I’ve just begun a new moon for a year-long foundation project. The focus of this month is on reflection, I am rebooting my daily diary habits and working on some research on thinking and feeling better.
For those interested, you can check out my first seven months here:
- Fitness: Begin, end, books.
- Productivity: Begin, end, books.
- Money: Beginning, ending, books.
- Food: Beginning, ending, books.
- Reading: Beginning, Ending, and Books.
- Outreach: Beginning, Ending, Books.
- Sleep: Beginning, ending, books.
Why do you need a diary?
The cornerstone habit of this month is to write a diary every day. To prevent this from becoming a heavy commitment (especially given the other eleven habits I’m going to maintain), I won’t keep myself at any minimum. When I was super busy, it was a good day to write a word. Of course, I hope I will do more on most days.
The motivations of diaries are diverse:
- Writing makes you smarter. Working memory is the ability of the mind to think simultaneously, closely related to intelligence, and is famous. Writing liberates working memory by allowing transient thoughts and thoughts to have a permanent place. While the idea that writing makes you smarter may sound exaggerated, consider multiplying the three digits on your head by the paper to make sure that this is obviously correct.
- Writing captures thoughts. The main purpose of cognitive behavioral therapy (current gold standard therapy for depression, anxiety, etc.) is that we engage in automatic thoughts to generate feelings and actions, which often lead to a vicious cycle, and negative thoughts to generate negative feelings and actions, thereby enhancing negative beliefs. Usually, the cycle occurs without much self-reflection or awareness. But if you write down your idea, you now have an external object that you can ask, essentially asking yourself, “Wait, do I really think?”
- Writing can help you solve your problems. The reason math problems are much easier on paper than in your mind is that writing allows you to uninstall components of complex puzzles so that you can organize your solutions. But this is also a situation where problems are not happening! Often, our intuition provides an intuitive answer, but writing can promote better planning if you want a reflection answer.
Of course, these are the benefits of a rather unstructured journal – you just have to write down your own list of ideas and see where it goes. Diary can be made more specific, from daily records to event records to meditation on specific topics such as gratitude or empathy.
My Diary Experience
Diary is an exercise I do throughout my adult life. In some ways, this blog is an extension of the practice. My inner life is shaped by my personal and public writing.
I tend to rely more on journals when the problems in my life are harder to solve and when I have fewer people discussing them. (Although there are different advantages and disadvantages, dialogue can also play many of the same functions as isolated reflection.)
But, like many good habits, it’s easy to let effective things slip because you get busy or simply forget. I hope to bring back the diary, especially in a low-key way of not empowering a lot of time commitments, which will help me solve some of the real problems in my life, and more imagined issues where my reaction to this situation is really problematic.
Before that, I wrote that I am an anxious person and I tend to plan and worry. But many of the idle worries are totally useless, neither taking action nor reminding me of the invisible danger. I don’t want the diary to remove these emotions regularly, which are probably from an unconscious part of my mind, but when I’m currently worried and out of the helpless thinking cycle, I do think it will help me grasp myself.
I also want to use a diary to regain some of the initial motivational benefits that I had brought to me when I was young. Writing out my goals and life vision helps me strengthen my action plan. I often go into a reactive mode in which my daily decisions seem to be made out of necessity and not open to all possibilities.
Reflection, beyond writing
Of course, diary is just a method of using reflection practice. And others:
- Mindfulness meditation
- Talk to close friends
- Creative self-expression
- treat
I’m choosing a diary for myself and the people who follow the course because I think that in the technology of reflection it requires minimal training to do well. In contrast, meditation may be learned through retreats. Not everyone can really use their sense of self through art without a lot of training. Again, if you don’t have the right person to chat with and many people are unable to receive treatment.
But I hope my reading and research can go beyond this particular technique. I want to use this month as an opportunity to reread some classic works in psychology, such as thinking, cognitive therapy, mindfulness, etc.
As always, if you want to join me for a month, Keystone’s habit is simple: provide yourself a paper diary (or open a new document on your computer/phone) and write it every day. Even if only one word is important, so don’t feel sad if you don’t have the time to reach the bottom of all life problems at the end of a tiring day.
By the end of this month, I will share some notes from the book I read and reflect on!
A little update
Although the focus of this month is on reflection, I think I’ll share some updates from one of the foundations I’ve been working on: Fitness.
Last Sunday, I finished my first marathon!1
This is a major improvement compared to last year. At that time, I would have worked hard to complete a ten-kilometer run, but it doesn’t matter if I was 42 years old. Marathon races were on my bucket list, but the idea didn’t become more than a distant daydream until I started exercising every day.
footnote
- My time is 4:33. The race itself was tough, my half marathon was 2:00 and some really bad leg cramps were frustrating for me over the past 5km or so. However, even if there is room for improvement next time, I’m happy to finish it.
