Here’s what happened when I journaled everyday for two weeks
So I’ve been super into self experiments lately and have compiled a list of different things I’d like to try out for two week “trial” periods. Next up in my experiment to do list was daily morning journaling.
Like many of my newly introduced habits, strategies, etc. with life, I drew this experiment from Tim Ferriss, Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism in general.
Some people have structures to their daily journals and others just use it as a therapy tool. I wanted to converge these two approaches.
Structure
Ben Franklin’s daily itinerary was notorious for being incredibly structured and disciplined. Would you expect anything less from one of the greatest inventors in American history? See his daily routine:
My daily journal ritual draws inspiration from Mr Franklin’s in the sense that it embodies the day’s intent (“What good shall I do this day?”) and a reflection of the previous day (“What good have I done?”).
These two sections are the breakdown of my daily mourning journaling but within them is the embodiment of entropy: a stream of consciousness.
Every morning I write literally everything that comes to my head with respect to today’s intent and yesterday’s reflection.
What’s the value?
Self analysis is key in handling tough decisions or stressing over situations. You want to continuously ask yourself: “why am I feeling this way”, or “why is this my reaction to XYZ?”. Maybe you’ll uncover some truths about yourself. However this won’t happen unless you self analyze and establish an introspective voice. Otherwise we’re no different than our primate ancestors.
It’s a challenge, but it’s simply a muscle that requires constant flexing to build and become more useful.
You’re probably self conscious or worried someone will judge you. But there is never an intent that these journals will see the light of day. I’ve even built a daily journal feature on Meports that houses everything in an encrypted database because I’m that concerned with anybody seeing these.
Having said this, let loose. Don’t have any inhibitions in these writings. Nobody will see these, you have nothing to lose. It could be a tool for cognitive offloading, self analysis or even therapy. One things for sure, that it’s worth the experiment.
How’d it help me?
I don’t have the best memory and I partially attribute that to how much information is thrown at me regularly, so the more information I offload the better. After all, the human brain’s value is geared more towards making decisions based on limited data, rather than storing that limited data.
But it also helped me document my aspirations. I’ve got some pretty ambitious goals. And journaling has helped me retain that north star amongst the chaos and impediments of life.
Would love to hear anybody else’s approach with journaling
P.S. If you want to learn a bit more about me, my projects, habits, struggles, check out my website: ethansteininger.com
