How to Journal : a step by step guide

hi friends welcome back to my YouTube channel where we talk about Neuroscience your brain health and how to live a good life you've all heard about journaling now how many of you Journal regularly go down to the comments and let me know if you Journal right now before you watch the rest of this video I'm dividing this video into two parts why to journal and how to journal there are time stamps Below in case you want to jump ahead now why should you Journal life is happening quite fast these days and you and your brain

are going through a lot your me meting new people learning new things feeling a lot of emotions it can be quite a roller coaster and some days it's fun but other days it can feel overwhelming because when your brain is going through a lot of things especially emotions it cannot think very clearly you may find it difficult to plan ahead you may get that feeling that you are overthinking and some of you may have felt what is called brain fog there is a reason for this in your brain there's a part called as the prefrontal

cortex which is responsible for logic rational thinking and planning ahead this is also the part that does the talking and the writing so when you have something to say to someone your prefrontal cortex helps you find the right words but there is another part called as the limic system which is the old primitive part of the brain this is the part that feels emotions like anger and sadness but also happiness and excitement and whenever the lyic system is very active the PFC can't do its job which is why whenever you are emotional you can't think

very well you must have seen someone when they are angry how they're not able to speak properly they may use the same words again and again or just use insults they can't use complex sentences and also they can't understand complex sentences now people who are in relationships may have experienced this if your partner is very angry with you and you say something smart and complicated they will feel even more angry this is because at this time they are in a lyic phase so it's like you are talking in a foreign language that they can't understand

which is very annoying but as they Cal down they are able to use more and more words now here is the trick that you need to know if you use more words you also calm down this is because as I mentioned before using words means you are using more of your prefrontal cortex and the more PFC you use the calmer you get and that is why journaling helps because when you sit down and write about your emotions your brain is gradually shifting from a lyic to a prefrontal stage and in this process you get more

clarity about life the second reason to journal is to document now if life is speeding up and you are consuming a lot of content a lot of information that also means that you're forgetting a lot of information and the more you forget the less you learn and when you are living so fast it is easy to get lost to lose track of where you are and wher you planning to go because let's face it it's very easy to get distracted these days you're doing one thing some phone rings some notification pops and you've forgotten whatever

it is you were thinking journaling is a way to keep track of where you are where you're going and how far you have come it is only when you look at your previous journals entries from a year ago or even a month ago or even a week ago that you realize how much things have changed how much you have changed how much you have grown and because our memories are not always good and because we always have some biases about ourselves it's easy to ignore our own growth or think negatively about ourselves or even lie

about our our own faults and mistakes journaling helps us catch those things and that means we become more self-aware and a third good reason to journal is that someday you will be famous and you or someone else might want to write a book about your life and then you won't remember all the fun stuff you don't want that do you so start journaling now that I've convinced you that you should start journaling let's talk about how to journal so here we'll first talk about where to journal should you write in a book some fancy diary

of Word document should you buy some expensive app the short answer is you should write in whichever place is the easiest for you to write where you write is not as important as whether you write at all but that being said let me tell you where I journal and what are my reasons for it I journal online in a website called notion I like it because I can access it across all of my devices and there's also a nice app which is easy to use there is a widget that I can put on my home

screen for easy easy access and within the journal I can also add tags which makes searching really easy my personal issue with journaling in a book is that I travel a lot and sometimes if I forget to carry that book I don't want to miss out on my writing but I know many people who journal in notebooks and it works very well for them now coming to how to actually Journal there are two ways of doing this I call it structured and unstructured now quick reminder if you haven't subscribed to this channel already please do

so it's a motivation for me to create high quality videos for you and you get to see awesome Neuroscience content on your feed now structured journaling is when you have a pre-existing framework and you just fit in your answers according to that framework like a question and answer section these questions could be like what are you most grateful for today what did you do today that made you scared what are three things you did today that you are proud of such Frameworks are useful because they allow you to organize your thoughts and it makes journaling

easier there are many physical and online journals available that already have such pre-existing Frameworks in them or you can create your own framework personalized for you and as you keep growing you can change this framework to suit your needs better so structured journaling is a great place to start with especially if you haven't journaled before the other way is unstructured journaling where you don't follow any fixed framework but just write what's on your mind this might seem challenging at first but after I did it for some time I found it more comfortable and more natural

even freeing now there were a couple of practical problems that I face with journaling which I will share with you and also give you Solutions number one was that when too many things happen in a day you can sometimes forget important things like a realization that you had or a good discussion that you had with a friend you might forget it by the time you start journaling at the end of the day or the next day morning the other problem I faced is in unstructured journaling things may seem very halfhazard because when you're writing you're

not really editing your thoughts and so if you want to go back and you want to find something specific you might not be able to do that easily especially if you're writing in a physical book so for this I propose a three-level method of journaling I call it the three C method and the three C's are collect consolidate and connect level one is collect where you collect your thoughts thoughts at the time when you have them you don't wait till the end of the day or the next day this is like rough work it doesn't

have to be clean it's just a way for you to remember something it can be done anywhere on a piece of paper or you can put it down on your notes app or the most practical solution for me was you can WhatsApp it to yourself just type a quick message or leave a voice note so that you can remember what happened and at the end of the day when you actually sit to journal you already have a list of things to work with level two is consolidate where you take everything else that you've collected add

more things that you remember and put it all in one place now you can add your own thoughts about things add tags and even add photographs if you want anything to make your journaling experience more exciting interesting and fun for you to read later on now this is where most people stop journaling document things and move on with your life but actually there is one more step to journaling which I think is the most important one and that is level three connect this is where you spend time with what you've written and learn from it

and it helps to do this after some time has passed from the time that you've written it so that you can see it without the strong effect of lyic emotion so maybe after a week or so after your PFC is working fine go back to what you've written and try to spot patterns in your own behavior spot patterns in your way of thinking try to think about why did you do what you did try to spot similar patterns in previous entries in your Journal because as you zoom out and you see more and more of

your life the more patterns will come out and that is how you see more of yourself which is what self-awareness is all about and once you've done this with yourself it's easier to do this with other people and understand other people better and as you keep getting better at this you will learn more lessons faster and more efficiently than you otherwise would have these are lessons that would have otherwise taken you months or years to learn or maybe you would have never learned them and that is the true power of journaling try it out let

me know how it goes all the best to all of you cheers