Journaling

Journaling.

This is something healthy people do.

It's something intelligent people do.

It's something successful people do.

How do we get into the practice of it, get the most out of it, and most importantly—why does it work?

I remember being 12 or 13 years old. I was a pretty stressed out little kid, and laying in my bed one night trying to fall asleep, and my mind was just racing, racing, racing.

All of these things I was afraid of—at school, with my parents, whatever it was, wouldn't leave me alone.

After hours of laying there, I got up, flipped on the computer (which was relatively new at the time), opened a word document, I just started to type.

I started to just pour out everything that was on my mind. It was stream of conscious. It didn't have any punctuation—just everything I was afraid of.

It was brutally honest.

It was extremely, extremely vulnerable.

It was never intended for the light of day or for anybody else to see.

And I remember going back to my bed after I was done exhaustively typing that all out, and falling right to sleep!

I just remember thinking as I lay my head on the pillow, "Oh my gosh, my mind is clear! How did that work??"

Since then, I have become a major journaler.

I have filled up volumes and volumes and volumes since I was 15 years old.

I bought an entire bookcase to hold my journals, and I'm sure that it will be filled before too long.

So, what is the power in journaling? Why should we take the time to put our hand to paper?

It's scientifically proven that the brain thinks faster than the mouth can speak, and certainly faster than the hand can write. That's why we say stupid stuff all the time.

When we journal, we take those thoughts that are inside of our head—formless, amorphous, scary, ugly, useless—and we start to channel them.

They go from our brain down our arm into our hand. And by doing that, it slows the thoughts down.

This is us putting the deck into order, making the traffic go in a single file line.

As we write even more, it slows the thought down, and we are forced to let one idea solidify at a time.

As we're writing, we're reading; it's coming back to us.

It's going into our eyes, which is into the brain, which is into a different section of the brain that is used for parsing apart and understanding information.

And what we get to do then is create a full circle where we had an unformed thought, we formed it, and then we ingested it, analyzed it, and understood it.

This is why very often as I'm journaling, I'll have had a thought in my head for days or weeks—something I couldn't figure out, some big question mark, some scary thing— sometimes I don't even get through writing the entire first sentence before I figure it out.

Sometimes all it takes is just that little bit of work up front, putting it down on paper to realize, "Oh, that's not so scary! Or, oh, yeah, okay, I get it now."

The benefits of journaling can't be overstated.

If you are not a journaler today, I highly recommend you go out, get yourself a really beautiful journal (splurge a little bit on it because it's the first time), get a pen and make this a part of your daily habit.

Two minutes, five minutes...

Before long, I think you'll start to realize that journaling is a life changing practice that you're going to want to use in every area of your life.