Journaling is actually a great way of promoting mental and emotional health.
I don't journal daily because I don't have enough to say every day, but I do something similar called "writing therapy", especially when I'm feeling emotionally stuck. I find bad emotions to only be bothersome because they are inside and unprocessed. Externalizing emotions onto a physical page (not digital!) helps me process them. The physical act of subsequently crumpling the piece of paper and throwing it out is catharsis. The act itself somehow tells my brain not to hold on to certain feelings -- I've done the work to process them and I can now let them go.
I do this when I'm experiencing minor issues that don't rise to the level of needing to talk to a $150/hr therapist. Some people prefer talking things out, but I prefer writing.
"So what do therapy, journaling, and meditation all have in common?
All three are techniques to help us convert what is usually the subject of our consciousness into the object of our consciousness.
> Journaling is actually a great way of promoting mental and emotional health.
Can't agree more. I built myself a simple writing app[1] a couple of years back, purely because I wanted to have a place to slow down, somewhere I could just pour my emotions/thoughts into, without self-editing. I posted a bit more about in the root thread. If you give the app a shot, let me know. I think you might like it.
> "So what do therapy, journaling, and meditation all have in common? [...]
I'd add any unconstrained (and ideally "childish") form of art to the list. I write in the morning then doodle just before going to bed [2]. I generally struggle with sticking to new habits but relying on this form of mental hygiene, plus therapy made a huge improvement in my quality of life.
When my friends ask why I pay for my journaling software instead of a free option, I tell them $22 a year is a great price for my primary therapist.
I found I wasn’t being completely open and honest when I was journaling on pen and paper because I was subconsciously concerned someone else would read it. A password protected journal works better for me.
> I don't journal daily because I don't have enough to say every day
Just recount what happened I the last 24 hours. Had to be something even if you just worked and watched netflix. ie, what specifically did you do at work, how could you have done it better, etc
I journal off and on, not currently doing it. But I found it to be a great tool for introspection and improvement. I would think in depth about technical problems, social interactions, various distractions and impediments to productivity. It's a great tool if you have the time. but you have to make yourself do it, every day
And, although it may be obvious, journaling is not a general miracle cure;there are many stories of suicide where a diary has been left, only to show to those left how someone has been stuck in a spiral of desperation, self-hatred and anxiety for a long time
Ah, if only my brain would let me selectively forget!
Journaling is actually a way to forget as long as one throws out what one writes and never revisit (which I never do). It works like an accelerated Ebbinghaus curve.
That said, I suspect forgetful people are often less emotionally burdened.
Similar to how heavy sleepers tend not to be grumpy people because nothing prevents them from having a good night's sleep.
I'm really forgetful to the point I'm starting to worry about its impact on my career. I also ruminate like hell even about things that happened in high school, constantly feeling bad about things I said, did or didn't do.
Journaling is definitely one of the things where you have to figure your own way out.
I tried a lot of things. Markdown based apps (Obsidian), Diary apps (Diarium), and so on.
What worked finally was pen and paper. Not any pen. Bought a bunch of good fountain pens (Lamy, Pilot, Parker), and bought a nice refillable leatherbound journal.
And I journal every night before my meditation session before going to bed.
I do not plan to read them or store them. I just write my heart out. I use writing as a tool of thinking, and dumping my thoughts. The stuff that have some particular qualities, evolve into actions (anywhere from visiting a friend or a travel trip to learning something new), blogs, or projects.
I do not plan to do OCR or any kind of special storage.
I hated digital journaling because I had to pick up the phone or sit somewhere to use the laptop/desktop. Also a quick figure would require me to at least open a tool, and at most made me connect my graphics tablet. Pen and paper just removed the friction. Now I just journal in bed sitting or half-lying under a lamp with my wifi turned off.
Pen and paper is my ideal workflow, and I reached here after months of trial-and-error.
>Pen and paper is my ideal workflow, and I reached here after months of trial-and-error.
I finally stopped yak-shaving my writing workflow when I built a web app with a single text field and no editing capabilities, just pushing letters. It feels "dummer" than a piece of paper, but works for me. 2.5 years of almost daily writing (700 words on avg) so far. I practice calligraphy, but my regular hand writing is terrible. I used to hoard piles of paper with doodles and notes, and I'd always felt bad about throwing them out. I do like that the list of notes keeps getting longer every day although, but rarely re-read them. Otherwise I'd just use a pen.
