Month: March 2019

Switching up the journaling approach this week was certainly helpful in a number of ways. Putting together a plan the night before and morning of each day laid a general structure to the day ahead. Also, getting my mind out of the past was a key to trying to make better decisions in general.

Laying the Future Foundation

By shifting my focus forward, I found myself creating rough outlines for the day. Days hardly turned out as initially planned, but having some structure to fall back on helped when I would start to feel overwhelmed. Knowing what to bring my attention to at a given time allowed me to focus on what was most important in the given moment.

Each night, I wrote down a couple of sentences about how the day went and then shift focus to tomorrow. I created a list of things I wanted to do or think about for the day helped me to get over whatever happened today and get excited for tomorrow.

Admittedly, life frequently got in the way of my perfect plan most days. I would wake up late, or some other distraction would come up. Following what I wrote down verbatim wasn’t really the intention. Planning something was. Writing down a plan was a way to think about tomorrow, and not the day that is already over with.

Putting the Past Behind

The past can be a useful tool to learn from, but getting lost in it can be dangerous. When I started journaling again for this trial, I found myself focusing on the day that just passed.

The future is like the past of course, and too much focus on either can lead one down a slippery slope. Learning from the past and planning for the future are useful practices for anyone, but in reality it’s the present that requires all of our attention.

Keeping a journal is something I want to continue, even if it’s just a few words per day. Speaking of the future, for the next few weeks I’ll be changing things up a little bit. I won’t be starting a new ongoing trial. Instead, I’ll be writing about some other experiments I’ve done that don’t have their own posts yet.

Lately, most of my journaling and insight in general comes from hindsight. While it has it’s place, relying too much on hindsight leads to me frequently missing out on what’s happening around the corner. Focusing too much on the past, can leave little room to appreciate the present or plan for the future.

Hindsight Habits

My approach to journaling this time around boils down to wait until last minute of the day and then write down my thoughts. It’s definitely helped me to capture my feelings at the end of the day to wind down before bed, but it doesn’t capture the moments I’m writing about. Writing down my thoughts at the end of the day means I’m always looking back.

This tendency to write solely on the past causes me to miss out on the future ahead. With my current routines, I hardly ever take time to make plans for the future, both near and far. Sure there are events like vacations and goals, but the difficult part is the day to day that ultimately make up those things. As of now, the only foresight based activity I partake in is a weekly breakfast with friends. There we set goals for the week to come. Otherwise, all of my habits look back.

In Moderation

Looking back on events can be a great way to learn and develop, but a problem arises when everything is done retrospectively. Learning from the past is probably one of humanity’s greatest strengths, but so is planning ahead.

For the rest of this trial, I’m going to change up a little bit about how I approach the daily journal. Instead of journaling only at night, I’m going to write down my thoughts and plans for the day ahead. At the end of the day, I can look back on what was already written and see if I was successful or not. This forces me to start applying foresight in my routine.

This is the first time I’m revisiting a previously done trial, a daily journal, and it’s for a pretty specific reason. Prior to starting to journal again, I was dealing with quite a lot of stress, anxiety, and depression. Having a daily outlet of my thoughts helps to better sort and understand them.

Emotional Release

For most of my life, I’ve often held emotions at bay until I could no longer do so. The result was often a scene, a meltdown. As I’ve grown older, I may know how to avoid creating a scene, but I still struggle with emotional expression. On a given day, I can bounce from one end of the emotional spectrum to another in my mind, while on the surface trying to appear disconnected from any given feeling. I don’t believe this is a good thing.

Prior to starting to journal again, I would get lost in thoughts. The negative ones somehow have a way of clouding out everything else. Sitting down for a few minutes each night has helped me to get things under control. Writing down whatever comes to mind has cleared the fog. Negative thoughts don’t have the same hold, and the good aspects of a situation come to mind easier.

Getting Serious

I feel compelled to preface the following story. If you feel that you experience thoughts of harming yourself, please contact the suicide hotline at 1-800-273-8255. Regardless of your thoughts in that moment, any act against yourself can have a destructive blow to the people around you.

Drafting up my thoughts on this, I can’t help but remember a time a few years ago that I wrote a suicide note. By the time this idea crossed my mind, the event that sparked the deep depression and self-loathing I was feeling was well behind me. For some reason, I was committed to writing. What I found was the event that triggered those feelings, was really just the surface-level. Deep rooted emotions I had carried with me for years were dug up. Seeing the words on the paper, I was able to see a physical representation of those feelings and work through them.

I kept the note with me for a while. It was a reminder that things on the surface were usually not what they seemed. Eventually, I tossed it, putting that experience behind me. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had that type of emotion lurking in my mind, but the lesson of that day has stuck with me.

This post took me a lot of re-writes due to the difficulty of this subject matter. It’s a scary thing that these thoughts can impact anyone. I once again urge anyone who finds themselves drawing close to hurting themselves to call the suicide hotline at 1-800-273-8255 and, if able, seek out help from a professional. I am definitely not qualified to offer advice or solutions, but the above is just one experience I thought was relevant.

For the first time, I am repeating a trial I’ve done in the past, a daily journal. There are a number of reasons that I wanted to try this again, but today I wanted to dig into a concept I’ve seen frequently, creating a record of a certain time in life.

An Autobiography of Sorts

A creator I follow recently discussed some disappointment he had that there was no concrete record of certain points in his life. For him specifically, no videos he could look back on. This made me think of when I read the biography of Ben Franklin. So much of what we know about him comes from his journals. His autobiography captures how he reflected on his life, but his journal gives us the moment. A journal for anyone can capture the instant far clearer than retrospection.

Something I’ve thought of doing recently, was to try and write up an autobiography for the first 25 years of my life. I don’t know if I’ll go thru with it, how much work it would be, if I would ever release it, or the answers to a variety of other questions. I like the idea of trying to capture what my 25 year old self thinks about his life so far. Keeping a journal going forward, can hopefully help a future me remember what these times were like.

Journal Format Doesn’t Matter

The last time I tried journaling, I mostly focused on trying a variety of different methods, but so far I’ve been purely writing free form thoughts as they come from my mind. Not focusing on a format or structure has allowed me to express the exact thoughts passing thru my mind at the moment.

This has helped me to process what I think were the biggest parts of my day and the emotions that I still need to process. Rather than let them boil around in my head too long, getting them on paper makes them feel more concrete and tangible.

Next week, I will dive deeper into this emotional expression, another major reason I am giving journaling a try once again.