For the past few months, I have started to keep a daily log. The goal is to write what you are thinking on the given day. I found that it helps reduce anxiety about the unknown and consolidate ideas more concretely. In this post, I explore why journaling works.
I recently read this post by Paul Graham about writing and how it helps us to think about the critical ideas in our head and see if we know them. He says if we can put the idea in a well-structured essay, we can be sure that we have understood the concept. However, more often than not, we find that we cannot convert the ideas in our heads into words.
This happens for two reasons:
When we write the idea and read back what we wrote, it is very clear to us that what we want to express is not what was written, maybe because of our lack of writing skills.
When we think we know something, in reality, we only have a familiarity with the concept. It could be because the concept is ubiquitous or trending and we have heard it too many times which makes it easy to recall the concept name.
It is only when we try to write down our views on such ideas, we realise how little we understand it. I feel this happens because we have not consolidated our views on the concept, and instead of understanding it deeply, we just have a fuzzy feeling of familiarity which can be misinterpreted as knowledge. To test this, I did an exercise to ask myself, ‘What are my moral values, and why are those important to me?’. When I did this exercise, I found that I had never defined them explicitly to myself but before doing this exercise, I was pretty sure I knew what my moral values are.
So how does this tie in with journaling?
Journaling is just a specific type of writing paradigm. Just like we can consolidate our ideas by writing them out, we can also see what is bugging us more concretely when we write it out. For example, if we are feeling anxious about our career, writing out what is making us anxious helps to alleviate the feeling. This is because, in our head, anxiousness is a fuzzy feeling, but writing it down will help to convert that into concrete problems that we can then tackle one by one.
In addition to this, it also helps us to freeze our thoughts. This helps to detect patterns in our thinking process by looking at previous entries. It can help identify situations that make us uncomfortable and help us to be better prepared to tackle them.
Regularly journaling also helps us to become better at writing in general, which in turn helps us to get better at consolidating our ideas as well as our feelings.
I hope this makes you consider keeping a journal.
That’s it for this issue. I hope you found this article interesting. Until next time!
An article I found interesting: Putting ideas into words by Paul Graham
A podcast I found interesting: Dr Lex Fridman: Navigating Conflict, Finding Purpose & Maintaining Drive | Huberman Lab Podcast #100