Why I journal

This post now includes material from "Good, bad, or somewhere in between" (January 2024).

I mention journaling a lot, but I've never explained why I do it every day. The short answer is that it started as a way out of a difficult time, when anxiety, poor focus and a foggy memory were getting the better of me.

Before journaling, those feelings were constant, and I couldn't see a way out of them.

Then something changed. Maybe it was a line in a book, maybe a short YouTube clip; I honestly don't remember the source. But the message was clear: journaling helps. I was curious enough to try.

At first, putting my thoughts into words was hard. Writing even a few sentences about how I felt took real effort. So I kept it simple and wrote down only the most pressing things: my fears, and whatever was feeding my anxiety. It worked quickly. Within a week I felt relief. The journal became a mirror that showed me both my progress and my pain points. Once my thoughts were on paper, I could face them and deal with them.

Over time journaling became an extension of my mind. It made me more reflective and improved my memory, because writing things down helped me recall my experiences and connect them faster.

My daily entries grew from a few lines to four pages of A5, and that growth mirrored my own. I found that the answer I'm looking for is sometimes already in me, and writing is how I dig it out. Journaling became a second memory, and the way I think through whatever life throws at me.

What it taught me about control

For a long time I wondered what makes us feel joy or despair, and who decides what counts as "good" or "bad". Along the way I came across an idea from Epictetus, usually quoted as "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." That wording is a modern paraphrase; the closest line in his Enchiridion is "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things." Either way, it made the pieces fall into place for me.

We don't control the world around us; we control how we see it. We label events good or bad, and that label decides whether we end up happy or sad. My mind tends to fix on the sad side, and I can conjure those shadows before anything has even happened. So the real question is how to get better at the way we see things.

There's no single answer. Getting control of your own thoughts is hard work. It takes discipline, honest self-reflection and a lot of self-control. For me, what made the difference was daily journaling. It's like a frank conversation with myself that peels back layers of anxiety and gut reaction. Through it I learnt what really matters to me, and I noticed my habit of fretting over the unborn troubles of tomorrow. Journaling, together with weekly reflections, helped me draw a clear line between what's within my influence and the much larger, unpredictable world beyond it. That showed me that my illusion of control was the root of much of my distress.

If you want to feel less weighed down by events outside your control, a pen and a notebook are a good place to start.