Tag: journal

The Top 3 Excuses For Not Journaling

Marlon1 Comment

While I may have written quite the beast of a series on journaling last year, I still feel like there’s more to write about in regards to this therapeutic practice. Particularly when it comes to three common excuses people tell me as to why they don’t journal. I don’t mean any of this cynically as journaling is a choice people are free to make, but for the people who say they want to do it, but “can’t,” ie. simply don’t do it, I want to help you get out of your own way and get down to business.

Journaling is not easy, as I’ve said before. It requires you to take a hard and honest look at yourself, and it demands your full attention to really reflect on the thoughts and feelings you have about the events in your life. Some journaling can be easy breezy like simply writing about what you’re grateful for, or keeping track of your progress on a project, but real and soul searching journaling requires cognitive and emotional commitment.

No wonder people resist this simple, yet difficult practice, right? Sounds frustrating and often times it can be. Plus it also feels crazy to be arguing with yourself on a piece of paper, but like as Anne Frank said, “paper is more patient than people.” The biggest gift you can give yourself and to the world is the ability to express your thoughts and your entire being in the most clear and concise way possible, and one of the best ways to achieving that efficiency is taking the time to journal about your thoughts and feelings.

Here are The Top 3 Excuses For Journaling:

  1. “I always forget to journal for a long time and then it’s too late because I can’t even remember what happened a few months ago.”
  2. “I don’t even know what to write and I just get bored because I write about what I ate that morning.”
  3. “I want to, but I don’t have the time for it. I’m just soooo busy.”

To distill these excuses into mere concepts let’s rename them as:

  1. Lacking Memory
  2. Getting Bored
  3. Not Making the Time

Lacking Memory


“I always forget and I can’t remember things from long time ago.”

Unless you’re severely senile or have suffered brain damage, yes, you can. Otherwise, my heart goes out to you and props to you for being able to read this blog post. I say this with compassion, not cynicism.

But to those of you who do have the wonderful privilege of having their mental faculties in tact, you really do need to give yourself more credit rather than claiming absolute memory loss. While the easiest way to journal is to write about your day to day life as it unfolds, there’s also nothing wrong with taking many months or even years away from journaling before you get back to it. Especially if the intention is to write about all the things you’ve experienced from your time away from journaling. Writing about your past is just as important as writing about your present and future.

I’ve had times in my life where I’ve been fortunate enough to not really struggle for a while, and I’ve used those opportunities to reflect on the times I have struggled so that I can learn and grow from them more than the initial experience may have offered at the time. This way I am better equipped to face future challenges or even present challenges if I happen to be struggling at the moment. Either way, my journaling isn’t always as day to day as I’d like for it to be, but I am definitely okay with spending months away from my journal before chronicling my life in epochs whenever I get back to it.

In fact, as of writing this blog post, it is July 2023 (and I am only now posting it in June 2024), but all the things I’m journaling about are from earlier this year. As early as January, I’m writing about how my life has been this year and while most of it is chronological, a lot of it also structured by theme and predicament. Some things happened concurrently with others, while other things happened in a somewhat linear fashion.

How could I possibly remember this? Well, I just sit down and concentrate, thinking about key moments where I felt something strongly or something left an impression on me, and then work from there.

You can too if you just took the time to sit down and think about your life.

That’s all there is to it.

If you think you can’t remember your life from not too long ago, then you’re not thinking or trying very hard. But I promise you, if you decide to simply sit down and crack that journal open, you will remember. Give it some thought. Give it some time. Give it some attention. As you begin to write and recall specific events in your life, you will be engaging your memory bank and everything will come back flooding toward you.

The next challenge is to be able to structure your thoughts and feelings surrounding these past events in a way that at least makes sense to you. Remember, your journal is almost always for your eyes and your eyes only. So who cares if you write in run on sentences or go all over the place chronologically with what you write about? As long as you’re making the connections yourself the best you can and engaging your capacity to remember, that’s all that matters.

If it makes sense to you, then good. If not, then slow down and try to take it one thought at a time.

