Journaling gotten out of hand? If so here’s the 5 minute journal
By: Daniel James Udale-Forrester
Tags: Self-awareness, Journaling, Writing, Self Improvement, Mental Health

The 5 minute journal

I’m a writer (sort of), I like to throw in a bit of sass, personality, and flavour into journals. What can I say I like telling stories? Interestingly even to myself… I find it cathartic to write out sequences of events as they happened so I find mysef writing 6, 8, or even 10 page long journals! Like it’s literally war and peace stuff, it’s a mission. I mean come on, did you see the size of this post? I swore to myself this was gonna be 500 words, whoops!

I started writing journals for the first time seriously when I started the “Understanding Counselling” course, our teacher told us that each week we will be writing journals to document how we feel as the course is an intensive mental and emotionally transformative process. I had never really given journals much thought other than writing down how I felt in times of desperation as directed by my therapist. She told us that we were writing down our observations about how we felt and things we noticed about ourselves, easy right?

After completing a journal I would find myself feeling a massive weight off my shoulders after sharing with myself the deepest troubles and truths. I’d also feel a sense of vulnerability that made me absolutely despise journaling, it made my sore spots exposed and that was tough. I’m a guy that got himself into £5000 worth of debt because I struggled talking about vulnerability and being accountable for things in my life so it was always going to be a difficult task, I just didn’t like calling myself out on my own bullshit I guess? Something I did well though was to romanticise the process of journaling, it was like a ritual. Every Wednesday after college I’d go to some pub where I knew it was going to be quiet and I wouldn’t know anyone so I could scribble away in peace. My hand would hurt because I’d write that much, I’d have my headphones in jotting away, I mean the people behind the bar probably figured I had cracked special relativity. I had messy hair, smudged glasses, a backpack, and a scruffy notebook. A poor man’s Harry Potter?

This process continued after I finished college, I would take myself out on these dates. I’d go for food and write a journal. Drive to a service station and write a journal. I’d head to the city for the morning and write a journal. It evolved and blossomed into something beautiful, I actually liked myself, I had given myself time and space to reflect on life and as a result developed self-worth. After some time I found myself writing journals less and less until it was more of a monthly task instead of a weekly pleasure to write down my thoughts and feelings. I would only write a journal if I was desperate, and even then it was kind of like being invited to a pity party where the room sad, empty, and the only company was a wet fart when you slumped onto the sofa. Part of it was me, you know making mountains out of mole hills, and it’s cool. Sometimes you have stuff to say and sometimes you don’t, I think I went from romanticising the process to fucking marrying myself to it. I’d fallen out of love.

Things happen in three’s sometimes, my favourite number is exactly 3 because I saw an advert when I was a kid that said the number was magic and even had the song “3 is a magic number” by Schoolhouse Rock so I was convinced. That’s literally all it took. So my therapist stared at me for a while when I told her that I hadn’t journaled for a little while and said “You’re putting too much pressure on yourself to write a lot in your journals, it can just be sentence or a word if you want it to be”. Naturally I ignored her advice, and it wasn’t until I had heard the same advice from two other people that it sank in and I gave it a try.

So I sat down with a notepad one night and crafted a quick template for a journal when I got inspired. So grab yourself a piece of paper and a pen and I’m going to show you how to do this :) In the top left hand corner of the page draw yourself a battery, it doesn’t have to be massive, just a small icon. Now what you are going to do is fill in the battery with how you are feeling in yourself. So for example today I feel a little run down and tired so my battery would be at 50%, it’s also a measure of how irritable, angry, content, or happy I might be. You can make yours mean whatever is most authentic to you, but ideally you would use it as a quick visual update on how you are feeling.

Title the page “The 5 minute journal” with today’s date, and then below that write “How I am feeling today”. This bit is where you write a couple of honest sentences about how your day was, so if it was bad I want you to write that it was bad and how it made you feel, if it was good I want you to write that it was good and how that made you feel. Then I ant you to write a heading “Today’s achievements”, here your aim is to write 3 bullet points about things that went well, it could be getting up on time for work, making someone smile, and even throwing a paperball across the office which gracefully flew into a the bin. Next write another heading underneath the bullet points you have just done which reads “Improvement points”, notice how we’re not focusing on negativity? This is about accepting shit happens and figuring out what we can do to make things better for next time, so you might write not judging yourself so harshly, learning when to take a break, or even something like tomorrow is another day to get at it again.

That’s literally it. Yup. That simple, do this every day. I tend to do mine before bed because it helps me dump a few thoughts out of my head and relax. You will recognise patterns about yourself, gain self-awareness, and this may even lead onto you loving journaling and doing more long-form journaling like I do once a month too.

Thanks for reading it has been an absolute pleasure having you! If you enjoyed this blog post check out my podcast Know Yourself on anchor.fm/knowyourself for more helpful tips and advice on Mental Health.

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Dan Udale