> do not plan to do OCR or any kind of special storage.
but in case anyone else is struggling with the problem you described,
> I hated digital journaling because I had to pick up the phone or sit somewhere to use the laptop/desktop. Also a quick figure would require me to at least open a tool, and at most made me connect my graphics tablet. Pen and paper just removed the friction. Now I just journal in bed sitting or half-lying under a lamp with my wifi turned off.
my solution has been an e-ink tablet, specifically the Supernote A5X. The Supernote's handwriting is extremely fast and accurate and, as far as quality, to me there's no difference to writing on real paper, even though it might not feel exactly like writing on paper. (It feels different but very good!)
All in all, it's basically like a paper notebook, just with more pages/storage and the ability to erase/edit and built-in digitization.
Love it. The only issue I had with this approach is aggregating notebooks but not enough storage (due to constant travel) to keep doing this without having a separate bag just for it.
Its very contextual but I truly believe this is the best way!
I built myself a system that sends me an email every day, and all I have to do is respond to that email; the answers get stored in an SQLite database, which is backed up on Dropbox.
So, opposite to you, my system lets me revisit and read my previous thoughts, something I do enjoy. It's also a great tracking system that tells me when this or that event happened.
But, like you, it's not dependent on any specific tool. I can lose my phone and all my devices, as long as I can receive and send email, it'll work.
I always compare journaling to trying to solve a math problem with paper and pen. Of course you can do math problems in your head, but it's so much easier when you can express thoughts as symbols.
But the problems you're trying to solve aren't mathematical. They're emotional and perhaps even spiritual ones; petty ones and unexamined ones.
It's a great tool more people should use, not out of obligation, but because once you become aware of it, you'll automatically want to.
To me it is the act of turning abstract thought into concrete thought.
For this reason there is nothing wrong with talking to your self. you are taking thoughts which are always a bit fuzzy and turning them into solid actionable items. Writing things down is even better at this. But the best is teaching someone else.
I've discovered so much about myself journaling. Journaling allows me to listen to myself in a way I cannot otherwise do; it separates me from my thoughts & feelings, which gives me the perspective I need to see myself a different way. I can't reliably get this meditating the way I can journaling.
If you're a curious person, the habit of journaling is a fantastic engine to drive your curiosity inward, and is often quite fun and something to look forward to. It's also a great way to get better as a writer - writing 500+ words a day, and really thinking about the words being written, over a long period of time really adds up. I'm so much faster at writing than I was when I started.
Why write on the phone when routinely journalling before and after bed? I always feel stifled by typing speed on a touch keyboard; in this case especially, it seems minimizing the friction of expressing a spontaneous thought would take priority. I don't see mention of dictation, unless it's a given with the app. Or is that particular workflow feature so beneficial as to offset this?
> I always feel stifled by typing speed on a touch keyboard
My typing speed on a laptop keyboard was the thing that finally made journaling work for me. I could never write fast enough by hand to capture my thoughts.
Ditto. Though I see now: it seemed obvious to me commenting initially that physical keyboard typing speed ≫ touch keyboard typing speed. Rather, a cursory search now shows averages of around 50 WPM vs 40 WPM, so there isn't much difference for most people; I don't doubt that with practice on the phone some will upset the inequality. But up in the tails is where mobile falls short: I think I'll be sticking with writing on desktop when I can, as judging by the record mobile typing speed of either 85 or 110 WPM (over only 25 words ≈ 15 seconds), I don't think I have much chance of approaching my two-handed typing in practice.
But maybe there's a benefit in slowing down, perhaps more concise notes the first time around? For millennia diarists scribbled on dead plants, after all. Then again, the average writing ability was illiteracy, and isn't there the cliché of individuals nowadays being more productive than ever before?
It doesn’t take that much practice to get typing speed/comfort up to the speed of organized, phrased thoughts.
A lot of people have that already from communicating on their phones a lot, or (for the young ones) growing up on touch screens, but even if you just dive into journaling like the OP, you’d probably get their soon enough.