Getting Bored

“I don’t know what to write so I just get bored.”

I had a friend tell me that she got bored of journaling and eventually stopped after a mere two or three days at it. She said she didn’t know what to write about and got bored, thinking it was silly that all she did was write about what she had for breakfast and all these other mundane day to day things she does throughout the day. And then I figured, yeah, no wonder you got bored, you wrote about boring things!

Try thinking of journaling as a way to dramatize your life like it’s a novel. Rarely ever do you see characters in a novel doing mundane tasks like brushing their teeth or mowing the lawn unless they’re thinking about something important, having an important dialogue with another character, or at the very least revealing the nuance of the character with how they do these day to day activities in a unique way.

Likewise, with yourself, you can even journal about getting frustrated while doing the dishes. Maybe a spec of dirt refused to get wiped off by your sponge. Who ate so poorly as to let these morsels get this dry? Why is this sponge so weak? Why hasn’t anyone in the damn house bought a new one yet? Stupid little questions and frustrations like this, silly and mundane as they may seem, can also lead to some revelations about yourself in regards to what actually sets you off and what you need to do around your home to improve it.

But obviously you will tire rather quickly if you dramatize dumb little things to this degree all the time. What you want to do is write about the big moments in your life, or even the small ones that lead up to them. For me personally, I had one hell of a time journaling about my brother’s wedding last year as I reflected what his marriage brought out in me and my conceptions of love and romance. Where he and his wife shared schmaltzy and heartfelt vows with each other and responded to each other so smoothly, I was involved in a relationship where I wanted to express that same kind of affection, but it was toward a woman who just wasn’t into that kind of communication. That totally gave me a wake up call, making me realize how much of an uphill battle I was fighting at the time.

Hell, even as of today’s journal entry, I wrote about the process it took for me to build my gaming and music production PC. To most people it’s not a big deal. It just a one and done occurrence, but for me it was a gauntlet of self doubt and triumph because it was my first time doing it. Then on top of that, once I somehow managed to build this PC to the point of getting it to run as it should, as opposed to having it explode upon turning it on for the first time, I also had to sell my old PC to my nephew to make space in my room and to make back some of the money I spent on the NEW PC’s parts.

To most people this will look and sound like a convenient sale within the family, but when you dig deeper as I have in my journal entry, I learned that it meant a lot to him to finally have a gaming PC because out of my other gamer cousins and I, my nephew would be the last of us and his friends to get a gaming PC to escape console poverty.

Even the tiniest thing like that can have significance in your life if you look hard enough, but otherwise, you can and always should bank up on some more significant things in your life like a break up or new relationship, a death in the family, or a conflict with a friend as something to journal about and get some revelations from.

Not Making the Time

“I want to journal, but I don’t have time to.”

Yes, you do. If you want to, you will make the time. Proclaiming how much you wanna do it is just blowing hot air and accomplishing nothing. Unless you work a demanding job where you’re on call 24/7, got a spouse and some kids to support, along with a whole lot of other responsibilities to tend to, you have the time to journal. Otherwise, you really need to take a hard look at your schedule and priorities as no one should be living that kind of a constricting life.

If journaling is something you really want to do, then I suggest you get the fuck off your phone, stop binging Netflix, and definitely turn off the evening news, and do something way more productive with your time and journal. You will have a much better time being in quiet conversation with yourself and tracking every thought and feeling as you put pen to paper, much quicker than you would wasting your time on the shit that most people consume on the daily basis.

You do this one thing and you’re already ahead of the curve because most people don’t even stop to think they should journal, let alone engage in any personal development. But ego stuff aside, it is just so much better to live the conscious and purposeful life rather than living life by default. It may feel easier and more comfortable, and living on purpose has its difficulties, but at the end of your life, I guarantee that you’ll wish you made the time for more important things like journaling rather than arguing with idiots online while you take a shit in the morning.

