From stuff.co.nz
At the end of every day, Suraya Sidhu Singh sits down to write in her journal.
What the Taranaki-based writer and artist puts down isn’t meant to be profound or insightful – although sometimes, with hindsight, it is – more often it’s a simple record of her life: what she ate, who she spoke to, what she did, where she went and what she thought about it.
“I think when you have a creative background, it feels like a journal has to be amazingly perfect and wonderful, insightful and beautifully written all the time.
“But if you can spend an hour, or if you have 10 minutes here or there, to capture your day, one day that might be really meaningful to somebody. I don't know who. I just thought, 'yeah, I can do that',” she says.
“I come from a family that doesn't really talk much about feelings, and I think a lot of people do. So I thought, 'well, at least there is some kind of record of the person that you were’, even if you're not delving [into your feelings], or keeping a mood journal, necessarily.”
BACKED BY THE SCIENCE
There was a period in the late 90s when journaling as a means of self-discovery got something of a bad rap.
That’s unsurprising when “hardening up” was still how we dealt with depression, and pouring your feelings onto paper was considered an ‘emo’ excuse to write bad poetry.
Haters always gonna hate, but in the 2000s and early teens, several studies backed claims that writing it out significantly eased the symptoms of mental illness, even when that illness was chronic.
In her book 2001 book Painfully Shy: How to Overcome Social Anxiety and Reclaim Your Life, US psychologist and anxiety expert Dr Barbara Markway wrote, “there’s simply no better way to learn about your thought processes than to write them down”.
Only once you know how you think, can you tackle the negative self-talk that’s often the root of the problem.
The first study to look at the effects of expressive writing on Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in 2013 found just three days of pouring their hearts out into a journal lowered participants' MDD scores significantly, as well as alleviating symptoms of the disease.
Anecdotally, writing works for more mild, every day emotional turbulence, too.
Curious about the nature of memory, Sidhu Singh started dipping back into her journals and discovered just how fallible and prone to reinforcing negativity, memory can be.
“Every time I read [an entry], it was either something I’d totally forgotten – I think it’s interesting, because once you've forgotten something you don't know you've forgotten it. Journals are the only way to recover those memories in a way – or I remembered it differently from how I had recorded it.”
By re-reading her diaries she could see that “life is made up of these continual moments of nice reinforcement that happens to us, even if we have memories that make us cringe and keep us self-conscious”.
As someone with “a tendency to lay down negative memories, more than positive ones”, Sidhu Singh found that valuable, even liberating.
Physical health can also get a boost from the act of writing your feelings.
A Kiwi study from Auckland University's Department of Psychology showed that expressive writing helped older people and women actually heal wounds faster.
At the time the paper was published, author Dr Elizabeth Broadbent told Scientific American that “writing about distressing events helped participants make sense of the events and reduce distress”, that in turn lowered cortisol levels, and helped participants sleep better, giving the body more quality time to heal.
University of Rochester medical centre in upstate New York, responsible for the health and well-being of more than 11, 000 students, advises students to take up journaling to manage the anxiety and stress of studying at a top-tier US school.
“Keeping a journal helps you create order when your world feels like it’s in chaos,” the centre’s website says.
It also gives you a place to offload your woes, so you can get on with more important stuff, like learning and creating.
CREATIVE RECHARGE
"I just began writing because it was the way to start actually organising my thoughts,” says artist Denise Durkin, who’s kept a “creative journal” since she was training at polytech. A sort of external brain dump, where she can offload all her ideas, inspirations, and emotional baggage, keeping a diary leaves her free to explore her creativity.
"We'd be given a project on the big layout pads. Other people would start sketching thumbnails, but always started with writing.”
She would write "free flow", pouring out pages of ideas about the project, before drawing anything.
"Something about the cognitive process of writing words really helps you not only think, but come up with ideas. You don't know what you're going to think until you actually write it down."
Durkin’s process is reminiscent of self-help guru Julie Cameron’s Morning Pages, from the best-selling book The Artist's Way..
Cameron’s process involves writing absolutely anything and everything for a solid hour as soon as you wake up, getting all the mental detritus out of the way, so you can get on with the more important business of being creative.
