Self-Dialogue as a Journaling Strategy

after I get done with a bicycle rise (I do push while I ride, like pulling on my cleats/toe clips, not just pushing - And I rarely coast) so a shower is usually recommended for me after (to give anyone a sense of my exertion).

And during the last part of the ride and the time thereafter, ideas frequently start flowing, I see solutions to problems that now appear obvious, where before I felt stymied.

And that is what I hope to get out of journaling...

ymmv, of course :)

You are not alone. I don't journal, but I've tried on & off over the years. I find I had more 'fun' building the framework* to start journaling then actually doing it.

IMHO Journals work good for those who are not introspective. It's a way to "discover" how you really feel about a topic/day/week/trend and to extrapolate from there.

I already know the dozen or so reasons "why" I am unhappy, but I also recognize the choices that I made to get to this position and it's better then the alternative.

* from VIM keybindings, to EMACS, to a web-diary, to some other variations I've discovered that my roadblock to writing it down isn't my hesitancy to write it, but to face the truth of what I have to write.

I also had a hard time ever keeping a journal until I sat down one day and started working through The Artist's Way [1], which my partner had on her shelf. There are parts of it that don't really work for me, maybe a little too self-help-y, but the main practice of what the author calls "morning pages" ended up getting me going.

It's very similar to what the article's author ended up hitting upon -- just sit and write out the internal monologue. Let it go freely and don't worry about it making sense or having direction. Don't think about it too much and don't be precious about it. If there's a thing that comes up and you want to work it out, that's fine, start unpacking it. If it's just "man I really feel tired today" and other things that feel like nonsense, that's fine too.

Personally, I went from never keeping a journal to having a daily journaling practice for maybe 5 years after following The Artist's Way for the 12 weeks of prompts it gives you. Now I'm only doing it a few times a week, but that's because I'm working on other things that the journaling brought me to.

[1] https://www.theartistswaybook.com/

There's only so much time in a day. Try one for a few months. Did it help? Maybe keep doing it then. Definitely try something else if it didn't. Maybe keep a simple log of it - just a date, the fact that you did it, and if anything interesting happened maybe write that down too. Maybe don't if that gets in the way of you just sitting down and doing the thing.

How can you carve your time up differently? What would your life look like if you replaced that "I need a break, I'm gonna look at HN/Tiktok/Twitter/etc" reflex with "I need a break, I'm gonna meditate for a few minutes" or "I need a break, I'm gonna get up and dance to this bangin' tune that just came on"?

("Walking meditation" is a thing too, and a walk out in nature is a great place to do it!)

And: how can you bend your life so that your job is enjoyable; how can you bend your life so that the time you spend "at work" is well-spent, and that you don't have to waste extra hours in the parts that help?

I've been journaling for over 10 years, and I can empathize with everything you're saying here. I wrote a short guide for effective journaling here[1], and plan on writing a lot more on the topic soon. I do have some thoughts about what you've written specifically though—I hope it's helpful.

> I find it just ends up my going around in circles or getting frustrated, but I think that's just me

It's not just you. Circular thinking or rumination is very common. I find journaling helpful in these instances because it is a lot easier for me to recognize that I'm ruminating when I write my thoughts down. When they're physically in front of me, you can see the looping. When it's ephemeral thoughtstuff in your head, it can be a lot harder to recognize.

The trick (for me) is finding a way to escape that loop once I've recognized it. That's why I edit all my journal entries after an initial stream-of-consciousness braindump.

There are a number of techniques you can play with to broaden your viewpoint—write down an interpretation of events that is the opposite of what you think, imagine the situation from a caring friend's perspective, etc.

It's helpful to think of this as play, which brings me to my next thought.

> whenever i sit down to think about anything and try and make sense of anything in my life, I really struggle ... i'm just overwhelmed.

> It's also hard to do at the end of the day due to low energy.

It is possible you have set too-high expectations for your journal entries. You will look at a majority of entries, immediately after writing them, and think, "What trash, I will never want to read this again."

