Journaling and you
The work of therapy is hard. Therapy happens on average one hour every week or two weeks for many of my clients. Apart from specific exercises that I offer clients relevant to the specific concerns within sessions, there is one strategy that I would recommend above and beyond all else. Hint: it’s not talking with AI. It’s dialoguing with yourself, better known as journaling. Journaling more effectively accelerates any work you do through therapy.
“Are you the kind of person to journal?” I’ll often ask my clients. I get it. Journaling as we typically think of it, that is, sitting down every night with a fresh page in front of us, scrawling the words, “dear diary,” at the top of the page, and then pouring our heart out… this type of journaling works for a select few people. And only those few people.
The benefits of journaling are not exclusive to that mode of journaling though. Journaling doesn’t have to be a daily exercise, though there’s benefit there. And it doesn’t have to involve a mock dialogue beginning with “dear diary,” though there is also certainly value in that. It can be much simpler, much more sporadic, and much more free-form.
Let’s get under the hood of what’s happening when we’re journaling, especially with a pen or pencil in hand.
What is happening when we journal
We slow down when journaling
Using a writing tool does something rare and powerful that few of us get to experience anymore: it slows us down to the speed we can write at. Left to our own thoughts, our mind can race at breakneck speeds with no speed bumps. It’s very easy for many of us to get caught in loops there, that no punctuation or line end can easily break. When we observe our thoughts being converted to ink or carbon, we observe them at a much slower pace and this allows us to keep up with them and wonder about them as they pour out. Writing our thoughts down on paper is a strategy for journaling mor effectively.
We get more control through journaling
Journaling requires us to use our fine motor skills. Using a keyboard, analog or digital, does not engage our fine motor skills nearly the same way using a writing tool does. This embodies our thoughts and recruits the part of our brain that is engaged with precision and self-control. Thinking with a pen or pencil changes the structure of how we engage in thinking. It’s not the same as free-form shower thoughts. The reward of journaling effectively is developing patience and more impulse control.
We get more perspective through journaling
Journaling effectively externalizes our thoughts. That’s a fancy way of saying we can see our thoughts outside of us, in a way that lets them be separate and open to our critical judgment. This, in many ways, is why I would call journaling “therapy between therapy.” This supports you in taking the mode of thinking and speaking from therapy and live it out between sessions. This helps you to realize that your thoughts are open to review, revision, and even being discarded. An eraser, some white-out, or other creative ways of destroying the paper they’re written on can be an amazing symbolic action that our body enacts upon thoughts we review and don’t want.
Making journaling effectively more achievable
When our nervous system is in high-gear, the specifically low-gear mode of journaling can be almost painful to try to do. I’ve witnessed people literally start shaking, apart from emotions, from trying to slow down enough to catch their breath let alone put pen to a paper. Our lives are full and fast-paced, and there are many reasons why many of us do not have journaling as part of our life. This is more than a matter of will-power or “being a journaling person,” which I think is not a fair characterization for anyone, and I’ll explain why.
1. Honor our need for transition
Coming out of a busy day, of “being on,” of transitioning between roles, of living a generally fast-paced life between work and play, journaling is hard because it is a slow, thoughtful, and sometimes intense experience. An instructor of mine phrased this nervous system process as “moving from battle-mind to rest-mind” regarding coming home from work to crashing on the couch. We crash because we skip steps in the wind-down process, much like a gear-shifting car would stall if it skipped gears when revving up or down.
Solution: find activities that are less demanding than your previous activities, but more energetically demanding than journaling. These could look like tidying up a room, doing dishes, going for a 10 minute walk outside, doing a light workout, etc.
2. Honor our need for ritual
We forget new habits because we are creatures of ritual and habit. The main benefit of ritual and habit is that we “are doing the thing” without having to think about “the thing” so hard. There’s so much value in that, whether it’s brushing your teeth, eating at the right time of day, praying/meditating, etc. You might not be fully present for it each time, but in ensuring you do it, the opportunity to be present for it is far more common. New habits like regularly journaling aren’t habit yet. New habits can take anywhere from 21 days to over 200 days to form. This depends on the complexity of the task and how present you are for the task during habit formation.
Solution: pair journaling with another habit that already exists, and happens a often as you’d like to journal (habit stacking). Then make your new habit, journaling, as multisensory of a ritual as reasonably possible. Aim for a consistent time and space, as both are key to effective habit/ritual formation. The more your sense s are engaged, the more present you’ll be for it, the easier it is to encode. A clean, quiet room; a good smelling cup of coffee or tea; some quiet, thoughtful music; a reasonably comfortable, supportive chair; etc. can each support a few different senses to give you a symphony of things to attend to to help you slow down.
