Why I Journal

The best times of my adult life have been the times that I’ve been journaling. Not always the times where I experienced the most success, made the most money, or had the most fun, though there’s sometimes been some overlap. But these have been the times where I’ve grown the most, and where I always felt the happiness of knowing that my life is moving in the right direction, that I was moving toward more and more faithful adherence to my values, and more and more toward the habits and decisions that most support my goals.

Even knowing this, I’ve never been especially consistent. I’ve journaled intensely for months at a time, lost the thread, drifted away from it, and eventually returned feeling like I was starting over again.

This is a time of life with a generous share of challenges. With seven young children (and an eight on the way), life at home can often be most accurately described as a tooth-and-nail struggle to keep chaos reasonably contained. During all this, my job feels more difficult and demanding, its requirements more ambiguous and higher stakes, than I remember ever experiencing in my professional life. My work days are characterized by a constant feeling of overwhelm, and it’s not uncommon for me to end a work day feeling more frustrated and more behind than I started it.

Along with all of this, these past 12 months I’ve been confronting some of my ugliest and most recalcitrant personal habits that have eroded my effectiveness as a husband and father, as a provider and leader in my family.

For all these difficulties, this is a time in life where I feel more joyful, more grateful, more confident and at peace than ever before because of my journaling.

How I Journal

When I’m journaling, I take inventory of my struggles as well as my wins. I name my adversity, and when it is named, it suddenly seems much smaller and much less powerful. It’s like the old legends where you could conquer a demon simply by speaking its name. Naming a struggle doesn’t make it instantly dissolve or go away — far from it. But it does cause a profound shift in power. Suddenly I have power over that adversity and how I respond to it rather than vice versa. I’ve progressed past my default of reacting based on fear and perception. I’m naming the problem, examining what it really means for me and how I really feel about it, and identifying what I should do next.

I’m coming back to the journal frequently not just to name issues, but to reflect on the day: what I’ve learned, where I’m still struggling, which naturally fills out the narrative of where I’m growing and where I’m stalled. The format is unstructured and informal on purpose. It’s all about just getting my thoughts out. My favorite way to do this is to turn on the voice recorder on my phone, pop in my headphones, and start walking toward no particular destination, talking about whatever’s on my mind. Usually, one thought leads to the next: opening a topic leads to examining and speaking my mental context around this and ideas that come to mind for solutions or next steps. It’s a stream of consciousness, but the act of speaking it or typing it or writing it forces just enough structure. I have to commit thoughts to the medium, see or hear them out loud, which naturally brings assumptions and inconsistencies more to the forefront.

I’ve found that most of the value that I get from journaling comes from this part — the act of committing my thoughts to speech or writing. I get more out of this time of introspection and just going through my thoughts, working things out out loud, than anything that I do with the recordings after the fact. To make it most effective, the best rule is, when I feel a little stuck or stalled making an entry, to ask myself: What do I not want to talk about? What am I avoiding mentioning? That’s what I need to journal about. That’s what I need to admit to myself, out loud, and immediately it brings the problem out of the shadows. It “names the demon” and helps me find the tools that I need to conquer it.

Using the Entries

Every time I finish recording an entry, I log it away, and the way that I’ve done this has been different over the years, the various personal eras where I’ve engaged with journaling. Today I’ve been able to make good on a longstanding intention by developing a personal journaling app that directly accepts my voice memos and/or any entries I sit down and type out. It acts as a personal librarian of sorts, identifying common topics, captures tasks from my entries to maintain a live to-do list, and tracks habits visually.

I’ve also integrated it with AI chat. It does a surprisingly good job of finding trends between entries, surfacing those, and pointing out areas where I need to give some attention. For instance, I’ve been journaling a lot about poor sleep habits, but never really making the connection that I had chronically bad sleep habits that were having negative effects across my life as a whole until using this method. The bot basically said, “Look, the sleep problem is unavoidable, urgent to the point of being on fire. You need to fix this before anything else.” It backed that up with examples and helped me focus my attention on what I should be prioritizing: getting my sleep right, working back from a pretty severe sleep debt.

Another helpful prompt has been: “What am I avoiding naming in my entry? If you read between the lines, what am I dancing around, but either haven’t realized or haven’t said out loud?” It’s really helpful as just a thinking partner. It’s something that can help me identify what insights are hidden in my journal that need more attention from me.

Conclusion

With all these things in place, I’ve been able to grow through adversity. Sometimes it’s been painfully slow, and the growth has been really imperfect, but I’ve been able to notice and preserve the areas where I’ve made even small progress, celebrate that small progress, and then build on it. It’s been able to help me keep from giving up, from feeling like some of these challenges are intractable. And I’ve been able to live this time of substantial challenges as a time of growth and excitement.

I’ve found that I’m happiest not based on where my life is, but on the direction that my life is moving in. Being in a great place in life but moving in the wrong direction is terrifying. Moving in the right direction, moving toward where I want to be, is everything. And with journaling, I can see that I’m doing that, and I can course-correct when I’m falling short.