Therapeutic Journaling Part 10: The Gratitude Journal

Marlon1 Comment

One of the most overlooked, but also one of the most powerful kinds of journals you can write, is the Gratitude Journal. All too often we’ll journal out our problems and hopes for the future that we forget to take stock of what we currently have: The Present Moment.

It’s all we ever have and no matter how much loss we’ve suffered in the past and how much more we’ve got to gain in the future, so long as we’re simply breathing, we have a lot to be thankful for. Maybe you’re not where you want to be in life and maybe you’re suffering a crisis. The mere fact that you get to live and be given the opportunity to learn and grow from hardship should be appreciated.

It’s a strange concept, to be thankful for even hardship. But if you really think about it, without sadness and hardship, we would not have much appreciation for happiness and the good times in our lives. There’d be no contrast. And in the business of contrasting, instead of journaling out your problems all the time, take a moment to be grateful and acknowledge where you’re at.

“He who cannot be contented with what he has will not be contented with what he wants.” – Socrates

It was true over 2000 years ago and it’s still true to this day. Practicing gratitude can help reframe your mind toward abundance rather than always focusing on scarcity. We have evolved to focus on scarcity because human survival was much harder before than it is now, so we’ve still got a lot of leftover monkey brain residing within us. Not to say it’s entirely useless because starvation and poverty are real problems, but I think it’s safe to say that if you can afford the internet connection in order to read this post, there’s a high chance that you’re living a comfortable life, if not a luxurious one.

Yet that’s the problem, right?

Comfortability.

We work so hard to get to the point of comfortability because being challenged is difficult, we just wanna laze around and watch Netflix or play video games all day because they’re the most fun and easiest things to do. But then we tend to grow stagnant when we live a little too comfortably. So just as we need challenges to help us grow, we also need ample rest so we have the energy to tackle the challenges of life.

It’s a balancing act that we will never perfect, but will definitely try our entire lives to employ. You want to be journaling your problems out for the catharsis and possible problem solving that can come with it. And you also want to be writing about the things you’ve achieved thus far and be grateful for what you have in life, even if it may seem very little.

Harkening back to the Socrates quote, sometimes we get so busy chasing things that we think will make us happy that we somehow forget how to just be happy. We think that next relationship, that new job, or that new toy is what’s gonna make us happy, and maybe we get one or all of those things and then it’s like “so what now?”

That’s the tricky thing with life.

It’s good to have goals to strive for so that each day you live is filled with some sense of purpose and direction. But as that old cliché goes, “life is a journey, not a destination.” It’s cliché because it’s true. If you’re not moving toward an aim you are then aimless and begin to feel the weight of existential dread falling upon you.

So you work, work, and work, and you finally achieve your goal, and then you’re confronted with a whole new problem: “what’s next?”

Achieving one goal only opens you up to having a whole new set of problems you did not think possible, and since you have much more life left to live, then the process repeats. Until the very end of your days there’s always gonna be one more mountain to climb because it’s just what we do as human beings. We inherently do not feel like we are or have enough and so we strive to fill ourselves with more and more experiences and possessions—all of which are not bad things in and of themselves, but none of them really mean anything unless we take the time to be grateful for them.

If you have nothing pertinent to journal about, no issues to solve, then take a moment to write a Gratitude Journal because we could all use a little respite here and there. Give thanks to the people you love, the art that you’ve consumed, and even thank yourself for showing up for your daily practice. Life is very short and we tend to go from one thing to the next in a heartbeat, so giving ourselves a moment to breathe and feel that heartbeat, even for just a fraction of eternity, we are reminded that it is Your Write to Live.

Therapeutic Journaling Part 9: Improving Your Self Talk

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What all journaling comes down to is improving how you talk to yourself. It’s definitely what I’ve learned from my Trifecta of Tribulations a few years ago. We all have a tendency to narrate and frame our lives in a certain way that can cause us suffering. A lot of it has to do with unmet needs, unmet expectations, and just a general sense of pressure we put on ourselves to be a certain way and experience life a certain way, instead of just letting ourselves be.

