask myself the questions that were muddled amoungst the grief and make sense of it all. In my brain it was like this huge knotted bundle that was a mix of feelings, thoughts and questions etc but once I wrote it down i could make sense of it and work through my grief more logically without everything in my head being all knotted together. I don't journal every day, but when I have something on my mind that is really bothering me and keeps distracting me, I write it all down and I feel so much calmer. Everything makes much more sense on paper than when it's swirling around in my head like a tornado and like I said, I use it as a brain-dump so my thoughts aren't distracting me from getting on with my day.
Is it normal to look back and read through journals from 5 years ago, and feel embarrassed - for feeling / thinking those ways?!! Is this growth? Or weird?
Totally normal! I'm a huge journaller too and I get like this. I think this is an advantage of journalling: you get to see the ways you've grown and changed. It's a great opportunity to practice being open and sympathetic towards other view points. I think if we realize and accept how changeable we are we can be more accepting of the differences in others.