That's fine. You might be right—maybe it's worthless. But you'll be surprised at how frequently, a year later, you find that you were wrong. It is interesting to read those honest entries that are twisted and convoluted and just messed up.

And you will make progress over time, if you're flexible with your mindset and open to change. Most entries will be ugly and definitely not revelatory. That's fine—it's the accumulation of observations that leads to breakthroughs. Putting too much pressure on the individual entries themselves can actually be counterproductive.

> The trouble is there are so many things I can do for my mental health and improve myself ... when am i meant to get anything done after i finish work if I do all of these?

This is a real problem. I don't love the narrative around "self-care" I'm frequently exposed to. Industry has a vested interest in making you feel like their solution is one you absolutely need to incorporate, to the point that self-care becomes yet another external imposition for many people.

To be sure, all these things you list can be helpful, but getting in touch with yourself and deciding what you need and when you need it is most important.

[1] https://www.indelibleapp.com/effective-journaling

It takes a bit of motivation to get me there, but once a month usually works out for the most part. I summarize my thoughts on stuff going on in the world and with my life.

I don't use any fancy software. Just some markdown files in a private git repo.

I think when one starts writing all the messiness of one's life / thinking shows up even stronger and makes 'writing' to feel like a wall. I have tons of notes from all over the years, but only now, gradually, I tend to treat it more and more as a perfect way to make things clear and have fun doing it. I see it (looking from the practice) as a self-enforcing process, when it is kept alive it starts to bring flowers.

So I would rather talk about simply 'writing' and even finding different modes of writing - themes, journal, goal oriented, mumbling, notes, thought,...

As someone put it (I cant credit properly): Writing is nature's way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is. ;)

What is proposed in the article is even stronger, it is to talk with oneself using writing, dialoging as in... I ask X, is anoyone (inside) who would like to answer? ... and so on... Strong stuff. :)

As with most things related to the interior life, what works best for you is intensely personal. For myself, I have journaled sporadically for the last decade, as the occasion presented itself.

At first, I bought the notebook to catalogue a trip to Europe. The first pages contain detailed daily logs of about 2 months of my life while I was there. At the time, I recall feeling like I was wasting valuable time that I could spend having more experiences, and there are many missing days as a result. But now 10 years later those pages contain stories I have failed to retain in my memory, and help me to reconstruct the days I didn't record. People and interactions I would have forgotten, short-lived but vivid crushes, a tomato sauce recipe transcribed poorly via a picture dictionary from a retired Italian grandmother at a hostel in Lourdes.

Other times, I've used the journal to clear my head during times of turmoil. Weak and unfinished thoughts on difficult circumstances, poetic images of my emotions, scribbled bullet lists of what happened and in what order as I tried to piece things together.

For a spell, the same journal was where I kept daily todo lists. Today, I'm using it as an outlet for my personal thoughts and goals, to keep them distinct from research notes and work notes. I find that writing them down helps me to clarify what I want and to move in a consistent direction over longer periods than focus and determination alone would allow.

The only consistent format for my journal is putting a date at the top of each entry and writing in pen so I can't erase it.

Every time I look back over what I've written, I take something different away; Rarely do I read what's there and count the act of writing it as a waste of time. It's a window into the past.

> whenever i sit down to think about anything and try and make sense of anything in my life, I really struggle

I used to feel much the same, but also found after I started keeping a diary in early 2018 that this got a lot easier. Being able to refer back to my earlier thoughts and considerations, as I wrote them down and thought through them in the moment, saved a lot of time in "getting up to speed" on prior context, and also enabled me to test my hypotheses for why I felt a way or what might help me feel differently.

It's made a huge difference, despite that I didn't start with that expectation, or really any expectation - I had a flu and a 102° fever for most of that week and the next, I didn't go into it expecting anything to make much sense at all! I just started, and stuck with it, and that seems to have been the thing that counted.

