The Only Journaling Video You'll Ever Need | Dr. Sid Warrier

Most people who try journaling quit within a week and I think I know why. We are told that when we journal, we have to write down all our goals or whatever has happened in the day or maybe write down everything that you're grateful for. And while all that can be good advice, that is not what journaling really is. And this is something that I have realized after several years of journaling that you don't journal to write down what you know, you journal when you don't know what to write. So journaling is an act of discovery and not documentation. And if you give me the next seven minutes, I'm going to teach you exactly how can you use this principle to start journaling and probably change your life. I'm Dr. Siddharth Warrior. I'm a brain doctor and welcome to my YouTube channel. Here we teach you everything you need to know about how to keep your brain healthy. If you have not subscribed yet, do so. It means a lot to me. Now let me run you through a common instance. You wake up in the morning and you are feeling irritable. Something is not quite right and you don't know what. You go through the day and you have that heavy feeling with you. It affects every conversation you have with your partner, with your parents, even at your work. That heavy feeling comes in the way of your productivity. You feel like there is a brain fog that is preventing you from thinking clearly and you still don't know why. Even at the end of the day, when you go to sleep, you just feel like today's day was not very good. Now at this point, if someone were to tell you, hey, why don't you journal? You might feel, I don't know what to journal about. I don't know what is happening. But that is exactly where journaling comes in. When you sit down and start writing about what is happening to you without having to explain why, that is when your brain finally starts to look inwards and understands things that you didn't know before. Think of it like this. All you have is one end of a thread that you don't feel good. As you start writing, you are pulling on that thread more and more. And as you keep pulling on that thread, more threads will come out and eventually you reach a place where you finally get the source of all of it. Something in your head, some idea, some memory, some issue that has been there all along, but you simply were ignoring it because you didn't know it was there. Maybe it was a conversation that didn't go exactly the way you wanted, or maybe it's a fear of something that is coming up. Either way, your brain had managed to figure out a way to let you ignore it, but it was still affecting you. And as you journal, you throw a light on it and it comes out. In other words, journaling lets you discover something rather than document something you already know. So if you've ever sat down to journal and thought that, oh, I don't have anything to write about, I'm going to give you three journaling styles that will help you discover yourself before you start The first one is the 10 thought dump. Here's how you start. You take a sheet of paper, you take a pen and you write down 10 thoughts that are in your mind. It doesn't have to be of any hierarchy. It's not like the first one is more important than the last. It can be good thoughts, bad thoughts, anything that is in your mind, just jot down. And when you reach 10, stop. It could be as simple as I need to reply to my mail. I have to go to the gym. I have a presentation coming up. Why haven't I replied to my mom's message? Any 10 thoughts that are circling through your mind should land up on that paper. Now, notice that you are not solving any of those issues, nor are you talking about how you feel about any of those issues. You're simply letting those thoughts come out of your head onto paper. And this is why it works. Your brain is not very good at holding on to unfinished tasks. So the more unfinished tasks you hold on to, the more stressed out you feel. As soon as you see all of it on a piece of paper, you know that it is there now. You don't have to remember it. And that realization acts like a cognitive relief. It's like you've been carrying a 50 kg bag on your shoulder all day and someone just comes and takes it off of you. That is the cognitive equivalent of how you would feel. This method is especially good to do in the morning before you start your work or at the beginning of a journaling session so that you just get everything out. And this is something that I do every time I sit to journal. My first lines on paper is what's on my mind. And I just jot down everything that's on my mind before I start journaling about something more specific that I want to discover. The second style I want you to try out is called free flow writing. Here you take a piece of paper and you pick one topic that's on your mind and you just start writing. The only rule in this style, you cannot stop writing for the next five minutes. Even if nothing comes to your mind, you have to keep writing that nothing is coming to my mind, nothing is coming to my mind. Eventually thoughts will come. The importance of this style is that sometimes you face a resistance to your thoughts coming out and our first instinct is to then stop thinking. But if you force your way through that, if you get past that resistance, you will suddenly unlock a whole new series of thoughts that were simply hiding behind that resistance. So power through that and just experience how many thoughts you actually had to get out, but you simply weren't allowing yourself to. And one truly remarkable thing that happens in free flow writing is that you might start writing about your work, but in two minutes you are writing a long story about your relationship and how something has bothered you and you didn't even realize that you were thinking about it. One suggestion that I have is that you start free flow writing with some idea on what are you writing about. Let's say, why am I not able to focus or why am I procrastinating? And you start writing and where you end up is your point of discovery. And finally, the third style of journaling, which is something that I'm still working on is targeted questioning. And here you can use AI. The idea is really simple. Instead of figuring out what to ask yourself, you can turn to an AI app and tell it the subject that you want to journal about today and ask the AI app to ask you five questions. Now, it's important that you write down the answers to those five questions on your notebook. I'm not asking you to have a conversation with an AI bot, but what these LLMs are really good at is giving you interesting prompts. So if you are having trouble, say, focusing, you can ask to ask you five questions that can make you introspect on why are you not able to focus and use those questions as prompts to write down your answers. The reason this is useful is that your brain works differently when you're trying to think yourself versus when you're trying to answer someone else's question. Also, why therapy can be so useful. But here you are not really sitting in front of anybody. You're not getting judged by anyone. You are simply using a tool at your disposal, which is AI to create questions, to trick your brain into thinking it is answering questions. So it is a kind of self journaling, but with the use of an external tool. And very often it happens that a good question can unlock an answer that you didn't know you had. So to put it all together, you journal to discover more about yourself, not just to document what you already know. And the three styles that I would suggest that you try to discover yourself more is the 10 thought dump, the free flow writing and targeted questioning of yourself with the use of an AI tool. All these three things put together should not take you more than 15 minutes and 15 minutes of journaling like this every day would make your life unrecognizable in three months. Trust me on this. I hope that all of you try out these journaling styles and within three months, you come back to this video, comment below how your life has changed because of this. I would absolutely love to read it. And before you go, I want to tell you something interesting that I've been doing. So for the past three months, I have been building warrior clinic. It is a neurology and mental health center here in Mumbai. And every week I have started conducting community workshops. Some of them could be on breathwork, Bhagavad Gita and neuroscience. We are doing rock balancing workshops, storytelling workshops. The idea is that building community is a very strong part of mental health. And if I truly want to treat mental health in this country, building a community is important. So if you guys are in Bombay and you ever want to come down, I'm going to leave a WhatsApp link below. Join the group. All the updates are going to be on it. I hope to see some of you in person at the clinic. I love you all. Take care, everyone. Bye.