And once you’re there, dictation can’t hold a candle. I’ll type a paragraph in the time it takes for some dictation assistant to transcribe a sentence, with fewer mistakes, more precision, and more linguistic creativity.
I see now that I didn't make it clear that I commented because I find desktop typing superior rather than as a general lament of typing speed. That'd be the curse of knowledge, only in the domain of personal context.
I’m surprised by all the app and website talk here. I’ve always associated my journaling with quiet reflection, which means no phones or computers. That is, no notifications or requests for updates, or other distractions so I’ve never considered anything but pen and paper. I have one of these quite nice notebooks [0], that I keep handy morning and night for my journal activity. Even with quiet mode my phone is too distracting and my computer is too closely associated with work.
I really like Day One for journaling. It’s a very clean experience though I admit I don’t journal everyday.
I have bristled against the idea of subscribing to it as an app. I think It’s a great app, and I want to support the author, but subscription to apps just rubs me the wrong way. So I live in the free mode.
I’ve tried a few alternatives that are free (including markdown and plain text), but always come back to it because it’s so comfortable.
I push about 30k-50k words of text journaling into it per year, for about 6 or 7 years now, and it handles it seamlessly while keeping everything organized.
The most important feature to me is that it feels lightweight and lagless to open the app and get to typing.
My impression is that Day One has a ton of features for people who want multimedia entries, or sharing, or all the other bullet points that keep it from getting squeezed out by competitors, but it seems to keep those out of the hot path so that my own niche experience is never ruined by bloat.
Seems like a good place to mention the writing web-app I made a few years back: https://write.sonnet.io
I've been using it almost daily for 2.5 years, and I've been quite happy with it so far.
I'm terrible at sticking to habits, but since the tool is so limited and de facto aimed at inducing the flow state, eventually it gets really hard not to end up with 700-800 words after just a few minutes.
Sometimes this ends up being word soup full of typos, but that's ok since I use it mostly as a "mental shower": I look at the past day and try to understand my reactions better, gain perspective, or just vent. For me, it's about staying focused and writing, instead of over-analysing.
The fun part is that now I can go to almost any date in the past couple of years, and look at the mental/emotional snapshot from that time.
The UI and UX of this is superb. Congrats for the nice taste!
I enjoy reading my writings from years ago... Are the notes stored somewhere and are they available for re-reading later? Is it possible to download or sync with external storage? I'm on mobile so the site encouraged me to come back later on desktop.
Journaling is key to my productivity and creativity. I think that many people associate the activity only with writing about their feelings and personal stories. It's that, but also so much more. My journal is central to my days. It's where I keep track of what I've done, what I've discovered, the challenges I've faced, my ideas for the future, etc.
I've tried it today for the first time. The transcription thing is awesome! It is a little less useful as I speak in Dutch and English and tend to switch spontaneously, but just to have a separate app that can transcribe if I really want it to is awesome.
An interesting twist about the gratitude practice:
It turns out that it does not work they way we think it works. At least that's what the scientists say. To get the desired results the practice needs to be inverted.
"The key elements of highly effective gratitude practices are [...] the essential need for story (narrative), receiving or perceiving gratitude rather than giving it, and the role that theory of mind plays in this context" []
Make an email account which only you know about. Send yourself mail to that account. Each mail is a journal entry. Any email client (desktop or mobile) becomes your journal editor. Mails are automatically time-stamped and can feature rich text and all of the attachments supported by modern email providers.
You can switch all of your mail to another email provider thanks to facilities built into email since the 1970s.
I think Diarium [1] is the most underrated journaling app. I have been using it for around a while and can definitely recommend it. Also, it is one time pay (for each platform though which I think is still better than an overpriced subscription)
I've started journaling daily myself and just pouring out my thoughts somewhere makes me feel really really good. It doesn't matter what those thoughts/feelings are: love, hatred, sadness, gratitude, jealousy, ambition, anything really. Just writing stuff down made the difference for me.
I’ve been journaling daily for the past few years and it’s been really fun to tick through each day around a year previous to observe my current state. Most of it seems trite or meaningless, but collated it feels like a meaningful picture of who I was back then — what my struggles were and how they split between the distant and close.
