The Danger of Journaling Is Introspection

Since it appears that everyone is sharing their experiences.

I have been journaling daily for close to 20 years, with the exception of a few breaks and skipping journaling in really busy days.

From my personal anecdotal perspective I feel that overall it's a positive experience. I've tried multiple mediums, Evernote, Workflowy, Pen & Paper, Google Docs, and countless of journaling apps. I find pen and paper the best, probably because I can parse my thoughts better when I write them down over typing them. Even though typing is much faster. There is something magical about making a moment for yourself with a fresh cup of coffee, some music, a pen and a journal.

I've also experimented with the type of content I want to journal. It feels like the standard is to write about your day. I find that the least fun way to journal. Albeit at times my personal day to day life bleeds into my journaling, I prefer writing about my thoughts, what I'm struggling with, debating to do, what I'm trying to improve.

Essentially for me, journaling serves as part self-therapy, part life strategy writing, part goal planning and blocker removal strategies. I can analyze my actions and their side-effects. Do it long enough and you start seeing patterns in your way of thinking, or you will catch yourself writing about the same thing yet again. I strongly suggest you don't just write when you journal, create flowcharts, make bullet lists, underline things that you think are important. It's a very undervalued thinking tool.

Usually when I talk to friends about journaling the common deflection is "I don't have that kind of time". Here is the thing, it's ok to write just one paragraph. Sometimes even a single sentence. I have journal entries that just say something like "I have nothing to talk about". The thing is you are building a habit. Most of my journal entries are about 2-3 paragraphs, about 10 minutes of writing. Occasionally if I feel overwhelmed, or troubled by something I might write for an hour. Other times I might write a short journal entry and 12 hours later make an update with new thoughts.

I hope this helps someone thinking about journaling.

To echo the linked article, what's interesting is reading past entries and realizing how you are often wrong, but tenacious, stubborn, a dreamer, someone that doesn't give up...because you are still doing it...you are still here, fighting.

maybe the danger of reading your old journal entries is to get stuck in the past.

the purpose of introspection is to learn about yourself and understand yourself.

at one point i had the opportunity to digitally scan a set of negatives that i have collected from my photography work over a decade prior. this forced me to review all my work at once, and only then i realized that most of my better photos were portraits.

reviewing my journal might allow me to make similar discoveries.

the point of introspection is to make those discoveries. to find things that i can learn about myself that were not obvious before.

i am generally aware which current goals i am not achieving. in my journal i might find some goals that i dropped, but those don't matter anymore. i dropped them. maybe i can analyze if there is a pattern in how i set goals and drop them, and maybe there is something to learn.

In a way, introspection has held me back. It has made me viscerally aware of my shortcomings in the financial, professional, romantic, and physical realms. Introspection has reminded me of dropped promises, awkward encounters, unfounded concerns. It reminds me of just how naked and vulnerable in the cold of space and time I really am.

i don't believe introspection is the problem here. being aware of my shortcomings always helped me to better deal with them, to find a way to work around them instead of letting them control me.

the conclusion the author makes seems rather a sign of not enough introspection. i would dig deeper, trying to understand where these are coming from, how to overcome them...

Hi I agree, and I myself never thought I was special amazing or everyone loved me. I did however think I was great at engineering and could write some great code.

I think the point was that most people think they're an above average on most things. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/getting-along-and-ge...

Now I realize I'm probably average at best and the stuff I look back was actually pretty bad.

Damn, my experience with journaling is so different! I write whatever comes to my mind, usually some existential turmoil or insatisfaction. Just writing them make me feel so much better. It help the bad feeling go away and grow over it. Over time, those small changes adds up and I really think I'm someone very different than someone who I wouldn't without it.

Oh, apologies for reading your comment this way, my bad.

Voice Dialogue is amazing. Perspective that we have different, very much independent sub-parts to our personality is not new and it is gaining more and more popularity (both in professional context (different modes of psychotherapy, etc.) and in popular culture (more and more references which use this 'many parts' view)).

Voice Dialogue in core is _practice_ of talking to these parts of our personality (or rather consciousness) (edit: engaging with them in a conversation). This is where one person engages in a conversation with different parts of another person.

To give you an example, one could talk to Your Inner Child (in fact, one could talk with diffrent child-like energies in you), your Rational Mind, your Cautious One, your Joy, and so on...

If you do it well, a certain shift in consciousness accurs. You just realise that these are in fact 'voices' or 'parts' ('energies' is also a good term) in you and you are not them. I dont hesitate to call it an insight.

Even reading a book about it can make that shift happen for you. I am pretty sure of what I write here. :)

In English there is https://voicedialogueinternational.com

Seminal work by Sidra and Hal Stone, authors of VD, is their book "Embracing Our Selves", which I highly recommend. You can check it out in Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8683721M/Embracing_Ourselves

You will find similar approaches, I favor VD for many reasons.