With journaling, you can write down the ways in which you behave, how you think and feel about them, and then decide on a course of action on how to proceed knowing what you know. Take stock of who and how you are throughout the day and compare it to how you would like to be better in the future, but also be kind to yourself if you don’t live up to these new ideals you set for yourself.

That’s the important thing about goal setting: aim high, but don’t break your neck.

We all know of a multitude of ways in which we can operate better in the world at large, but we often feel disappointed in ourselves whenever we don’t live up to that standard. This is where journaling can be helpful in keeping track of your past, present, and future trajectory. By observing yourself as objectively as possible, and maybe even seeing yourself as a protagonist to your own novel, you get to write yourself out the way you so please.

Do you want to be the protagonist or the antagonist of your own story?

Sometimes we’re both, such is the human condition. We are walking talking contradictions claiming to have one value and then betraying them seemingly in the next heartbeat. Then comes the shame and the guilt around it. Why? Because we all have a potential future self that is actually judging us in the present. We know we could be better, but often make excuses as to why we’re not living up to that potential.

It’s one thing to have that inner commentary constantly justifying why we squander our time away, but it’s a whole other thing to write that down and face the painful reality that that’s what you actually think all day. When you read back on your journal entries as if it’s a good friend reporting to you the contents of their mind, then it becomes excruciatingly clear how much work you have left on improving yourself.

Whether you write an Internal Family Systems Journal or not, a journal is essentially a conversation you have about yourself, with yourself, and to yourself. So much of the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our thoughts because the quality of our thoughts affect our words, and in turn our words become our actions. To keep track of all these things is to develop the self awareness required to move forward in life.

That’s all life really is in the end, an ever going journey to understand ourselves and operate better day by day until our final breath. The learning never ends until our lives do.

And that’s another thing journaling can help you discover. That you are constantly faced with your own mortality and so much of it has been squandered on self defeating thoughts that hold you back from moving forward in life.

It’s perfectly fine if you fill an entire notebook full of yourself doubt for the catharsis, but what do you once you get that out of your head and onto the page? Well, you do the excruciating practice of actually reading back to yourself what you’ve written and imagine your journal self as someone you care deeply about. What would you want to tell them in counter or support to what they’ve said?

I know in my experience I could be quite harsh on myself to the point of causing my own depression for several days. I used to beat myself up for making mistakes or not living up to my potential to the point of not letting myself do any writing or not letting myself reach out to friends or family to talk to. I was too ashamed of myself to think I was worth all that trouble for people to care about, let alone believe my writing had any merit beyond mere self expression.

Self expression is key, though.

That’s the most important thing about journaling that people need to understand. It has nothing to do with being a good or bad writer or if it makes any sense. It’s all about getting to express yourself as freely as you want because the page is the safest place on the planet.

Anne Frank said it best when she said, “paper is more patience than people.”

The page won’t judge you or shame you for thinking what you think.

The page won’t challenge you on your thoughts.

That’s all completely up to you to do. You can start off journaling with the express purpose of letting your darkest, deepest secrets and desires onto the page, but in the end it’s up to you whether you want to do something about any of that or not. My opinion is that you should, but my opinion shouldn’t matter to you when you’ve got your own intricate inner world that I will never understand, and you’ll have your own reasons for resisting the challenge that journal brings forth. Let alone journaling at all.

But once again, in my experience, I’ve become acutely aware of how damaging myself talk has been, calling myself names, making myself feel guilty and ashamed about certain things I do or say, and giving myself an overall lifestyle of dread and misery.

After several years of journaling and about half a year of therapy, though, I’m starting to see how much time has been wasted on doubting myself and not believing in myself enough. Trusting myself is an even bigger point of contention, but I’m getting there. I’m finally at a place where I can get depressed and tired of life, but simply retreat to myself and recover instead of telling myself how much of a failure I am and unloading my negativity onto others.

If I have a trusted friend or family to talk to a certain thing about. Hell, that’s what my therapist is for when I want an even deeper dive for help beyond unconditional empathy. She will challenge my thoughts and beliefs, pose questions about them, and I am left speechless and mindless a lot of times because it stops the usual noise that goes on in my head.

