Episode 276 – I’m begging you to start journaling

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

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In this episode of A Changed Mind, David Bayer makes the case that journaling is the single most underestimated personal growth practice available to you, and teaches the exact 10 to 15 minute process he uses himself.

David is direct about the stakes here. If you told him he could keep only one tool, framework, or process from everything he teaches, this would be the one. The reason is structural. Most practices work on one or two dimensions of transformation. Meditation changes your relationship with your thoughts. Therapy helps you process emotions. Visualization builds a relationship with a future that has not happened yet. Prayer connects you to something greater. Journaling does nearly all of it at once, and it requires nothing but a pen and paper.

He walks through five unlocks. First, writing slows your mind down enough to access what sits behind it. He shares the moment his hand finished a sentence differently than his mind intended, revealing that the real reason he was procrastinating had nothing to do with the work. Second, handwriting engages far more of your brain than typing, and David connects this to the ancients, to runes, to spelling and inscription as acts of creation rather than recording. Third, journaling gives stuck emotions a pathway out, because it is almost impossible to write honestly without feeling. Fourth, it amplifies what you want more of, sustaining the neurological experience of gratitude instead of letting the thought pass in two seconds. Fifth, it becomes a form of communion with your higher power.

That fifth unlock is where he gets personal. David tells the story of how communion journaling emerged: the desire for a more personal relationship with God, the idea he initially dismissed, his wife suggesting the same thing weeks later, and the breath work session where his body sat up and started writing in the air before he finally listened. What came out that first morning at six a.m. was not a technique. It was a conversation. Thank God for everything. Ask God for what you want, with the knowingness that you are asking the creator of all things. Then ask on behalf of others. Three steps, five to 15 minutes, and a completely different relationship with your day.