JOURNALING

FROM THE MIND TO THE PAPER

Every day I try to find some space in time to stop, pick up my journal, and write down whatever is on my mind at that moment. A tremendous pain felt in my heart, a feeling of gratitude, or just the holiday shopping list. Sometimes I do it first thing in the morning, other times before going to sleep. There are some days when I write more than once, and yep, there are other days when I can’t write anything.

For me, this started more as an organizational method, expecting to become more organized and efficient in my daily life, but slowly it changed into a necessary habit, a personal therapy.

Now it is for me a form of self-care.

Writing allows me to create mental space and process my emotional experiences and it is the most life-changing practice I’ve learned.

It is transversal to all the other disciplines that I'm also trying to develop such as yoga, philosophy, or meditation, and it has contributed to enhancing my performance in several areas of my life.

But let’s start talking about what’s this all about, for those of you who never heard about it, or even if it sounds familiar but you never understood what journaling means.

What a Journal is, in fact?

In simple words, it is the practice of writing on a paper, usually a notebook, everything we want to get out of our mind.

Some people compare it to a diary, similar to those we used to have when we were young. I had a few of those but, by that age, I was so distracted with everything that was happening in my little world that being present with my thoughts wasn’t much intuitive (honestly, it was becoming less and less).

The difference between those diaries and journaling, is that instead of reporting life events from an external point of view (“I did this”, “I went there”, “she told me bla bla…”) it comprehends the reflection on our emotions and deep thoughts about life and personal experience (present, past or even imaginary). Like getting really deep on what we are experiencing and putting that in words.

Why paper? You might ask. Well, in the end, it is just an option according to your personal preferences and the way you want to use this tool. But since I'm a paper person, I want to highlight the beneficial effects of handwriting that you don't get from typing, especially if you're doing this with the intention of self-development and internal work.

Science suggests that brain regions associated with learning are more active when people complete a task by hand, improving memory. Also, handwriting forces you to slow down. Some studies have shown that writing leads to higher levels of self-disclosure and translates into more significant therapeutic benefits, as opposed to typing, by allowing people more time to create a greater variety of words, which can facilitate better self-expression.

On the other hand, if you start journaling to become more organized and productive, there are some advantages of the digital form that you might consider. You can create backups of your journal and access it from anywhere. It’s easier to search for specific entries. It’s faster, and some argue that you’re more likely to stick with the habit.

I’ll explore the “pen on paper” kind of journal!

In science, journaling is named “expressive writing” and its effects on health and human behavior had been hugely studied in the last decades (maybe past century). As the name suggests, this practice incorporates the expression of our emotions through writing.

I like to call it a kind of a pre-stage for the meditation practice because, as in a meditative state, we break the high speed of our wandering mind and become observers of our thoughts. At least of those we manage to write down. Do you see? It is as if you can put your thoughts on a table and appreciate them from the observer's point of view. They suddenly become apart from you.

We are not our thoughts.

And journaling has helped me a lot in consolidating this separation from the Ego (we have a loooot to talk about the Ego, but not today).

Before talking about the practical part of it, I think it might be interesting to learn a little bit about the history of journaling and also its scientific background. This is more than just a new millennials “trendy” practice, my friends!

History

The habit of writing down sentiments, thoughts, ideas, and personal reflections may be as old as the handwriting. There are well-known "journals" with thousands of years.

One of the most iconic examples of this is the “Meditations”, by Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor, and stoic philosopher. He wrote this series of 12 books of private notes and personal thoughts as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement. This was around 167 A.D.

In the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys, an administrator of the navy and Member of Parliament in England, is pointed as being the first to write down a dairy as a biography, recording intimate experiences between 1660 and 1669. His diary has great historical importance because it provided eyewitness records of the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War, and the Great Fire of London.

By the late eighteenth century, explorers such as Captain Cook, Lewis and Clark, and Darwin were traversing the earth and documenting their discoveries on paper. Some genius such as Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Thomas Edison, also kept diaries where they explored their ideas, observations, and hypotheses about the world.

The use of journaling as part of the creative process has also been adopted by many artists in recent centuries. Tolstoy, Kafka, and Sylvia Plath are some of those who had their journals published. It is now possible to access the huge amount of knowledge and creative content they produced because they disclosed their psychological and philosophical personal quests on their journals.

And how do you think Ann Frank managed to deal with the german occupation? Mentally speaking. She wrote a diary!

…

Okay, frankly, I can't imagine how she did it, but the diary certainly helped and you can perceive that if you read her diary.

Even though this is a practice used by humanity for millennia, it was only in the 1960s that its potential as a therapeutic method came to public knowledge through the work developed by Dr. Ira Progroff. He was an american psychologist who dedicated his life to exploring new ways to stimulate creativity and cultivate individual growth. He found that customers who wrote some form of diary were able to work on their personal problems more quickly.

