Ink to Blog

Repeating patterns in our journal entries

One often overlooked benefit of journaling is recognizing our own thinking patterns. Because journaling records our thoughts, after some time we should have an index of the things we think about. We can use this to our advantage to tackle worries or negative emotions in a structured way.

When we write, we tend to use the same phrases, the same nouns, or the same names in our journal entries. I am often able to notice these patterns during a writing session, because the phrases feel so familiar, like I am repeating myself. But we can also actively search for these repetitions by browsing through the pages or searching for words that we think we have written before (when journaling digitally).

Investigation

We often combine descriptive writing with a more reflective approach after it, to make sense of a situation or to draw conclusions from it.

If we rely solely on descriptive writing, we can only see the pattern in the things that happen to us and what they made us feel. Because we now can recognize that something bothers us again and again, it is the right time to reflect on the experiences. This only makes sense when we view these reoccurring patterns as something we want to eliminate, because it would make our lives better. These situations are not always solvable. Sometimes we use journaling to just vent about events or life situations that are inevitable, and while we can't solve the situations themselves, we can still draw conclusions to help us deal with them, or extract reason from events after describing them first. This is also known as "Reflection-on-action": to look at what happened in the past to find patterns and to learn from them (as opposed to "Reflection-in-action": thinking while doing something). In conclusion, pattern recognition is helpful here to define a target for our reflective writing. I will also suggest some questions you could ask yourself.

"Why do I act this way?"
"How will I deal with this in the future?"
"Can such situations be prevented going forward?"
"Why does this happen again and again and how much does it bother me?"
"What kind of person do I want to be when such a situation emerges?"

Not meeting the own expectations

But what happens when we have already come to conclusions or even have suggested a solution to a specific problem to ourselves through journaling? This is a more interesting case, because we have identified that something is weighing us down and that we want to tackle it, but the self-suggested solution has not worked as expected. Here, we have to dig deeper and find out why our approach did not work. What stopped us from pursuing our goal and fixing the problem? Coming up with a plan and writing it down can feel like a victory in itself, making it easier to forget that we also have to pursue the plan, which is often harder than previously assumed. Were we over-optimistic? Or was the plan just not realistic? Here are also some questions that can help with finding an answer.

"When did I forget about my ambitions?"
"What are triggers that I have to look out for to make the right decisions?"
"Was this solution within my control?"
"What do I now think of this solution after some time has passed?"
"Can I maybe take smaller steps to get closer to a solution?"

Seeing a pattern is the easy part. Making sense of them, reflecting on them, and understanding ourselves with regards to our actions is harder. But the hardest part is to actually change something. So we should not be frustrated when a plan doesn't work right away. It is already a significant step to commit to controlling negative emotions and influences.