if you're anything like me you've probably googled such classics as why am i so anxious can't stop feeling sad and who can forget how to stop panicking oh god oh god oh god you know the hits and if you have googled this then you've probably come across advice that just says journal but how do you actually do it that is the question that i'm going to attempt to answer in this video how do you journal how do you journal better for mental clarity for more direction for your anxieties for when bad things happen to make your day-to-day life better but to answer those questions i've got to pay you a picture of who i was before i journaled and a quick warning this story gets a bit heavy so if you don't want to hear stuff about suicide drug abuse or family drama just skip to this time here cast your mind back to 2009 it was a simpler time we had skinny jeans dubstep and fluoro shirts with gigantic fonts on them now picture me i was a young 18 year old with a bleach blonde rat's tail unfortunately for me at the time it felt like my whole world was crumbling it wasn't anything too out of the ordinary but it all happened at once i had a really hectic suicide attempt when i drove my mother's car headfirst into a tree i was diagnosed with bipolar disorder i had a close call with an overdose and my parents were finalizing a messy divorce meanwhile they were also going through some pretty gnarly financial drama so the house got repossessed by the bank people always say drugs aren't the answer but holy hell they really were they were for me in that moment and so i found myself at 18 with a pretty hectic drug problem i was so determined to be high all the time that i would do these things where i put out a line and my alarm would go off in the morning to wake me up and i would do the line and then turn off my alarm i lost weight i lost friends and to support my drug habit i obviously had to sell drugs so i ended up getting kicked out of uni for that here's where journaling enters the story so not too long after my 19th birthday i was just a freaking mess i was stressed i was chaotic and for whatever reason i had this urge to sit down at a computer one day and i just decided that i would type out every single thought that was in my head and so i did it and the thoughts magically traveled from my head through my fingers and onto the page in front of me and it was so bizarre man once i saw the words in front of me they didn't look as scary and my bully overhead finally went quiet for about two days and that's when i realized that journaling was a practice that i would have to do for life fast forward 12 years of constant journaling and it really has changed me it's been my number one go-to tool for any problem-solving in my life ever and over these years i have come across and come up with all sorts of techniques various questions and exercises that you can use in your life quick disclaimer before we get to these techniques i'm no expert i'm just a dude with the youtube channel who loves to journal i make a video on all of the techniques i talk about here but for now this is a pretty fast and dense overview this is just what's worked for me so take the good stuff leave the bad stuff and let's go the nine journaling techniques that changed my life journaling for clarity this is the first ever journaling technique i tried which is basically a mind dump where you write every single thought as you have it and there are two ways to do this you can either sit down in one session and try write out every thought that you're having or you can keep a notebook with you and every time you have a new thought just jot it down personally i hand write mine in this cheap notebook i usually fill out one page and i'll do this maybe three times a week journaling for breaking your mindset i find sometimes that i get fixated on something and i get really obsessive about one thing and it gets to the point where i can't think about other stuff so i use the following three exercises to break that imagine six impossible things this is from the author lewis carroll things like imagine a camel and his best friend skating over an exploding pigeon something about indulging in whimsy just makes me really happy the second one i use is how can i make someone else happy right now this is really cool because you immediately get out of that mindset of serving yourself and you start serving someone else and it can be basic like just telling a friend you love them or if that's way too intimate just sending them a weird meme another one to break out of your mindset is what's something in my immediate environment that i have never noticed i've never noticed the square sail there that's cool something new the purpose of this question is if you're stuck in the past or the future it immediately draws you to the present journaling for daily reflections this is the most common type of journaling you might have seen like gratitude journals stuff like that wherein you reflect on your day using a specific set of questions the questions i like are what excited me what drained me of energy what did i learn what are 10 things i'm grateful for and how did i push the needle forward if you do these five questions most days for a month you will learn so much about yourself for me the biggest lessons came from number two what drained me of energy after a month of saying the exact same two things alcohol and social media i was like huh i wonder what i need to change it's stuff you already know or at least suspect but when it's staring at you on the page consistently you're like ah yep message received journaling for habits and lifestyle audit this is for anybody who's in a phase in their life where they are going for big improvements where they want to get better and level up i will say with a bit of a caveat that this is pretty harsh but when i'm in the mood to be harsh on myself this is the technique that i use i divide my page into three columns and at the first column i put actions and on the second and third column i'll put the worst version of myself and the best possible version of myself so i might write these out like lazy self-indulgent cruel alcoholic slob and funny and fun sober dude with limitless creativity someone like that they might sound corny but you know push through you got this at the end of your day in the first column you'll put every single thing that you did that day what you ate who you hung out with what work you did list them all down there and then in the second and third column decide whether that thing gave you a point in the negative or the positive column so for example i drank 10 beers that would be a point in the negative column but if i worked on like a video like this that would be a point in the positive column then you add all the points and give yourself a score and whichever identity one is the direction that your life is moving toward like i said it's a bit harsh and it's obviously exploiting a false binary like this doesn't actually exist but if you