This year my new year's resolution is sticking. I wanted to increase my reflection and intentionally map out my week by charting my thoughts throughout the days, weeks, and months. I’m journaling.
In high school and college, I kept a "training log" to track my distances, paces, workouts, and various other details that were helpful to look back on seasons and years later when trying to optimize future performance. Having markers and comments for what I did when, for example, I felt sluggish the week before a big race, was invaluable knowledge. I'd also have go-to exercises and drills for specific minor injuries with data on how quickly I started feeling better. I'm confident that maintaining detailed training logs helped improve my performance as a distance runner, but it also deepened my commitment to the sport. For many competitive athletes, a robust training log is the "secret sauce."
This past December, I thought, why not apply the same attitude to my life more broadly? If I could log my thoughts, habits, stressors, etc., I could employ the same strategies to deepen my reflective capacity while improving my ability to live in this moment, empowered by the cataloged tools and data that I collected throughout months and, hopefully, years of journaling.
I jumped into journaling with the traditional leather-bound, look-like-a-smart-guy option though I opted for dotted lines as a way to have a bit more freedom with my approaches. I'd seen a couple of Youtube videos by incredibly creative people journaling in the "bullet" style, and it inspired me to opt for this route over lined paper. Aside from a passing interest in ceramics, I've never been exceptionally creative, but considering this journal is just for me, why not give it a shot? After a few weeks, I was ordering various colored pens, had subscribed to "Jetpens," a channel on Youtube dedicated to stationery, and my wife commented, "Wow, you're really leaning into this whole journaling business…"
Initially, I struggled to find a reason for writing. I didn't have daily prompts and felt that I was forcing many of my entries, but over time it became much more natural. I also began adding new templates that I found online to help track various data points. The data I'm able to visualize is a powerful tool to analyze my emotions and feelings. I can see how my stress and mood fluctuate with my sleep patterns. I started monitoring habits as a way to try and hold myself more accountable and logging the books I'd read on my journaling "bookshelf." Drawing in a new book felt so incredibly rewarding and weirdly visual now. As the journal started filling out and becoming more "me," my entries felt more natural, and I've started carrying it around with me most days.
I also found that when I started to struggle with stress or anxiety, the pages were helpful dumping grounds for fraught ideas and ruminations. Returning to these entries after a couple of weeks helps gain perspective on whether my frustrations and thoughts were overblown and has helped ground me.
Next school year, I want to try and employ a similar journaling strategy for my courses as a way to reflect on lessons and units. What worked? What should I change? Can I find trends that were difficult to visualize?
I've never been so committed to a new year's resolution, and I'm confident journaling will be a permanent fixture moving forward. Could journaling be the "secret sauce" to happiness? I don't think its quite so simple, but it is certainly one step towards living a more mindful life.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash