How Journaling Can Unlock Your Thoughts and Transform Your Life

Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”  Interestingly, an author with such massive success doesn’t say anything about her audience as a motivation for writing.  She wrote to get at what was in her head.  And in doing so, she touched millions of lives (and admittedly, helped me gain perspective during a particularly trying time in my life).  I’ve been journaling daily-ish, more days per week than not, for years.  I picked up the habit when I started getting coached, and my coach offered it as a tool to see what was happening in my head. Since most of the 60,000 thoughts we have daily are unconscious, it was essential to get into those unconscious thoughts: just because they weren’t front of mind didn’t mean they weren’t affecting my life.

Today, my journaling had a decidedly nostalgic bend.  I was reminiscing about my time in fellowship and wrote about how easy it all was.  Work was hard, but it had a pace such that I couldn’t lament too long about how difficult it was.  Everything outside of work was glorious.  I lived in a great city.  I got into the best physical shape of my life.  I had amazing friends, like, “Yes, I’ll help you drag a body across the floor, I’ll bring the tarp” friends.  The three years had the energy of my whole life being in front of me.  I felt myself getting sad and missing those times.     

I kept writing, though, and realized that I was romanticizing it.  First, I was in an extended adolescence with no actual responsibility.  It didn’t feel like that at the time; learning how to care for critically ill children felt like the most immense responsibility in the world.  My actual responsibility was just to learn, and the responsibility for the patients’ outcomes rested solely on my attendings’ shoulders.  For all lovely learners reading this, don’t let that discourage you.  I took my learning seriously because I felt so much responsibility for my patients.  Secondly, I was broke and in a ton of debt.  Like, “using one credit card to pay the minimum payment on another credit card” debt.  Lastly, during my fellowship, I was in a string of ridiculous relationships that were frivolous at best and self-destructive at worst.  I didn’t think too hard about what I wrote next; it just came out.  Work is hard, but I have so much agency over it.  Now, when my patients get better, I play a massive part in it.  When they don’t do well, I’m part of a vast community supporting each other so we can carry on.  The feeling of getting out of that credit card debt with my attending-level paychecks was almost euphoric.  I found my partner two years into my faculty position.  He’s 100% my person and would help me dispose of a body if I needed him to (the plan is, obviously, to never need him to).  I live in another great city.  I have the resources and knowledge to get into the best shape of my life if I wanted to.  I’m currently dabbling in that last one.  Maybe it will be my next journaling topic.

Here’s the point.  If I let my mind wander and reminisce about my fellowship without journaling, I might never have realized that I was cherry-picking my memories.  My pen moves slower than my brain, so writing slows everything down and allows me to roll the thoughts around and examine their nuance instead of thinking a thought and then *whoosh* it’s onto the next.  And as much as I hate to admit it (and am trying to fight against it), my attention span seems to be getting shorter, just like everybody else’s.  If I had just thought about my time in fellowship, I would’ve gotten distracted by something and never seen any of these thoughts to their ends.  Just thinking about my fellowship would have left me sad, upset about losing that time, and unsatisfied with my current life.  My brain would’ve gotten me into a rotten mindset.  But with a bit more deliberate action, I relived those memories while ending up grateful for what I have now.  

Starting a journaling habit can feel overwhelming, but the benefit of journaling continues to surprise me years after I began.  Start with low standards: a few sentences daily, but resolve to avoid beating yourself up if you miss a day.  Just write the first sentences that come to mind.  Soon, you’ll end with an interesting thought about which you want to write more.  Then, you’ll be surprised by what’s been rattling around in your subconscious but is now getting written down.  After that, you can take your journaling habit wherever you want to.  Sometimes I ask myself, “What do I want right now?”  Inevitably, the answer isn’t something pedestrian like “a cup of coffee”; it’s an exciting life-changing goal I’ve been too scared to admit to myself.  Once it’s out, I can decide what, if anything, I want to do about it.  Sometimes, I’ll try to figure out the solution to a problem and journal about it, asking, “If I knew what the solution to this was, what would it be?”  Soon, I have a whole list of out-of-the-box solutions to try.  Despite my love of checking boxes on a to-do list, my journaling hasn’t been reduced to something I must do just to check the box.  It’s a tool I use, and I can pick it up and put it down as needed.  Don’t overthink it or make it fancy: some of my best journaling has come from just writing down what I have planned for the day and the (sometimes utterly scathing) unconscious thoughts about all those things.  

Though I started journaling because of coaching, thinking of my habit as Didion-esque adds a little thrill.  Try it, find out what you’re thinking, and figure out what it means.