Note: try to keep the different multisensory elements simple, not taking more than a minute or two to attend to before journaling.
3. Honor our exhaustion
We’re creatures built for efficiency. This is part of why rituals are great, they save us energy. Making a new habit is exhausting. Generally, the more friction we can take out of setting up a new habit, the easier it is to encode. The reverse is true for breaking habits. This is why it’s good to have your multisensory elements simple, and the time and space dedicated to the task. Every extra step between you and pen-to-paper is a risk for ejecting from the process before you start. That is a trade-off to think about. The best use of our limited will-power is to design a life that requires less will-power.
Solution: Set apart the time, the space, and the sensory parts with intentional design. Keep things accessible, and if at all possible, visible. A visible journal is far easier to remember to write in than one tucked in a drawer or under a stack of unsorted papers.
4. Honor the purpose
“No plan survives contact” is a saying from the military. You and I don’t come to our journaling with the same purpose every time. There’s no rule saying we should. Part of the secret of journaling effectively is to stay focused on your purpose, not your form. The purpose we have for journaling, the function it serves for us, is key to keep in mind:
- Do we want to organize our thoughts, our feelings?
- Are we looking for more clarity on a goal or desire?
- Is it for troubleshooting things that are bothering us?
- Do we need to vent in a private space where we aren’t judged as we sort our dirty laundry?
Notice how each of these things are also a reason why people attend therapy. Each reason is different, and session to session (with a therapist or journal), the reason can be different too. If we change our expectations of what a journaling session should be, it can serve you as much or as little is necessary when the ritual gets rolling.
Solution: Ask yourself, “what would be most useful for me to journal for today?” You can keep a list of prompts on a sticky note or on a certain page of your journal, like the question prompts above. We always benefit from reminders. Find your own to use as well, including from therapy. Remind yourself that daily log journaling is useful, but infrequent intensives or scattered short lists can also count toward the habit and purpose.
5. Honor the process
Journaling effectively is hard. Perfection, or fear of failure, can freeze it. We’re always developing, whether actively or passively. Training and failure are the left and right arm of learning. Training is the process of repetition and refinement. It can be done by yourself or with external support. It can be a powerful experience to commit to journaling, and then many entries later, look back on your earlier entries. Take some time to appreciate those entries as well as the growth in writing you’ve accomplished.
Failure, also, is worth embracing. It is impossible to learn without failure. Just like plants grow best with rich manure, we too grow best when we take the important lessons from reflecting on our failures. Failure implies that you made an attempt. There’s a bigger difference between zero and one than there is between one and one hundred. The difference is of something versus nothing. There’s a story that Thomas Edison once said, “I didn’t fail a thousand times, rather, I found a thousand ways not to make a light bulb.” Each attempt can be seen as the process of learning that enabled something rich to happen.
Solution: If you’re like me, there’s a chance you think that “maybe one day my grandkids will read this,” and you start writing for another reader. This can really disrupt the process. If you run into this challenge, I suggest writing with a plan to destroy your writing. This way you retain the benefit of engaging with journaling while removing the mind-trap of future readership. This is especially important while you’re creating the habit. Reframe your efforts as progress rather than strictly success or failure. When something doesn’t go to plan, reflect on how it departed from the plan, and how it contributes to progress.
Bringing journaling to therapy
I consider journaling effectively to be therapy between therapy sessions. It’s a profound way of continuing the process and not losing momentum. Eventually, perhaps, it may even make the need for therapy in your life far less. As a therapist, I support that, and am working to make myself obsolete. Journaling can be a useful support for therapy and a great way to make the most of your resources.
Considering the four question prompts that journaling can be useful for (see above: 4. Honor the purpose), any work you do on your own time can be worth bringing in to your therapy sessions. When you’re wrestling with very specific questions and challenges, you can share your questions and process with your therapist from your journaling. This can be a profound way to accelerate your work in sessions. This can make the most of your time and money.
Your insights can be turned into tailor-made supporting actions to help you develop. Insight is the easy part of therapy. Finding useful and achievable behaviors to engage with, enabling new experiences and confidence in those experiences, that’s where the work becomes hard. Journaling can often enable you to discover those behaviors, and where you run into issues, therapy can take it to the next step for you. We all benefit from external support at different times in life.