How I use journaling to pull myself out of a rut

 

Journaling is one of those things that I hear about everywhere, but I’ve never really had the discipline to instil as a daily habit. I’ve dabbled many times but usually only when I’m knees deep in stress or a rut and writing out my thoughts and reflecting has never failed to pull me out. So, journaling has always been my “in case of emergency button” to give me a kickstart in breaking a bad habit or building a positive one. Recently, I’ve also tried to adopt it almost daily and found it super useful as a tool for self-reflection and optimising productivity as well as generating creative ideas.

I believe there is power in the process of writing and externalising your thoughts, to me it is almost like giving myself advice and a conversation with myself. Most of the time when we seek advice, we are just confirming beliefs we already hold that either haven’t been put into words yet or that we are not ready to act upon. Therefore, often times looking inwards and laying out your own wisdom logically and in a step by step manner, as writing forces you to do, will pull valuable and coherent insights out of the messy ball of amalgamated yet disjointed thoughts and experiences held in our minds. Likewise, it is almost like a process of your rational mind convincing your emotional side of the mind to get out of a rut, break a bad habit or simply just letting go of irrational stress.

 

Getting out of a rut

One of the biggest challenges I faced in lockdown was and still is my sleep schedule, one night of staying up until 3am turned into a vicious and unbreakable cycle of late sleeping patterns for months. I would start waking up late at noon, make some lunch, do some maintenance tasks and before I knew it, the day has slipped past me. Then every time I’d try to sleep early it was just a battle with frustration which would always end with me giving up and going on my phone again and finally feeling tired around 2am. Cycle repeats.

Waking up late has been killing my productivity, not only because early mornings are the best time to focus without distractions as most of the world is still asleep, but also I found that the later I slept, the longer I’d sleep. This leads to 9-10 hours of oversleeping every day, which actually leads to a decline in energy and more of the sleep-fog feeling when I do get up.

As anxiety started to build up from each day of feeling like I’m falling behind and knowing I need to make a change, I started trying everything from placing the alarm clock far from my bed, downloading different alarm apps to force me to actually get up but nothing worked because the lack of a daily structure from lockdown gave me no sense of urgency or drive so I’d just go back to bed and continue the cycle.

Finally, one night I fell back to my last resort and pull-out a notebook to journal on. I began analysing each and every excuse I make for not getting up and staying up in the morning.  I knew that I had to get up and go for a run first thing in the morning, because if I manage to accomplish that one thing, the rest of the morning will fall into place. So, I began reflecting and listed every excuse I made to myself for not going on those runs as well as a solution:

Too cold?  - Wear a hoodie.

Raining? - Just take a shower afterwards.

Too early? -  Good, that’s what gives me the mental edge, knowing that no one is out there at 6am but me.

Too boring? -  Download a podcasts the night before and listen while you run

Aggravates an old ankle injury? -  Just ice it afterwards, 15 min won’t hurt.

Have to work out later? – Again, 15 min won’t drain you, it give you more energy

 

Eventually, I wrote an answer to every one of my excuses until I had none left. This way, I forced myself to accept that all those reasons were invalid through externalising them, so I knew if I don’t go, I’d be simply giving in out of weakness. That night, I laid out all the clothes for running, put the keys on top, the earphones, everything I need so that it minimised the resistance and it was easy to just get dressed and go out. The following morning, I got up at 6 and stayed up for first time in months.

By journaling, I finally managed to break open a hole in this cycle, but to avoid falling back is another challenge in itself. Despite that, I’ve managed to take advantage of this opportunity and have been getting up early everyday for the past week and let’s hope I can keep the momentum going.

 

 

Productivity

 

I used journaling as a way of reflection on each day, what went wrong, what went right? Have a list of ideas for improvements and choosing 1 or 2 to implement every day. It was often something simple but made a huge difference in terms of productivity, for example:

Scheduling specific times in the day (10am, 12pm, 3pm, 5pm) to check social media instead of leaving it to will and letting it be a distraction

 

Self-reflection

 

In terms of self-reflection, journaling is the only tool that I’ve found effective and viable. Following the recent career summit weeks at uni, almost all areas of career advice from the webinars converged on one single point: knowing yourself, you values, your strengths and your goals. But they never taught you how to actually start the process of self-reflection. For me, I simply write down a heading: what are my core values? And begin listing some words that come to mind in dot points, which I would then expand on the ones that I really resonate with. It comes down to a process of repeatedly asking myself questions and answering them, probing around the mind for an answer to learn more about myself.

 

 

Idea generator

 

Some of my best ideas come from me just putting on my headphones, putting on a rainy background noise and just write. I guide my thinking with a heading like “ideas for blog” or “what I learned from the past week” and just let the dot points flow. Then after I get 10 or 12, I’d highlight the one or two that I like and try to implement them.

 

So, whether you want to break free from a seemingly unshakeable bad habit, want to learn more about yourself as a person or just want to dump away some stress and clear your mind, give journaling a go and see what it can do for you. Remember it is just a fancy term for just writing in an unstructured and unedited manner, so there is no right or wrong way to do it.