With journaling and therapy, the goal is to tackle your thoughts and feelings to the point where you really do need to take a moment to stop, breathe, and think before you answer. Whenever your mind stills itself and stops the usual chatter, that’s when you know you’ve hit some big and need to take your time to figure it out.

And in the end you will learn exactly how you need to approach yourself on a daily basis. The kind of empathy and compassion you know you deserve, giving yourself the kind of self talk you need to survive the throes of life. This doesn’t mean delude yourself into thinking everything is fine when things are going to hell, but it does mean taking ownership for the ways in which you can influence the circumstances of your life to the best of your ability.

Improving our self talk is important because we get so used to hearing the same thought patterns over and over again, and we start to believe them. We don’t even know where so many of our thoughts and beliefs come from, whether we’ve come to these conclusions rationally, emotionally, or simply by default. We’ve given our power away by getting influenced by our peers, family, or society, but in the end we are the ones, at the individual level, who are ultimately responsible for the way we think, feel, and act in the world at large.

Therapy, coupled with journaling, is how reclaim that power.

Therapeutic Journaling Part 8: Dreaming of Ideas

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For today’s Workshop Wednesday post, I am really excited to share two types of journals that can be used separately or in conjunction with each other. There’s the Dream Journal and the Idea Journal, both of which can be very helpful in receiving the therapeutic benefits from journaling, as well as expand on your creativity.

The Dream Journal

The Dream Journal is where you jot down your dreams in the best possible detail you can manage. Dreams are so mysterious and elusive, we often forget them much quicker the more we go on about our day, so I highly suggest that you write them down as soon as you wake up.

The first stage in writing a Dream Journal is simply writing a narration of what you can remember happening in it. What kind of place did you find yourself in? Who was there? And what are some thoughts your dream self had within the dream itself?

Not sure if anyone else experiences this, so please let me know if you experience this too, but I often remember verbalizing certain thoughts in dreams that are even more out of my control than the thoughts I have in the waking world.

The second stage then is to re-read your entry and see if it holds up to what you think you can remember from it. This is where you’re free to add more details if more come in, or subtract some that you think might not have actually been in the dream because we do tend to add things we merely wish or thought were in the dream.

The third and final stage is the fun part: try to extrapolate personal meaning from them. While there are some websites that give you a rough guide as to what certain people, places, and objects are supposed to symbolize in a dream, it is ultimately up to you to decide what you think these things mean because only you know the specific idiosyncrasies of your life.

For instance, I’ve had the same dream twice in my life where I am lying in a hospital bed while rolling through a desert at night. I see myself in third person as a silhouette on that bed while my mom’s face is in the moon watching over me. I had the initial dream when I was a young kid, and then again when I was a teenager, this time with the addition of three doctor heads floating beneath the face of my Moon Mom.

Upon close inspection of this recurring dream, I think it symbolizes how disconnected I’ve felt from my body during the two of the open heart surgeries I’ve had in my life, and how my mom has always been there to watch over me in the hospital. She’s taken a couple weeks off work both times just to be there with me and praying to God that He’d guide the doctors, nurses, and surgeons in assisting my recovery.

Being in the desert at night symbolizes how cold and alone I feel when I go under the knife in real life, and seeing myself in third person I think might have to do with how I need to disassociate from my body in order to survive the kind of stress its put under during open heart surgery.

I often theorize that having had suffered heart failure as a baby, maybe my ADHD developed because my body was in such excruciating pain and fatigue that my brain fought to keep me alive by firing all the neurons it can to keep itself occupied and distracted from all that pain and fatigue.

The Idea Journal

The Idea Journal is a lot less emotionally heavy, but still fun to write as well. This is where you work out your ideas whether they are for a business, a creative writing project, or everything else in between. You spitball a ton of ideas without giving them much thought, then later see if you can separate the wheat from the chaff.

