Journaling Practice: Let's Get Up Close and Personal

Hello everyone, it's Stephen Smith. Mari has so courteously invited me to share more of my Journaling Practice with you. Today I would like to get a little personal and talk about analyzing your Journal entries and looking for trends. Once every three months or so I sit down with my Morning Pages Journal and read the older entries. I have a pen and notecard handy, of course, and I look for recurring themes. Or, sometimes my Lovely Bride will say something that prompts me to go back and look for specific things, like "You always get depressed at Christmas, I hate it." (Which was true, I went back and checked...every year that we've been together, except this one. I put in some extra effort to be cheerful this year.) I have found some surprising things:

• I obsess over time, specifically - how I manage my time. For a while there were tons of references along the lines of "I have too much to do and not enough time to do it!" Once I saw that this was such a systemic issue I made a conscious decision to do more delegating.
• I struggle with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I do get depressed in the Winter months. I managed this more effectively this past year by taking a Vitamin D supplement, making an effort to get outside to let the sun shine on my face, and I had quit my soul-sucking job in September (which made lots of quality-of-life improvements!!)
• I am very introspective. While I am quite the news junkie I write almost nothing about what is happening "out in the world" in my Morning Pages. My entries tend to be more about what is happening in my immediate sphere of influence: my work, my writing, my projects, my plans and aspirations.
• I skip my journaling in times of high stress. There are whole weeks and months of my life that I have passed over. When I look at the calendar I can see that these times were extremely busy at work (at my old job) or during intense periods of depression.

Looking for Trends and Cycles

If you decide to do this you should be prepared to use a gimlet eye and be very honest with yourself. You may uncover things that feel unpleasant or disturbing ("Why do I always write about how angry I am with my boss in the last week of the month?"). Trends in your journal may show that an issue or concern is developing over time.For example, in January you may have made a couple of references to a pain in your knee. In February you might have made five references and in March you referenced it almost every day. Are you just getting used to it, or is it something that a doctor should look at? We tend to overlook minor inconveniences that grow slowly, over time, like dust accumulating on the venetian blinds (then one day you are surprised at how much dust there is!). Cyclesof repeating types of journal entries can be harder to spot, but you can use your calendar as a guide to discovering these peaks and valleys. Look at entries that you make at the beginning or end of the month, or entries where the seasons are changing. Any annual event, like a birthday (yours or a family-members) is a good place to look for cyclical behavior. The annual types of cyclical behavior can be the hardest to find because they are often spread over multiple notebooks, with the older ones perhaps being stored away. Identifying these trends and cycles can help you to gauge how big the problem or opportunity is, and how best to develop a solution. Have you ever done a review of your journal entries? Find anything that surprised you? Leave a Comment below, let's talk about it. Maybe your discovery can help someone else.