While Durkin hasn’t heard of Cameron or her creativity bible, her notebooks have a similarly mentally freeing effect. But they’re also a repository of creative inspiration.
"I've gone back to them and created an art work that I wouldn't have remembered it if I hadn't written it down exactly. I also get a lot of titles for my artwork out of that.
"It stops me spinning my wheels, it really does. The act of sitting down and just writing and focusing on something, you get things in order, you can see it, and you pick something and get on with it. It's a very vital way to organise your day."
One thing she doesn’t use journaling for is recording her feelings because she’ll “end up looking for what makes you sad”.
"I realised what you really need to do is look at when were you happy.
“You’ve got to think about what you're focusing on when you're writing it down.”
The link between the physical act of writing and boosting memory is long-established. There’s a reason rote learning works.
Durkin’s practise of writing everything means that, when she makes extensive notes for the drawing classes she teaches, it down solidifies her lessons in her mind, so she seldom has to refer back to her notebooks.
"I've never encouraged [my students] to actually write because it's a drawing class, and I'm always encouraging them to draw, but it is the same. It's a cognitive manual skill that really helps with thinking, that I think we're losing in the digital world.”
THE LIFE INTENTIONAL
Writing by hand, rather than tapping it into your tablet or phone, where it's usually quickly forgotten, is a cornerstone of the Bullet Journal Method created by US designer Ryder Carroll.
Originally designed as a way to organise and optimise his professional life, Carroll quickly discovered a Bullet Journaling could be used to identify and achieve other, more nebulous, goals.
“There's a huge difference between what you should want and what you do want. I didn't realise that until I had I launched my own company after years of working on it, and it didn't matter. I didn't care.
“I think it was the first time in my life where I realised that I don't know what I actually want.”
Rather than panicking or throwing in the towel, he took all the tools he designed to achieve someone else’s idea of success, and "directed them inward", to "figure out what was going on in there".
"This is the foundation of the Bullet Journal method. It's not about what you're doing, it's about why you're doing it. It's very circular, it's like an ecosystem.”
Once you understand your motivations, you have all tools to help you take your insights, and put them into action.
It starts with bullet point lists, which give this type of journaling its name, the rapid off-loading of everything in our heads, from ideas to feelings, errands to important dates, deadlines to insights.
“It’s a great start,” says Carroll.
"If you're anything like me, these lists are never ending and half the time they actually become a great source of anxiety and sometimes shame. And then we abandon these lists, or we hold ourselves accountable for all these things we could never possibly get done.
"But a big part of bullet journaling is not about keeping never ending lists. It's about writing things down and then re-engaging with those things."
He calls this "daily reflection", a time to revisit your lists and re-assess them every day, every week, every month. Doing this "we study the substance of our minds, of our thoughts, of our emotions, to learn from it".
You might start to see you’re really stressed by some activities, or that you dislike working with a certain person, or that a certain type of project really gives you joy.
You get in the habit of “reading the story of your own life”, and in so doing, you’ll start to see what you want more of and what you want less of, “the things that give you energy, the things that take energy away from you”.
With that knowledge, you can start to plan accordingly.
“Over time, you only bring forward the things that add value to your life – not just that make you happy, that add value to your life. Things that add value don't necessarily make us happy, like paying rent, paying your insurance,” says Carroll.
“You're cultivating both your curiosity in, and your awareness of how you're behaving, and how you're feeling. And you're taking that information, and you're regularly putting it into action. Like, I feel incredibly lonely now, what am I going to do tomorrow? Tomorrow, I'm going to call my friend, I'm going to go spend some time with my parents.”
It’s all about living intentionally, instead of getting steamrollered by life.
LIVING RECORD
For Sidhu Singh, that opportunity to track and assess your feelings, combined with the power of writing doesn’t come without caveats.
"Doing something because it makes you feel good, that you believe in the importance of, that's reinforcing your own values, is great. It's had unexpected benefits for me, and I don't see any downsides,” she says.
"But I'm aware that if you dwell on worries, particularly in your journal, I think it magnifies them.
"So I would say yes, it does help you remember and clarify things more, but I think it's important to use that power wisely.”