There’s a common misconception that you might end up exhausting all of your good ideas from the very beginning and will be left with no more in the future. I would argue that the ability to create ideas is a lot like a muscle that you need to train in order to maintain. You need to exercise it by dumping all your ideas out as freely as possible on a regular basis.

One of the things this will do is allow you to write out the bad ideas and make room for the good ideas. Then another thing it can do is give provide a compass for which ideas you actually feel excited about. You can do this in a grocery list form or even in long form describing certain things for a few sentences and paragraphs before you jump to the next.

Either way, the point is to jump around from idea to idea quickly without being too attached to any of them. If you do find an idea that draws your attention the most and you can’t stop writing about it in that session, it might be a sign of how important and engaging that idea will be to work on.

I will confess to the reason why I’ve been able to write two blog posts a week this year is because I wrote a huge Idea Journal listing and briefly describing 50 possible blog posts I could write. A lot of them are the ones you’ve seen since January while a few other ideas were left by the wayside because I either saw no use for them yet or I know they’re good, but I’m not ready to write those particular posts just yet.

However, all the posts in this particular series on Therapeutic Journaling were not from that Idea Journal, rather completely off the cuff every week this month!

Dreaming Up Your Ideas

And now putting them together, you can also use Dream Journals to come up with story ideas. Dream Journals are beautiful to gain some personal insight about your life, especially the dreams that illicit a strong emotion in you like that Ralph Wiggum dream I had. (It actually turned into a huge journey for me to take on personally and one of my favourite blog series to date!)

They can serve the dual purpose of giving you the personal insights that change your life and help you generate creative ideas like they have for me.

Dreams are so interesting because they bend the rules of reality, yet feel very real when you are within them. Even if you become a bit conscious during a dream and acknowledge it for not being “real,” that feeling of hyper-reality still overtakes you if you don’t have the misfortune of waking up from them. Especially the good dreams and even the nightmares.

I’d even go so far as to say that if you become conscious of being in a nightmare, that you try and stay in it and see what kind of obstacle your mind is trying to get you to confront by way of that dream. And in turn you can use all those feelings and weird concepts you experienced in the dream to inform your creative writing ideas.

So for instance, back in 2010 I wrote a novel called Me, Myself and Who Am I? where a man is haunted by his own reflection in the mirror that has taken a life of its own, taunting him and acting like a cynical life coach to him.

I could not have come up with that idea had I not had this dream where I was in my washroom looking into the mirror, and instead of seeing my adult self in the reflection, it was my child self in the mirror. He was dressed in shrunken versions of my adult clothes, the very same clothes I’d often wear to to get drunk at parties and get high with friends outside all throughout the night.

I tried to look away from him because seeing him cry was painful to look at, but only his eyes shifted to the side while my adult dream self’s eyes were still fixed to the mirror. I woke up gasping for air because of this dream because of how much anxiety it provoked in me. It made me think about how I was betraying and suppressing my wounded inner child with all this substance abuse and hanging around the wrong crowd in my twenties.

I was a straight edge teen all throughout high school, but when I graduated, I got pretty addicted to the partying life because I felt lost and had no idea what to do. I had been so haggard and resigned from trying to graduate high school because I was held a back a little and needed to go to summer school for two years in order to catch up. I inevitably burned out after having put my all into my school work which is just absolute agony for the ADHD brain.

That dream alone saved my life because it forced me to confront myself not only in my journals, but also through the novel I wrote that year. The idea of your mirror reflection talking to you, pointing out to you and shaming you for how you can be better…I needed to experience that journey along with the protagonist Parker Davis in order to create some sense of resolution in my soul.

So you too, can probably some have deeply personal dreams that you can gain some personal insights from and/or get some inspiration for story ideas. Whichever way you slice it, Dream Journals and Idea Journals are another beautiful way to feel the therapeutic benefits of journaling.

See you next week for Parts 9 and 10!

Therapeutic Journaling Part 7: Pre and Post Meditation

Marlon1 Comment

As I mentioned in Part 5 of this blog series, I have learned to manage some of my ADHD symptoms through journaling. In addition to that, I also like to meditate before and after I do any kind of writing, whether it’s journaling or creative writing.

