Journals and how they help me to understand myself

I started journalling in early 2018, and over time, it has become one of my best habits. In the beginning, I was writing sporadically, but at least every few days when something happened. As the years passed, I started to write more and more about what happens inside. I shifted from documenting the exterior to documenting my feelings and reactions and slowly started to analyse them. Over the course of the article, I will do my best to explain how I use journalling, what I write on, how I write, and other tips and tricks I gathered over the years. Let's start with the first things you need to start journalling.

What do I write on?

I’ve used a few journals over the years and a few types of them. Sketchbooks, plain white paper, writing on my laptop, ruled journals, craft paper, you name it. Out of these, the best writing vibe I got was from sketchbooks, and the most practical, by far, was on my laptop.

On my laptop, I mostly use OneNote, Google Docs, or Notes more recently. I like to keep it simple. Word or Pages is great for editing, formatting, and doing all sorts of other things power users might do, but it is too feature-rich for what I would use it for. For a while, on the laptop, I used LibreOffice Writer and Joplin as I jumped ship to Linux, but this is a different story and article altogether. For writing my own personal thoughts and introspection, I still rely on sketchbooks.

All fun and well, but how was I actually using these journals? Here’s the catch, just writing what happened on a particular day, that is a diary or an agenda. The agenda being the diary for grown people wearing suits. Journalling is more than that, and I will admit that for the first few years, I’ve been writing a diary for the most part.

What is a journal, then?

For the first few years I was just documenting events as they happened. Plain and simple, I was just writing about my day, what occurred on that day, and what the outcome was. Basically, I was acting as my own personal historian or biographer. Now, the purpose of having a journal is to go beyond that.

True, documenting events is the foundation of a journal, but the next step is analyzing and writing about how that event makes us feel, what we think of it, how it happened, or what will happen next. This is the beauty. Once we write all those aspects related to an event, then sometime later, we can go back and check to see if we were right or wrong, or even if a similar event happened but we feel differently about it.

Using a journal this way will help us pinpoint important shifts in our behavior or at least narrow down the reason for those shifts or even growth. Then, we can use it to replicate it in the future or avoid it, but in any case, we can understand it. Here’s how I got to journalling the right way.

The simple answer is that I started looking back over my journals.

Over the years, I’ve been moving forward against all odds and have become used to the friction. I’ve gained clarity in how to deal with hardships and a tempered mind as well. Essentially, I learned how to take things one step at a time to reach my goals. However, this came with a cost. At some point, I had some downtime and looked over my journals and noticed that in a lot of areas, I was writing that I was tired, feeling blue, and anxious, and this was in between ticking goals off the list every now and then.

A pattern became clear that reaching all of those goals was taking a toll on me. I was looking over all of my journals, and I saw a lot of wear and tear over the years, running on fumes for months on end, but I have become wiser because of that. Unfortunately, not in a good way.

I became better at managing my time and being more efficient in getting things done. There was a lot of despair, hope, stubbornness, and a lot of drive and motivation. I was lucky because as I was writing my journals, I was documenting events, but I was also writing how I felt. In a sense, because I was tired but still wanted to do something, I would write and mention how I felt. At the time, it felt like some kind of progress, but my luck was that I was actually documenting important interior aspects.

I did the natural thing that came to my mind next: write more. I started writing my findings and the way I saw things from my journals. I was analyzing myself to understand what happened because, looking over those journals, it was clear to me that the person writing them was burned out to a crisp. I knew it was me, so I had to find out where it all started, how I could identify it when it happened again, and how to prevent it. Now, I was using the journal for what it was purely intended, understanding myself.

This is the actual power of a journal. You can write and analyze yourself, backtrack, and look at past events with an older and wiser mind. Doing this will and should help you better understand your actions and reactions from then. Once I started doing this, my journalling habit changed from merely documenting to introspecting and having conversations with myself. I would ask myself questions and try to answer them in the most honest way.

A recurring theme that always found its way into my journal was whether I should simply switch to writing on my laptop or just continue using paper. Funnily enough, this is one of the most frequent things that came up. It was a lot of back and forth, and there have been times when I switched from one to another.

It’s still a mystery for me even to this day. For the time being, I am using my physical journal for my personal thoughts, but I am also using my laptop and tablet for everything else. Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s some unconscious bias, but I feel better writing on paper overall, and I think the best paper is plain paper from sketchbooks.

Why do I prefer sketchbooks for my journals?

What we put on paper is essentially information and data. The way we display information helps us understand it. However, the way we display it may be more useful in a particular case than another, depending on the type of information. A block of text is obviously something we’d use for a story with chronological events.

The reason for that is it is the best way to display the succession of events. Think of a process where each step is followed by another one. A manual for describing processes or a history lesson filled with events and dates are good examples. A spreadsheet would be best used when dealing with inventory or when tracking a particular amount over the course of various states in time, such as sales. But what about trying to understand various bits of information that have intricate relationships between them, and those relationships are not linear or successive?

