Why These 4 Questions Shape My Daily Journaling Practice

I’ve been journaling more or less daily for the past fifteen years.

As much as I love the romantic vision of pen on paper, I’ve always done it digitally because I could never keep up with a handwritten journal. I tried, but it never really worked.

Over the years, I’ve come across plenty of advice on the best ways to journal, the best techniques, and the best prompts. I always think it’s worth bringing a bit of nuance to these conversations because, as far as I’m concerned, the best way to journal is whatever way means you actually do it. And that depends entirely on who you are, what you want your journal to do for you, and how it fits with your life circumstances.

In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, I discuss something I recently noticed about my journal practice that I’d never considered before.

https://youtu.be/mSpRvfmqW9A

Since 2021, I’ve been answering the same four questions most mornings:

What did I do yesterday?

What was the best thing that happened yesterday?

What are today’s news headlines?

What are my plans for today?

What struck me is that all four questions are surprisingly objective and focus on facts rather than feelings. They’re concrete, and none of them explicitly probe beneath the surface.

They don’t want me to go searching for deeper meaning. Just record, archive, and document. If I’m short on time, I can answer the questions in less than five minutes (once I’m able to recall what happened yesterday). They are simple, easy, and objective. But more often than not, I go deeper and longer. Especially once I start thinking about the best thing that happened yesterday, today’s news headlines, and what I have planned.

Recording and Processing

The reason I started thinking about all this was that I saw a post on social media titled “How Journaling Actually Works.” It suggested that people get journaling wrong by recording events like a diary rather than finding the meaning in them. It caught my attention because it was the opposite of what I’ve found to be true.

He suggests asking yourself questions like:

What does this situation actually mean to me and why does it feel the way it does?

Whoa, where do you start with that?

What am I avoiding thinking about right now?

What am I pretending is fine when it’s not?

What would I do if I were not afraid of the outcome?

These are reasonable coaching-style questions for addressing specific situations. But they demand a fairly high cognitive and emotional load and likely require more than the five honest minutes he suggests for meaningful insight.

If those are the kinds of questions you’re asking every time you sit down to journal, it can start to feel like a pretty heavy-duty habit. I don’t know about you, but I would feel resistance to picking up my journal if that was what confronted me.

My experience has been quite different.

Over fifteen years of journaling, I’ve found that recording often opens the door to processing.

The simple act of documenting what happened yesterday gets my mind moving. It gives me something to work with. And sometimes, while writing about ordinary things, I stumble into something much bigger.

Recently, during one of our Haven Journal Circles, I responded to the prompt: What brought me peace this week?

My answer was having the brakes replaced on my car. A fairly ordinary response.

But when I wrote a little more about it in my journal the next morning, it opened up a whole bunch of things I wanted to explore, not least of which was putting off doing something I know needs doing. It prompted me to stop procrastinating several other things that have been draining me in the background for a while.

I didn’t sit down intending to write about avoidance, and I wouldn’t have thought about it in relation to those other questions. It was when I considered something present for me (peace) that I could see what was missing.

That’s one of the things I love about this style of journaling. I never quite know what might occur.