Why I Journal | MindHandHeart

José Luis Ramos

January 6, 2021

Nine years ago I got into the habit of journaling and I have not looked back. Thirty-plus 3.5”x5.5” Moleskines later, I can confidently say that it is one of the best habits I have developed.

Of course, there are other journals I use to write down ideas and notes, but it has been these small leather-bound books that I have treated as the most sacred. Every time I sit to write in one of these Moleskines, I feel a sense of excitement and nervousness because I have no idea what the future version of myself will think. Whenever I read through old entries I find it somewhat amusing to see what I was experiencing, thinking, and worrying about. Take the first three sentences from a July 2013 entry:

“I’m lying on my bed w/ a little over 14 hrs to board my flight. Passport is enroute via FedEx and my packing is halfway done. It didn’t hit me until about 7:00 pm that I would actually be leaving.”

That day I was leaving for Europe to board the MV Explorer as part of my semester abroad with Semester at Sea. My flight to London was in a few hours and it was uncertain that my passport would arrive on time! Fortunately, it arrived and I dodged a major headache. Without that journal entry, it would be much harder for me to recall the craziness of the day.

This year our organization, Mindfulness & Leadership, received a grant from MindHandHeart to provide journals to the MIT Sloan community. Inspired by this grant, I’m writing to share three reasons why I journal and why I believe it’s a practice everyone can benefit from. With the New Year in mind, it may be the perfect time to set an intention to develop this habit for yourself.

1. You can build self-compassion and empathy (without even realizing it)

Reading older entries has allowed me to “speak” with a younger version of myself and assess how things have changed in my life, both in circumstances and mindset. I’ve had a number of experiences where I’ve said to myself, “no way I wrote that,” because of how different my thinking was in that moment compared to now. For example, in my earliest Moleskines I wrote about how happiness was derived from our external environment and the circumstances of my life. Today, I have done a 180-degree shift on this belief; while I still believe our environment and circumstances can be important contributors to happiness, my experiences have helped me realize that happiness comes from within and is based on our ability to understand a situation and adapt our perspectives. I also used to have the impression that we had to be happy all the time, but again my experience has highlighted that our state of being is fluid and while the sun is in fact always shining, cloudy days and storms do occur. Knowing that I have been the author of many faulty or simply different beliefs than those I have today has helped me develop a sense of self-compassion and has made me much more comfortable with simply being wrong.

2. Because Charles Darwin and Matthew McConaughey did it

A few years back, I picked up the book Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, and was fascinated by Charles Darwin’s relationship with journaling. I always thought of his discovery as a single eureka moment, but in fact, it was a slow accumulation of hunches that Darwin wrote about throughout his journals. It wasn’t even during his 5-year voyage (from 1831 to 1836) on the HMS Beagle but much later that he finally made the necessary connections to unearth the idea of natural selection. In 1845 Darwin wrote,

“Seeing the gradation and diversity of structure in one small intimately related group of birds one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago one species had been taken and modified for different ends."

Although here he appears to be close to his discovery of natural selection, it wasn’t until 1859 that he published On The Origin of Species. This notion that it’s a slow hunch that can lead us to big breakthrough ideas was a pretty convincing reason for me to pick up journaling.

And then there is McConaughey. As I was in the process of drafting this piece, I coincidentally came across a podcast that Tim Ferris did with Matthew McConaughey about his new book, Greenlights. It’s probably my favorite podcast episode I’ve listened to in 2020 and is a summary of Matthew’s key life lessons from 30+ years of diary notes. One of his main points is that journaling is an investment in yourself and that it can be a powerful way of getting yourself out of those deep holes we tend to find ourselves in. He says:

“What I found is when I would get into a rut again in life, I could go back to my diaries and see and dissect the times I had success, and I found habits that I had when I was successful and happy in my life” --Matthew McConaughey

So it is not just about journaling and letting your books collect dust, but rather taking the time to reflect on what you have written to bring out insights and patterns about what a successful and happy life means for ourselves. Which brings me to the third point.

3. To explore and remember your own journey

In my experience, simply remembering has been the hardest part of my journey. Not just remembering advice from my parents, math equations for tests in my undergrad, or the time of my flight, but more importantly the story of my life and my own lessons. Journaling is the best way I know of remembering the good, the bad, and the ugly of my experience, and the best way to jump back into that point in time and explore the situation further--with a little more distance. Matthew McConaughey uses the metaphor of green, red, and yellow lights that occur in our life. When we are driving forward we encounter one of these three options and have to address it accordingly. Red light moments are those that stop us in our tracks and are very hard times. Yellow lights are those interruptions or caution points where we need to slow down but can keep going. And green lights are those moments where things go smoothly with no interruptions. When we look in the rearview mirror, if we look at all, we may realize that all those previous red and yellow lights actually turn green. Journaling is an excellent tool for capturing those moments as they are happening so that I can view them through the rearview mirror down the line.

Getting started

So, with these reasons in mind, how should you get started? Thankfully, it is not hard at all. Find a brand that makes journals you think are beautiful and that you won’t simply throw away. My choice is the 3.5”x5.5” Moleskine because it is small enough to carry anywhere. Then get yourself a pen that writes well on the journal and has a decent grip. My go-to choice here is G2 size 05 or 07.

With these tools in hand, it might still seem quite daunting at times to start writing. Many times it is not for a lack of motivation but rather not setting the 5-10 minutes aside to write. We want to do it but just don’t have the time. When I first started writing I was under the impression that everything I wrote had to have some sort of insight. What I’ve come to realize is that it really is more about the habit of writing consistently, whether it be daily or 2-3 times per week, without necessarily thinking about the insight it might have. Most importantly figure out what style works best for you. Try writing in 3rd person, or maybe just bullet points, or just as freeflow. Don’t worry too much about spelling or having to follow all the grammatical rules.

If you are looking for prompts to get you started our team put together a few prompts for the Sloan community for a start-of-year reflection exercise: Self-Reflection prompts

Thanks for reading.

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