TLDR; I highly recommend journaling daily. It forces you to slow down and plug into feelings which is automatically a better start to your day than usual
A practice I do that's related to this is a year end wrapup. I write it at the beginning of January where I take my whole year and write about what significant things happened each month and then the major themes of the year and a reflection on it at the end.
Day One includes every feature requested by the author, including templates, scheduled notifications, and cross-device sync. I gladly pay the annual subscription. I have been journaling with it for almost ten years, when it was in some free app bundle.
There’s certainly a public form of journaling that happens on social media that seems to start with good intentions but then descends into self-diagnosis.
In terms of private journaling - well, it’s private, so hard to draw any general conclusions, but I tend to think that if you’re spending more than half an hour each day writing about yourself then you might have a problem.
You pass judgement pretty easily. Private journaling is not always "writing about yourself" in the narcissistic sense you seem to mean.
Plenty of people feel like their thoughts and ideas are worthwhile but can't keep track of them without writing them down. Some of them even pass the 30 minute cutoff doing so.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% behind keeping a private journal, even one where you just write about yourself, but you can have too much of a good thing, and I see 30 minutes a day as the reasonable limit.
Yes, and addressing those problems is what I seek to accomplish by writing to myself about them. :)
Highly verbose and time consuming journaling has gotten me through divorce, major career changes, single parenthood, relocation, a new relationship and a bunch of other life changes. I usually journal only a few times a week, but in the thick of that stuff, I needed much more than a 30 minute window each day to check in with myself about where I was at and where I was trying to get to each day. Sometimes I spent hours. I took a year and a half away from it — which turned out to be by far one of the most impulsive and reckless periods of my life!
Public journaling it seems inevitably devolves into glorifying the highlights and seeking attention and acceptance, rather than honesty. Which expectedly the media platforms exploit for engagement metrics.
I made an Apple Watch App and then Shortcut[2] to record by voice how I spend my time and write it to my calendar. The goal was to make it so easy (<10 seconds) to record when and how I spent my time that I would record even every time I went to the bathroom. I did it consistently for a few weeks and just couldn’t bring my self to continue, I was recording only ~40-50 activities per day and I still felt burden by such detailed self examination. What did I learn? That I was playing a lot of Xbox with my son and too much alone. That the free form text I was recording needed categorization and keyword analysis to even hope of being useful and that I really love spontaneity and aimless wandering, curiosity, and learning—but ultimately what a weight it is to do such detailed analysis of one’s own self. I do still some times have dreams of doing something similar with all of my Google data[1] at some point maybe bringing both ideas (recording how I spend every minute and full Google download) together for analysis and self awareness.
I think journaling can be a great funnel to collect everything of interest during your day. Like anything general a lot of it is just noise but the few gems inside can really be worth the effort.
Breathing, eating, drinking and sleeping are also hallmarks of mass shooters and incels. I even hear they cloth themselves frequently.
In all seriousness; that is a really toxic take. I’m surprised to find it on HN, where I feel constructive criticism and thought-out comments are common.
hi pol1-5, I don't understand what made you feel this way. Gratitude practice is universally human, in catholic culture Christ is the human ideal and spiritual teacher (apart from divine). You may disagree with the latter personally or think people who are catholic - like me as well - are not to be taken seriously. Fides et Ratio can go hand in hand (see the encyclical or Contact by Carl Sagan).
I don't journal daily because I don't have enough to say every day, but I do something similar called "writing therapy", especially when I'm feeling emotionally stuck. I find bad emotions to only be bothersome because they are inside and unprocessed. Externalizing emotions onto a physical page (not digital!) helps me process them. The physical act of subsequently crumpling the piece of paper and throwing it out is catharsis. The act itself somehow tells my brain not to hold on to certain feelings -- I've done the work to process them and I can now let them go.
I do this when I'm experiencing minor issues that don't rise to the level of needing to talk to a $150/hr therapist. Some people prefer talking things out, but I prefer writing.
"So what do therapy, journaling, and meditation all have in common?
All three are techniques to help us convert what is usually the subject of our consciousness into the object of our consciousness.
That’s it." [1]
[1] https://markmanson.net/how-to-get-better