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Comment by freetonik | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been journaling for about 5 years daily, and actually decided to stop last year. For a long time I felt depressed, and my journal notes reflected that.

Every day I sat to write down another entry, and when looking at a few previous notes (or at “this day 1 year/2 years ago”, which is a feature of many journaling apps), the bad days seemed “normal”, because, well, there weren’t many good days. I believe this somehow helped me stay in a depressed state, helped perpetuate the feeling of normality of something that should be considered abnormal.

I am feeling better nowadays and consider getting back into journaling, but I am wary of this unwanted normalization possibility. It’d be great to have some sort of a basis to compare days to. Or maybe this is a bad idea.

Journaling is supposed to make you more self reflective, to increase meta attention. It definitely does that, but it’s harder for some people.

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I 100% agree. I had kept a journal continuously for about 17 years. My decision to stop was intentional and difficult. I loved my journal deeply, and it's difficult to explain how it became an impediment for me and why I believed it was a crutch. Living with a journal was, for me, similar to watching a concert through the screen of your iPhone. My life is less examined now, but it is better and I feel better.

I destroyed that journal entirely. I can never get it back, and I can not see how I felt 8 years ago on this date, or 16 years ago on new years. It does not matter how I was then. The continuity of it prevented me from feeling I could break with the past.

>I had kept a journal continuously for about 17 years. >I destroyed that journal entirely.

Woah! That's one hell of a buddhist exercise. Reminds me of those monks that spend days diligently painting complex pictures with colored sand [1] to later destroy it completely.

I hope your break from the past was successful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala

Forgive me for speculating, but I believe it's not possible to fully appreciate a mental state when you're in that particular state. The insight power of journaling comes from reading your entries from an elevated perspective, as you have noted.

I also believe that, just like memories change when you recall them, writing down your thoughts will change them. That change isn't necessarily positive when you're depressed. Every thought will be inevitably filtered through the lens of apathy.

I agree.

My comment was one sided in a sense that journaling also helped me notice this condition in a long term. Eventually, at least. Also, I think those records might become valuable in the future.

Your “lens of apathy” statement really hit home for me. I do feel this strongly when reading journal entries from years ago. It all seems so... unimportant, so mundane, even thought I might’ve had very strong feelings at the moment. Not sure if you meant this type of thing.

It would be good to be able to capture emotions better. Maybe my writing is just not as good. Maybe I should try writing poetry :-)

> Maybe I should try writing poetry :-)

I've been writing poetry similarly to the way journals are discussed here. Your first post resonated with me -- I'd use poems to converse with my conflicted self; give the emotions a free hand to write things that may be painful to read later; get it out of my head -- and I'd encourage you to return to writing (or poetry!) because distance brings freshness.

"When the soul wanes the form appears." - Charles Bukowski

Reading your comment also made me think about how it's harder to write when things are good. Someone else commented about the possibility of writing your thoughts down having an affect on them; I think there's merit to that tied with the power of our thoughts and the reinforcement/feedback that you observed while feeling the opposite.

A reminder to myself, even; consistent writing is as hard as consistent anything else.

Thanks for encouragement!

I'm curious, and I hope that's okay to ask, but could you share an example of your journal-ish poetry?

You know, I think it really depends on how you do it.

I’ve gotten into journaling (though I call it “logging”) as a tool to help me overcome these kinds of issues. Depression is a vicious cycle where you feel like crap, brood on how you feel like crap, do nothing that’s meaningful to you, and then feel like crap because you did nothing that was meaningful for you.

If your journal is just an outlet for this cycle of brooding, it’s part of the problem. If you use it to log information that you can use to “debug yourself”, it can be part of the solution. If I had a paper journal, I would get one with the cover embossed, “NO BROODING”.

Journaling changed my life. I used a mindmap editor called Freeplane. I wasn't trying to change myself; I was just recording thoughts. But the mindmap editor let me decompose and reorganize them, and I spent a lot of time reiewing and reorganizing, such that I eventually had a lot of notes about things like kindness, humor, curiosity, interpersonal dynamics ... anything I thought might be worth remembering.

I think it led me to discover destructive behaviors in myself, and constructive alternatives to them. I remember a lot of it was about how to talk to strangers, which I find pretty easy now.

It was my favorite thing to do for years. Then I stopped. shrug

Interesting, I've been thinking about reflection too. As I've grown older I am a lot more self aware and think about my experiences, what I've done and what I'm doing now. It really helps to critically evaluate what you're achieving. But as you say, the reality is most of us really aren't doing much interesting, creative or ground breaking. Maybe that inspires you to focus on doing great things, but for me its sad.

Maybe just acting like a child and try to have fun is a better solution.

I think you might be right. Although I think depression is a result of the physical state of the body and depressive thoughts are always the symptom, never the cause of depression I also believe that narratives do matter.

Using narrative you can put yourself in a thought loop that prevents you from implementing changes that could improve your depressive condition.

Reading replies like yours I started to wonder about a more systematic approach to journaling in the context of mood, therapy, depression, etc. Quick google search lead to this [1] article, I haven't read it yet, though.

I also remember reading about particular journaling techniques to battle certain mental conditions.

[1] https://medium.com/better-humans/cognitive-journaling-a-syst...

I think journaling could help if you adopted a more upbeat personna for the purposes of writing than what you feel is your true self at the moment.

Man you have hit the nail on the head, thank you for sharing this, it has clarified some thoughts I’ve had for a while.

I hope all is going to be well.

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