My Story of Journaling to AI

"Journaling is supposed to be good."

Hearing that, I had been curious about it for a long time.
That's because I have always had a strong interest in
"outputting what's in my head."

The first method I learned about wasbrain dumping.
It involves writing down whatever is in your head onto a large sheet of paper.
That's what it is.

But to be honest,
I felt a resistance to
writing down what was in my head, especially negative things, directly onto paper.

I have tried it before.
But I didn't really get that "I feel refreshed!" feeling,
and it didn't really stick with me.

Even when people said handwriting was better, I couldn't keep it up.

"Writing by hand is better."
"Morning Pages are the best."

You hear things like that often, don't you?

I also bought an A3 notebook
and started Morning Pages.
But it only lasted about a week.

When I felt like trying again,
I noticed, "The last time I wrote was six months ago..." and
just that made me feel a bit down.

I also tried writing meditation.
It wasn't bad, but for some reason, it didn't click.
In the end, none of them became a habit.

What I'm doing now is journaling by "writing to ChatGPT".

For someone like me, the thing that is easiest to keep up with right now is
writing my journal to ChatGPT.

People often say it's best to do it in the morning or at night.
I often write when my head is in a tangle or when I feel like it.

However, I have recently come to feel thatwriting in the morning is the most effective.

The best part is that
I get feedback after I write.

If I write something positive, it praises me properly.
If I write something negative, it empathizes with my feelings while
sometimes organizing things logically and encouraging me.

The fact that it's not just "writing alone and finishing" is really huge.

The feeling of my head clearing up and my thoughts being organized

I think this is partly due to the effect of journaling itself, but
after writing,I have a feeling that the inside of my head becomes a bit more systematic.

It's like taking thoughts that were a jumbled mess and realizing,
"Oh, I see, this is where I'm stuck right now."

From there,
"Ah, maybe there's another way to look at this,"
"Maybe this was just an assumption I had."

Often,new insightsemerge.

I do use a little trick for the dates.

Since ChatGPT doesn't really have a sense of date and time,
I make sure towrite the date and time at the beginning.

However, typing it every time is a hassle, so
I use the Simeji feature where typing "now" inserts the date and time.

Just doing this is convenient because
I can tell later "when and in what state of mind I wrote this."

It's not the conventional way, but it works for me right now.

Of course,
I know that journaling on paper is the standard.

But,this was the method I could continue without strainas I am now.

People often say "journaling should be 15 minutes," but
honestly, I only write for about 5 minutes at most.

Even so, I feel it's effective enough, and
while writing this note,
I thought, "Maybe I'll try aiming for 15 minutes from now on."

To those who couldn't keep up with diaries or journaling

・Not good at writing
・Have a history of not being able to continue
・Afraid of writing negative things

For such people,
journaling by writing to AIis highly recommended.

You don't need the right answer or polished sentences.
Just throw whatever is in your head at the moment.

For me right now, this feels the most natural.