He then developed this method called the "Intensive Journal Method" as a tool of self-improvement and conducted many workshops available to the public, including prisons, social service agencies, and health care facilities. After that, the journal writing for personal growth and emotional wellness became gradually noticed by a wider audience.

In 1980 it was already used formally in many public schools but with more educational purposes than therapeutic. However, teachers started noticing that a simple assignment to reflect about an academic problem often revealed important information about the student’s emotional state, with reported sensations of relief when they could write about troubling events or confusing thoughts and feelings.

James W. Pennebaker was the one who put the healing and therapeutic potential of journaling in the eye of the medical community. He is a professor of Psychology at the University of Texas and has oriented his work to investigate the relationship between natural language use, health, and social behavior.

Along with other researchers, he contributed with scientific evidence to understand how writing therapy produces positive effects on physical and mental health, emotional healing, and overcoming trauma.

He has shown that when people write about emotionally difficult events or feelings for just 20 minutes at a time over three or four days, their immune system functioning increases. His studies indicate that the liberation offered by writing has a direct impact on the capacity of the body to deal with stress and fight off infection and disease. He also reported behavioral changes: “Students who write about emotional topics show improvements in grades in the months following the study. Senior professionals who have been laid off from their jobs get new jobs more quickly after writing. University staff members who write about emotional topics are subsequently absent from their work at lower rates than control participants.” (Pennabaker J. W. 1997)

He also demonstrated that writing about emotions can be beneficial, even if those emotions are not related to any specific trauma from the past. Writing revealed to be helpful through a mechanism of releasing unresolved emotions, either they were present, past, or even imagined.

After Pennebaker’s publications, the medical and therapeutic communities took a closer look at “journal writing” as a holistic method for promoting well-being. Expressive writing workshops started appearing, designed to give the general public tools of self-discovery, creative expression, and life enhancement, and this technique began to be incorporated as a usual instrument in psychotherapy.

Nowadays, we have a lot of options on how to adopt this practice. We can easily find tips and tricks and lots of guides to help us through this journey on books and on the internet.

I’ll give you some examples in the next post and also share my personal experience with the systems that I already tried and adopted for a while.

But first, let’s summarize why I think this practice is so good.

Although I believe fiercely in the good effects of this practice, they may not apply to all of you. This is a very intimate and personal exercise and what you can possibly find out, you’ll only discover with your practice.

This is what it’s been giving me:

• It helps me to set goals - by allowing the reflection on what my priorities are; and also to accomplish them – considering and defining written strategies gives me more efficiency on the pursue of my objectives;

• It is a memory assistant – sometimes, a great idea comes in the middle of a rushing day and having somewhere to write it down might be very useful. I tend to forget about lots of stuff;

• It is, in fact, a great organizational tool and alleviates the mental load of having so many things to do. I have my agenda incorporated in my journal (I used bullet journal for a while and now I do a mix of expressive writing and bullet journaling – more on the different types of journaling on my next post);

• It became a sort of therapy, allowing me to understand and recognize the things that matter the most for me. Over time, I realized that my strongest emotional experiences gravitated around pretty much the same topics. This was really helpful on decluttering my mind of all the garbage and distractions and focusing my energy on the things that bring me joy in life;

• It allows my creativity to flow naturally – sometimes I write spontaneously and emotionally, other times I start creating stories and fantasizing with my thoughts (that’s usually when good ideas come up), other times I decorate my pages, or just do randomly drawing;

• It gives me a wonderful sense of relief. By putting down my deep thoughts, negative thinking, regrets and fears, I develop the perception that in fact, I am none of that. It sets me free of that never-ending spiral of self-judgment where I used to get lost very very often;

• On the other side, it also allows the acknowledgment of positive feelings that we tend to under valorize and not experience fully, such as gratitude, forgiveness and the appreciation of simple things every day. It is very powerful and some exercises using this positive writing can completely change my mood for the rest of the day;

• Self-knowledge. Our “baggage” is huge. It doesn’t end at the moment of our birth. We carry the stories of our parents and those before them. Expressive writing became the basal pillar of the inner work I’ve been doing over the past years. It has helped me to better understand myself, to perceive and start healing the trauma that was conditioning me, and also to accept who I am and those around me. It became a safe space where I have been exploring my past, memories and sensations, recognizing pattern behaviors, limited thoughts about life, and my existence on this planet.

• At last, it is soooooooo relaxing! I cannot describe the pleasure that I feel when my pen touches the paper. I love the feeling of being able to do whatever I want in that space. Maybe it is my Ego caressed by a subtle sense of power, but my guts become warm and sweet with pure joy.