This is where mind maps come in. They are most useful when visualizing concepts or processes where multiple things happen simultaneously, and one from one area affects another in a different area or several, highlighting dependencies. I have been using mind maps at work and have been recommending that others use them as well. They simply excel when used properly for the right type of job.

Of course, I’ve been using them when doing my self-analysis and even when I am preparing for job interviews or my resume. There was a time when I used mind maps to break down my professional experience and skills so I could figure out my next career step.

Now, the best paper to draw mind maps on are plain sheets of paper. This is why I prefer sketchbooks. I can write as much as I want, but when I need to draw up a mind map, there aren’t any lines to limit or annoy me. Plus there is the great benefit that sketchbooks come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. The best one I’ve used was a B5-sized one. It’s the size sweet spot between A5 and A4. In terms of paper quality and color, sketchbooks have various paper thicknesses, colors, and grains. Again, the B5 I used had the paper sheets a tad on the thicker side, and the color wasn’t pure white; it was a bright eggshell, almost white, but not quite.

Regular ruled notebooks or agendas are okay if all you do is write. Since I was doing more than that, I needed more, and sketchbooks are what works for me. The best advice I can share is just to explore. Try different ones. Go wild and try some craft paper, or be more conservative and pick up a hardcover agenda. Use whatever works for you. Now, with all this said, I want to move on to the last point of this article, which is about milestones.

What are milestones, and how do you use them in a journal?

Milestones are vital for projects. They are steps and mini-targets that check the health of the project and make sure everything is on track. I like to use two types of milestones in my journal. When I set a big goal for myself, I break it down into smaller steps, chunks, and blocks of tasks, just so that it doesn’t appear as daunting, and I can make adjustments or corrections if needed.

Here is where the first milestone appears after each step. As soon as I finish a step or a part of a project, then I use that point as a milestone and check to see if everything was done right, if the plan still holds, and generally, I review myself and how I handled it all. I try to use this milestone to scrutinize my approach and see if I could’ve done anything better and how I feel about what I achieved. What is important to note here is that the time for this milestone is not set. It’s reached as soon as a step is completed.

The second milestone is one with a fixed date. That date might be my birthday, a specific date that has meaning to me, or my favorite, New Year’s Eve. Most of us look at the new year as a restart. An opportunity to make another attempt at the to-do list of goals and dreams. “New year, new me,” as they say. But what about the old me? When the year is getting close to its end, we should take some time and reflect. To look at the picture we painted.

We can look at the good and be proud of what we have achieved. But also look at the bad so we can learn from it and hope to never repeat the same mistakes. We are quick to shift our views to the next year and wash away the bad year because it was not enough. And with how things have gone in the last years or so, at the moment of writing this, I cannot blame anyone for doing this.

However, it is important to note that the idea of having a fresh start on the 1st of January is so appealing that we simply want to focus on that. I believe hardships are there to make us stronger and wiser. Each has a lesson to learn from and a reason to be grateful for. The simplest thing would be to be thankful to be alive and to have another chance at fulfilling dreams.

The next year might bring great opportunities, but the year that is close to passing truly gave us the tools and preparation to do the things in the next year. Let’s not be quick to judge, forget, or wipe it all down.

Personally, I take a good moment to look back and analyze myself, not just on what I did but also on how I felt and feel. There is value in looking at how one felt over the year and why those feelings were there. I saw for multiple years how ambitious I was in spite of the hand I was dealt, but that has led me to a lot of anxiety, stress, fatigue, and a whole lot of negative impact. Seeing all of this helped me understand what I can do to mitigate those feelings and start to focus more on balance and care so I could nurture a healthier and stronger way of moving forward.

So what’s the point of it all?

A journal serves a far greater purpose than just writing your day-to-day and tracking events. The way I see it, it should be used as a tool for growth through honest introspection and spending time with yourself, past, present, and future. We rarely have time to think of how we were and how we felt due to the inertia and kinetic nature of everyday life.

Without a doubt, keeping a journal has helped me to understand myself, to break myself down to the most fundamental form, and then build it up again over and over again, and this process continues as I age and grow. I realized that our true self is fluid and our perception changes, giving new meaning and understanding to the events around us. But this is just me, and the methods I use in my journals help me in this aspect.

For others, it might be just overcoming obstacles, getting better at something, or simply venting. And this is perfectly fine. Journals aren’t meant to be used once but over a longer period of time. Then they really start to shine. When we read them after months or years. Smile while we remember the pleasant events or wipe tears as we see what could’ve been.

Life is rich and complex. Things happen to us and we don’t even think about them, but if we write them down, on a simple piece of paper, at least we’ll have the luxury of looking back, remembering, and then processing it. If you’ve ever felt stuck, anxious, tired, or undecided, reading your own thoughts from the past can help you understand why you are feeling that way in the present.