In today’s Meaningful Monday post we will explore what meditation is, how you do it, and why you should add it to your writing routine.

What is Meditation and How Do I Do It?

Meditation is a formal practice of mindfulness. Where meditation requires you to sit or lay still, mindfulness can be practiced in motion like when you’re doing yoga, going for a walk, or even cooking a meal. It’s the practice of being aware of your thoughts and either accepting them as they pass you by, without judgement or attachment, or by trying to keep your mind clear of thoughts entirely especially when you need to focus on something.

Meditation is mindfulness to the max where you set a certain amount of time to simply sit, breathe, and observe your mind. For each inhale and exhale, you bring your mental focus more and more toward the flow of your breath and recognizing all the sensations that are occurring in your body, as well as becoming aware of the thoughts passing through your mind.

Once again, without judgement or attachment to your thoughts. Just let them be.

A common misconception about meditation is that you are supposed to sit still and have an empty mind, which can be achieved and quite liberating, but you cannot expect yourself to do that the first time. Let alone the first 100 times because meditation is actually difficult to do if your mind races like mine. ADHD or not.

Because of this, people think that they’re “no good” at it and will just fail because of how much they think, but that’s the point! To get some control of your mind, you need to let it do its thing while you observe from a bit of a bird’s eye view rather than being honed in on ground level. Let your thoughts pass like the wind, and not that gaseous kind of wind, but an actual gust of wind.

Why Should I Meditate Before Journaling?

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s preferable that you handwrite your journals so that it forces your mind to slow down, focus on one pattern of thought, and create some sense of order of the chaos that may be occurring in your mind. While putting your thoughts down on paper is one good way to slow your mind down and free up your mental real estate for better thoughts, meditation is the perfect aid to it.

Meditating allows you to slow your mind down even more, especially if you’ve gotten good at focusing on your breath. You should be inhaling slowly until you ca no longer inhale any further, and then exhale slowly until you can no longer exhale any further. You might notice that your breath is shallow throughout the day and this lack of oxygen to your brain is what causes it to think anxious thoughts. Without a proper air supply, your brain’s ability to breathe is obstructed.

Meditation will help you lift as many obstructions as possible.

As you meditate before you journal, what you can do is start setting intentions for what you want to write about. Think about the order in which you’ll convey your thoughts, what kind of entry you’ll be writing, and what the purpose of that entry will be. Maybe you want to gain some insights on how to resolve a relational conflict, work out the pros and cons of life decisions you need to make, or maybe you just want to make sure you get the most of your writing time.

You are definitely free to sit down and write whatever comes to your mind (which is all writing anyway, fundamentally), but for journaling in particular, it’s good to construct a game plan of what you will be writing about it in particular. This will allow you to increase the chances of making sure most, if not all, you write ends up being beneficial for you at the end of the session.

I Already Meditated Before Journaling, Why Should I Do it Again Afterward?

It’s important to also meditate after journaling because putting an abrupt stop to your self reflection might make you forget all the lessons you just taught yourself within your writing practice. If you drive a manual transmission car, it’s the difference between stalling in a parking spot vs slowly shifting gears down and turning off the car properly.

Meditating after journaling will help you ease out of that mindful mode you might find yourself, especially when whatever you’re writing happens to grip all your attention and you allow your mind to truly spiral toward every conceivable thought and feeling you happen to recognize in yourself during that session. For some, myself most especially included, journaling can be a very intense process where it brings up a lot of discomfort, and tackling all that discomfort by bleeding it out of the pen can leave you mentally and emotionally wiped.

Sometimes even physically.

All the more reason to meditate because you might feel a sense of adrenaline reaching certain insights about yourself, and you need to breathe and contain that adrenaline so it can be expended in a healthy way afterward. Plus, meditating after journaling can literally allow you to meditate on everything you just learned about yourself so your mind makes the distinction between what you took out of it and what you’re putting into it in return.

Catch you all in the following parts of Therapeutic Journaling!