For you it might be worth a try, or it might not. That's true of anything, and I think it may be worth considering that it's not necessarily possible to know going in what's really going to help and what isn't. More important, I think, is to be willing to give things a try, in order to find out whether they really are useful. If that means working a little less to make space, then sure, to some extent there's a tradeoff there. But on the other hand, if you don't put the work in on yourself, who else is going to be able to?

One of the biggest benefits I find with journaling is that I will often solve problems for myself. I'll write about a problem and then find myself typing out "I should do..." and when I read that I know what I should do.

There is a story about an old man going to watch the ancient Olympics. The place is packed and he can't find a seat until he arrives at the Spartan's section where the Spartans all leap to their feet to offer the old man their seats. The crowd of Greeks all cheer and the story's narrator observes sadly "All the Greeks know what is right but only the Spartans do what is right."

I think there is a similar disconnect in my brain. Sometimes it is very easy to know what is right and harder to actually do what is right. When you're writing though you can easily leverage the "know what is right" part of your brain and when you see what you should do typed out in front of you, it's easier to engage the "do" part of the brain. You force yourself to confront the discrepancy between what you know you should do and what you are actually doing.

I have benefited from this in everything from arguing with my wife ("I should apologize") to debugging ("I should make sure function X does what I think it does"). I have a standing order to myself to do what I think I should be doing.

I never thought I would be a journaler, but got into it by accident.

I read self improvement books regularly, and I started keeping a journal of what I was reading. I try to read 10 pages each day, and at the end of my section I just write a paragraph summarizing what I had read.

After awhile the summaries started naturally including examples from my life so that I could remember the points better. And my own personal goals and aspirations. Once I was there it isn't that different from a standard "life" journal, but having the book you are reading really gives you a crutch to lean into and grow off of.

Zen saying: "You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day. Unless you're too busy, then you should sit for an hour."

Gandhi: "I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one."

Meditation is like a time-doubler for me. Something like 1 hour of meditation makes me able to do 4 hours worth of productive stuff in the next 2 hours. But the hard part is the initial investment of time. You have to spend time to make time?

I really like vipassana, but journaling is also a meditation.

I used to worry about this, and then I realized I have years of internet comments that may as well be my journal. Going back to any of them will remind me of what I was thinking around that time. Same happens to me with screenshots, like was mentioned in that post yesterday titled “take more screenshots.”

I had the same problem but what helped was just focusing on bullet points summarizing the day/week.

I use vim-gnupg. It makes the whole thing a breeze. And in my experience, the author is completely right: I won't open up all the way unless I have guaranteed privacy. It's not that I have anything criminal to hide, but we all have things we're uncomfortable putting on the page and being forced to acknowledge as reality.

For me, "no one" translates more accurately to "no one I care about." I keep my journal physically on my person, in the backpack with my laptop. If the backpack is stolen, I actually don't care if the thief reads my notes -- maybe he'll find something of value there. More than likely, he won't care about my interior conflicts.

My wife and friends know not to look through the journal without my permission, and I trust them. If I didn't trust them, I would find different friends.

I have created a writing system for p&p rpg long ago and I kept improving on it for years as a hobby. It's messed up on purpose, i used it for puzzles and my players (math and CS graduates) couldn't figure it out so it's good enough. I also got comfortable enough with it that i can read/write it reasonably fast. I'm using it for writing personal stuff down (on actual paper which i keep in my actual desk). It's also good for short notes kept in physical wallet. You won't decode it when all you have is 5 weird scribbles and i don't think a thief would steal my wallet, follow me home, search my home, steal my journal and do a cryptographic analysis just to read my journal or steal my bank account :)

I believe in physical air gap and security through obscurity far more than in keeping personal stuff on internet-connected Turing machines no matter how well the encoding algorithm is supposed to work.

Thank you for posting these lovely, thoughtful prompts. just added them to my list of own prompts in the journal. :)

I've been reading "No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model", and I wonder if you might find the book worth the read!