Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?

The human mind is the product of a brutal optimization function over a billion years old. That process of optimization has extended into the operation of the human mind itself. The human mind itself is an optimization machine. It can always imagine a better way to do things. Don't let the fact that there is a better way to do a thing stop you from doing the thing. There is always a better way.

It has not improved my life. I tried it and found that it was a good way to process my thoughts and feelings. But exercise and therapy/coaching were better for that. Journaling in addition to the other efforts would be a very ineffective use of time. Journaling instead of them would be detrimental.

N=1.

I've been keeping a journal for about 12 years. It's in simple text files, one per day, one directory per year. It mostly contains health-related information: what I ate, any reactions to what I ate (I have various food allergies and such), any exercise I did, how much I weighed. It also contains mention of significant events, like when I finish a book, any movies I might have watched, friends I met up with, things like that.

It has mostly been useful for occasional reference. It is useful to notice long-term health trends and patterns. It is also useful to be able to confirm suspicions like whether I might have got an idea from a book I read - did I read it before or after some idea I had say six years ago.

Things I have found useful in writing the journal are to make sure things are spelled correctly, so I can easily grep through it without worrying about whether I made a typo. Ditto regarding synonyms: I strive to use the most common word to describe something and not get fancy. I use conventions for recording things, so for example my weight is on its own line in the format "Weight: xxx", so it is easy to write scripts that scrape such information to build tables and graphs.

There is very little beyond strict factual information, and I write it in prose, not bullet-form.

Hello! I can relate and agree to everything you said. Especially the "Family historian". When my family all got together last summer for the first time since 2019 I lost track of the times I looked up things in my journal when the conversation went to "do you remember when ... happened?". I am originally from the UK so I also captured a lot of the Brexit stuff that happened from the start of 2020. Honestly it is crazy how much happened and that I captured so much of it.

Just like you this was the first time I stuck with journalling and to be honest I am not sure why it worked this time but not others. Perhaps maturity? :D Or perhaps it is the streak feature which is motivating like you said. I also went easy on myself not setting any hard-to-achieve goal of N words per day. While most days I write quite a detailed entry there are a few days where I only wrote two or three sentences as I wasn't feeling it for whatever reason.

You make an excellent point regarding trends that I totally forgot to mention when posting earlier. I too have found quite a few trends, almost all health (or wellbeing) related. Things like how much better I felt on the days I did intermittent fasting. Or that having my coffee black first thing was much easier on my stomach than with milk (although I'm not lactose intolerant it certainly upsets my stomach if I have it in the first hour or two after waking up for reasons unknown).

These trends have led me to making changes that one could argue have been life changing as they have given me more energy, mental clarity or resolved long standing annoyances that I couldn't pin point the origin of.

Sitting here thinking about journalling now I feel perhaps my initial call that it isn't really life changing is perhaps not quite true. At least not totally. There are certainly a few small changes I have made that have improved my quality of life quite a bit and this has prompted me to add a todo for tomorrow morning to do a bit of analysis to see if there are any other trends I may have missed.

A nice thing about Day One is the tags/hashtags support. I started adding a bunch to entries almost every day to track things so sorting my entries is reasonably efficient.

One last thing I wanted to mention is didn't bother with the template feature to begin with but I set some up a while back to prompt me to capture things like when I ate, how much exercise I did, how I felt that day, how well I slept, etc. It is amusing to look back and know exactly what I ate on some random day and especially helpful when you identify otherwise random things like your burrito bowl and quality of sleep!

I started journaling a few months ago and it's been horrible for me. Around the end of February I decided I wanted to lose weight, and decided to use a food and exercise journal. I have a channel on Discord I write in whenever I eat or work out, and I keep a running total of the net calories for the day.

Did it work? Yes, I've lost almost 30 pounds.

Was it worth it? A solid no. It's given me some kind of eating disorder, which came with fatigue, occasional blackouts, and all sorts of problems with my GI tract.