How to Journal for SELF-CARE

Your Reality

In How to Journal for SELF-CARE, we cover the various reasons and process to capture the reality of your circumstances. During a typical day, an average person generates 70,000 thoughts. By any estimation, the required volume of practical, useful, relevant, and constructive thoughts is actually a small fraction of this volume. Contrast this by examining the behavior of successful leaders that demonstrate an action orientation instead, with no time for wasteful overthinking. Why?

By reducing the actual volume of your thoughts and raising the quality of your thinking, you release stress, and by taking control of your thinking in general, an overall sense of control. A deliberate use of your time and effectively managing your relationships, you will refine your purpose, identify meaning, discover your originality, and structure a better quality of life.

How Does Journaling Help?

Success or happiness is said to be getting what we want and wanting what we get. The likelihood of you achieving your fulfillment as defined in this way is a function of managing the most important capacity you possess, your mental energy and effort in favor of your ideas. Taking ownership of the moment, structuring your day and quality of life is up to you. When you journal, you initiate a process of self-discovery through a narrative process. You review your effort through the lens of time and gain an understanding of how your thoughts and your feelings are connected. You make better decisions.

Managing life is first a matter of mental self-control, a skill that results from conditioning. You need a structure in order to do this. SELF-CARE provides this structure. In being disciplined, your effort from the use of this structure will yield more than success. In mastering your thinking, habits, and behaviors, you free your mind to recognize the new opportunities by making mental connections. This awareness makes your life more interesting with a heightened pattern recognition.

What is Self-Awareness?

We are superior to animals in one critical respect: self-awareness  An animal barely questions the possibility of being anything more than what it is, and serves its biological functions with no thought to consequences. With perspective, we have the ability to challenge our ways of thinking, being and behavior. Our nervous system is distinct and more complex than any other living creature. To ignore the capacities we possess is to waste the evolutionary development give to us.

Self-awareness places a responsibility upon you to recognize the power that you have to change and adapt. The human being is the best adapted creature on this planet due to its capacity to adapt to various environments. With this newfound awareness and peak state of mind, you can transform to a new level of maturity and strength with purpose. The lack of self-awareness that leads to complacency and loss is something you can overcome by handling your emotional and mental state. Using a simple journal and using the SELF-CARE framework, you take control of your current state and lead yourself.

Why Is Journaling Important?

The journal acts as a private oasis and refuge as it occurs within your field of thinking and awareness. Formal education provides you with a foundation of basic language and the manipulation of information, but it does not teach you how to gain meaning and significance from your experiences. Learning to value your time and effort and yourself, come from a practice. When you journal, the practice is an investment in your self. With a journaling practice you will grow and adapt.

 

Recently, I reconnected with a person from my past that I had not spoken to in 10 years. I noticed that she started to follow me on Instagram, so I thought to check and see how she was doing. We caught up and I thought to check my journals from 10 years prior to remind myself of the situation and nature of our last interactions. What I uncovered was surprising. We had connected on the exact days 10 years prior and the nature of the interaction was exactly the same. The subconscious mind rules our lives  and we need to understand how it works. Journalizing as a practice provides such powerful insights.

 

How Do I Journal?

Following are practical steps to follow toward your daily practice of journaling. You need to think about the events of your day and their impact on your mental and emotional state. Record your thoughts, noteworthy insights and impressions as you would like to recall them later. Leaders are readers AND writers because they dictate their life as an active process.

 

  1. Dedicate at least 30 minutes every morning for personal time to recall and reflect
  2. Grab a bound notebook that you can write into and save as an archive for posterity
  3. Dedicate a new page to each day and note the date for later retrieval and reference
  4. Think back to the day prior, identify unusual things worthy of reflection and write
  5. Identify decisions, assumptions, beliefs, or ideas as unusual and noteworthy to you
  6. Write simple statements on the consequences or experiences related to the unusual
  7. Then write any new insights, lessons, understandings, or awareness from the event
  8. Next, write out what you are grateful for in your life to reinforce the positive aspects
  9. Make a list of actions or practices to improve your ways of handing life going forward
  10. Create an index at the front of the journal with a headline to associate with each day

 

The habitual practice of daily journaling conditions you to pay attention to what is important and the work that requires your attention and reflection later. Look for interesting and insightful experiences, and you will change your outlook to a productive viewpoint that leads to an effort. Your life is valuable, and the work that you do to improve yourself also improves the world. When you take the time to do this kind of reflection, you will see how much you change over time.


Your Significance

Consider excessive or redundant thinking as a form of distraction. By hosting distractions within your attention, you waste time, energy, relationships, and opportunities. The antidote is to shift the focus toward personal priorities and work on the life we live in this moment to focus on our situation and then avoid the distractions as wasteful ways of non-living. Your significance is determined by you based on the work that you do, and the value that you create for the world at large.


Recording daily experience on cave walls was an important part of the development of our species. Throughout time, great thinkers and social engineers used writing to reflect the new ideas that lead to our evolution. The practice of journaling is an essential part of capturing the memorable times of our lives that deserve attention. It is also our true legacy. Holding onto negative ideas, fixating stubbornly on outdated, poorly concluded beliefs keeps us from being more self-aware.