Why you stopped journaling, and why it was the first thing to go

For a long stretch, the first thing I did in the morning was write. My head tends to start moving before I have properly woken up, and putting the thoughts somewhere took the noise out of them. Every session ended the same way, with a line at the bottom of the page: one day you will be dead, and none of this will last. It was not a morbid habit. It was the quickest way I had found of working out which of the morning's worries were worth carrying, which was usually fewer than it had felt like ten minutes earlier.

Then I stopped journaling. There was no decision. I was busy building something, and I began opening the laptop instead, and the habit that had been holding the day together was simply gone. It was around six months before I understood what had happened.

What I noticed first was not the absence. It was the symptoms. A shorter fuse. Thoughts moving faster than I could sort them. A background anxiety that had not been there before. It took a couple of months of that before the obvious explanation arrived, which was that I had stopped doing the small things. The ten minutes of writing. The meditation. The stretching. The books I was no longer reading. None of them significant on the day you do them, which is rather the point of them.

Why it is always the first thing to go

The reason is not laziness. It is that journaling produces nothing anyone can see, including you. The gym shows up in the mirror. Work shows up as work, and a finished task can be pointed at. Writing down what is in your head produces a page nobody reads, no visible proof that anything happened, and no evidence at all of the effort you put in. It is the exact opposite of social media, which is most of the reason it is worth doing and all of the reason it does not survive a busy week. If you have never done it, the reward is not merely invisible. It is hard to imagine. It sounds like homework.

It is a little like homework. It is a thing you do not particularly want to do and do anyway, and the payment arrives later in a form you cannot point at. James Pennebaker has spent decades studying what happens when people write about difficult things, and reviews of that research report something which explains a great deal about why the habit fails to stick: the immediate effect of expressive writing is usually a short-term increase in distress. You feel worse first. What follows comes afterwards. So the habit asks you to pay now for something that settles later, while everything else in your day offers to pay you immediately. Of course it loses.

And the ten minutes it would take is not really the obstacle. Ten minutes exists. It is already spoken for, usually by doom scrolling, which does not register as time spent because it never feels like a decision.

Then, once you have dropped it, nothing appears to go wrong. James Clear's argument in Atomic Habits is that habits compound, and that the ones worth keeping are almost always too small to feel worth doing at the time. What gets less attention is the other half of the same arithmetic. If small habits compound when you keep them, they compound when you drop them too, and the loss is every bit as invisible as the gain was. Nothing collapses. You simply arrive, some months later, as a shorter-tempered version of yourself, with no particular day you can point at as the one where it happened.

What the writing was actually doing

The clearest thing I lost was ammunition. Stopping made the inner critic louder, and I think the reason is mechanical rather than mysterious. An unwritten thought gets to stay vague, and vagueness is what the critic runs on. Through those months the question underneath everything was whether any of it would work, whether anyone would want the thing I was building, whether the time and the money had been a mistake. Those questions never had to hold still and be looked at. They circled instead, and circling is where they are strongest.

Writing changes what the brain is doing with the thought. In 2007, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA published a study called Putting Feelings Into Words. They found that naming an emotion reduced activity in the amygdala and raised it in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and that the two moved inversely: as the naming went up, the reactivity came down. Affect labelling, they called it. What is worth noticing is what the finding does not say. Naming a feeling does not bring logic in to win an argument with it. It turns the volume down.

This is what writing does that thinking about something does not. Turning a thing over in your head keeps it in the place where it can only be felt. Writing moves it somewhere it can be looked at.

Think of a house where nothing has been put away. You cannot find anything. You do not know where you left it, because the place is a mess. A head full of unwritten thoughts works the same way, except worse, because you also cannot tell which of them are true. Writing gives the thoughts a home. Once they have one, most of them turn out to need very little: some go in a drawer and you are finished with them, some go straight in the bin, and a few turn out to be the thing you were actually going to have to deal with. Most of what you feel stays unprocessed.

What you actually get to decide

There is a line I wrote in a journal entry once, on a bad morning: we decide how we feel. Reading it back, I do not entirely believe it. Things affect us. Losing people affects us, being badly treated affects us, and any version of this that tells you to simply choose otherwise is not honest about being a person.

That line is also an example of the thing it was trying to describe. I wrote it quickly and believed it completely at the time. Reading it back later I could see what it had actually been, which was me giving myself a talking-to on a morning that needed one. I would not have known that if it had stayed in my head. Nothing that stays in your head gets read back.

The version of this I recognise most happens on smaller days. I have gone to the page angry with somebody, certain I was right about it, and written my way through the whole thing, and arrived at the end able to see the other side. Not because I talked myself out of the anger, and not because the anger was wrong. Because I had been talking to myself through the writing, and somewhere in that it lost the shape it had while it was only being felt.

There is something in the line all the same, and it is smaller and more useful than the slogan. While a feeling stays in your head it writes its own story and you get no say in it. Written down and looked at, you get a say. You can see what it is made of, what set it off, whether the conclusion it drew was reasonable. Then you decide what you make of it, and the feeling has somewhere to finish. Not deciding how you feel. Deciding more than you otherwise would have, which is a smaller claim and a true one.

I would like to finish by saying the habit is back for good. It is not. The ten minutes in the morning and the ten at night held for a while, then slipped, and I am starting again. I have written that sentence before and I expect to write it again. What I have stopped doing is treating the restart as a new beginning, because it never feels like one. It feels like an old friend who has been away.

References

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5). A plain-language summary from UCLA Health is easier going than the paper.

Baikie, K. A., & Wilhelm, K. (2005). Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 11(5). A review of the writing paradigm developed by James Pennebaker, and the source for the short-term increase in distress described above.