are looking for maybe an extra push and you kind of respond a little bit well to that type of reinforcement i'd recommend it journaling for when bad things happen my god bad things just happen sometimes don't they it's just shitty you just expect life to go this way and then bang it's going this way and you're like oh oh no it's inevitable so it's good to have tools these are the four questions that i use what happened objectively what did i make it mean how would i comfort a friend i loved if this happened to them and my favorite journaling question of all time how is this the best thing that has ever happened to me i think that last one's from tom bilyeu what i like about these four questions is it reminds me of that quote from hamlet there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so by separating the objective events of a bad thing with the meaning that we have instinctively assigned it we can start to get a pretty glimpse into our cognitive distortions then we can override our tendencies to beat ourselves up by treating us like a friend that we love and give ourselves a little bit of compassion in this situation then finally by framing this bad thing as the best thing that's ever happened to us we get to use that thinking that hamlet talked about to make an objective event which we felt was bad good this isn't to deny that it sucked by the way i'm sure it did and does whatever it is so acknowledge that too journaling for anxieties i'm a pretty anxious dude just in general i freak out a lot this is a technique where you divide your page into three columns again and you write fears fixes and the outcome that i would bet on so let's say you're anxious about putting your art online something which is totally normal to be anxious about what you want to do in the first column is dissect your anxiety into its constituent fears on the surface it might just feel like fear but when you divide it it's things like i'm worried people will tell me it's bad i'm worried no one's gonna look at it then in your fixes you want to write a really basic strategy to overcome those fears so if you're worried people might call it bad you might say well my strategy is to turn off comments until i've posted my 20th piece these strategies don't have to be perfect all we're trying to do is look at the anxieties and realize that they are just anxieties now in the third column the outcome you'd bet on this is to eliminate catastrophizing so something that happens to me every time my partner leaves the house every time felicity like gets in the car i immediately think that she is gonna get into a car accident and die but i know that this is just me catastrophizing and i know that this is just my anxiety and the way that i get around this is by having that third column the outcome that i would bet on the odds of a car crash are so low that i wouldn't bet on them so why does my head even entertain the idea it's just anxiety plus no amount of rehearsing tragedy will ever make you ready for it so you know there's that too before i continue the list i do just want to say something really exciting i just got my first copy of my book this is what it looks like and the reason that i wanted to show you in this video is well firstly i got this last week and secondly every single chapter ends with a journaling exercise essentially it's a chaotic guide to mental clarity says it up there wherein we examine brain function using this metaphor of a houseboat here's an octopus a bunch of people cool zoo and these pages are journaling exercises hence the relevance anyway it is available for pre-order comes out in october i'll leave the links in the description so i'm just so excited and mentioning journaling just made me want to chuck this in there back to the video journaling for your to-do list and direction i start this with a full page where and i put in all these dot points and i basically make a scattered list of all my various obligations and all the things that i'd like to do from here i ordered this list with a couple of questions what is non-negotiable what is exciting then i use a couple of questions that i got from tim ferriss what on my list if done would make everything else easier what of these if the opportunity was taken away from me would i fight to get back which really helps with what you should say yes and no to and the iconic pareto question what 20 of activities are producing 80 of the results from here i can usually get a full page of a list down to about maybe less than 15 points and that's really cool journaling for decision making what is the decision slash problem clearly define it i can't remember who said it but a problem well defined as a problem half solved what are the options and are they mutually exclusive so you can't be in two countries at once but you can do two projects at once so really analyze what the actual options are if i had to make this decision in 60 seconds what would i choose i'll actually put on a timer and i'll write out my decision what i love about this question is it helps me tap into my intuition because i find that i usually know the answer to a lot of these questions but i'm too scared to tell myself for some reason i don't know there's always some sort of fear in the way but with that timer ticking down i'm like no it's this it's got to be this oh a million bucks then with that 60 second decision i asked could i live with this outcome and then i'd check on another tim ferriss question actually which is what would this look like if it were easy finally journaling for direction in life this is a technique that i came up with after thinking about high school mathematics if you think about a graph like a basic x y graph if you only have one point on it you don't know a direction that a line would go it could pivot on that point it could be headed down it could be curved but if you put in a second point you have a relationship you have a direction and the more points you put in the clearer that direction is in journaling terms these points are asking yourself what do you want and if you look at the x-axis it's asking yourself what did you want at various times in your life so the actual questions are what did i want five years ago what do i want now and what do i think i want in five years time just like in a graph you can work out your actual direction when you look forward into the life that you're trying to make i find i know it's a cliche and i know it's corny but man this final question will help so much if it's used correctly if i knew i couldn't fail what would i do so yeah those are my favorite journaling techniques that i've come up with over the past 12 years if you were interested in the book there's a pre-order link in the description joshua ginsberg called it the most important and accessible mental health book in a generation no pressure book aside i really hope that this video has helped you let me know what you thought subscribe if you're new other than that have a gorgeous day catch