journaling fixes your mind

Welcome and overview

00:00All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how journaling fixes your mind. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself.

00:11Then your mind is broken and you don't even know it. The repair mechanism, the clear mind, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me oneon-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description.

00:23And if you want this training along with its respective document, then again, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters on how to improve in every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description.

00:40With that said, let's get started and talk

Your mind is broken and you don't even know it

00:47about how your mind is broken and why you don't even know it yet. So your mind, the thing you use to make every single decision, process every emotion and interpret every experience, is running on old conditioning where patterns you absorbed years ago, most of them during childhood or adolescence are still running your daily life without you even knowing it.

01:04And even though you think you're making conscious choices and you think your reactions are rational and you think the way you see the world is accurate, for the most part, you're wrong. Because the mind you're living with right now carries flaws, blind spots, and loops that most people go their entire lives without ever stopping to examine.

01:24Now, your mind runs on patterns that were formed during the earliest and most formative periods of your life. And those patterns made sense at the time. They were adaptive responses to the environment you were already in. But most of them are completely mismatched to the life you're living now and they're causing problems you can't really see because you've never stepped back far enough to actually examine them.

01:50So the patterns formed during a period when you had very little understanding of the world and very limited tools for processing experience, which means your core operating patterns were essentially designed by a child's brain. And you've been running on that child's logic ever since without really updating it.

02:09And these patterns persist because they're wired deep into your mind below the level of conscious awareness, which means you can't just decide to change them through willpower or positive thinking. They require a specific kind of sustained examination to even become visible, let alone to modify.

02:22And the patterns are invisible precisely because they've been running for so long that they feel like reality rather than interpretation. And you can't question something you don't even realize is a choice. Which is why most people live their entire lives inside patterns they never chose and never examined.

02:47And the mismatch between old patterns and current reality is where most of your problems actually originate. Where the anxiety, the self-doubt, the procrastination, the relationship difficulties, the self-sabotage that you experience aren't random malfunctions.

03:01They're the predictable output of patterns that were designed for a completely different context. Anxiety, for example, is often an old pattern's response to perceived threat in a situation that your adult self can clearly see is not that threatening.

03:13But the pattern fires anyway because it was installed at a time when similar situations actually were threatening. And the pattern doesn't know the difference between then and now. And self-sabotage is usually a pattern designed to protect you from a specific type of failure or rejection that was genuinely dangerous in an earlier context, but now it's just preventing you from taking risks that would actually move your life forward.

03:36And you can't override it until you understand what it's trying to protect you from. And beyond individual patterns, your mind also runs loops, meaning recurring cycles of thought, emotion, and behavior that play out the same way every time they're triggered.

03:48And those loops can run for years or decades without you ever realizing that you're stuck in one. So if you look at your life honestly, you'll probably notice that certain situations keep producing the same outcome and that you most likely get into the same situations over and over again where you keep ending up in the same kinds of conflicts or making the same kinds of mistakes or feeling the same kinds of frustration.

04:15And that repetition is the signature of a loop that's running below your conscious awareness. So recognizing the loop is the first and hardest step because the loop has been running for so long that it feels like normal life rather than a pattern.

04:26And most people need some form of a structured self-examination like journaling to even see it because the loop is literally the lens through which they see everything. So they can't see the lens itself. And so the cost of running these loops without awareness is enormous because every repetition of the loop wastes time, energy, and opportunity.

04:51And the cumulative cost over years and decades of unconscious looping is genuinely staggering when you finally add it up. And every loop has a trigger, meaning a specific external or internal event that activates the pattern and starts the cycle.

05:06And identifying the trigger is the key to interrupting the loop because once you can see the trigger, you can catch the pattern before it runs its full course. And the trigger is usually much simpler and more specific than you'd expect where and it's usually simple where it might be a certain tone of voice or a specific type of feedback or a particular time of day or even a physical sensation.

05:32And once you identify it, you can start noticing it everywhere, which gives you multiple opportunities per day to actually practice interrupting the loop. And the gap between the trigger and the response is where all the power lives. Because in that gap, you have the choice to run the old pattern or to do something different.

05:49And expanding that gap through awareness is literally the mechanism by which you rewrite your own operating system. And so the most concerning part of all of this is the blindness. Meaning you can't see your own patterns and loops from inside them any more than a fish can see water.

06:02And that blindness is really what keeps most people stuck in the same cycles for their entire lives despite genuinely wanting to change. Now your mind has a built-in bias towards confirming its existing patterns. We've talked about this many times.

06:18Meaning it actively filters your experience to reinforce what it already believes. And that confirmation bias makes it extremely difficult to see evidence that contradicts your established patterns. Which is why change feels so hard even when you're trying.

06:30And so your mind runs everything you experience through a perceptual filter. Meaning it quietly decides which details of reality you notice and which ones of reality you ignore. And it works both ways. It shows you evidence for your existing beliefs and hides evidence against them.

06:50And the result is a closed loop where your pattern creates your perception and your per perception reinforces your patterns. And every day that you operate inside the pattern without examining it, the pattern gets slightly stronger and slightly more entrenched.

07:01Which means the cost of inaction compounds in the same way that the benefits of journaling compound, just in the opposite direction. And most people's strategy for dealing with their broken mind is entirely external. meaning they try to change their circumstances, their relationships, their jobs, and their environments, hoping that a change of scenery will somehow fix the internal patterns.

07:23And it never works because the patterns travel with you. So, you've probably seen this in yourself or in people, you know, where someone changes their job or relationship or even their city and within a few months, they've recreated the exact same problems in just a different context.

07:42And that's because the patterns that created those problems were never addressed. they just got a new backdrop. So they worked on the symptom rather than the root of the issue. And the fix has to be internal. Meaning you have to address the patterns themselves rather than the situations they create.

07:54And that internal work is exactly what a properly structured journaling practice is really designed to do. So let's talk about the repair mechanism. So if your mind is running on broken patterns and you can't see them from the inside, the way you fix it is deceptively simple.

08:18You write not randomly, not when you feel like it, not about whatever pops in your head, but with structure and intention using a practice designed to surface the unconscious. Make the invisible visible and create space between stimulus and response.

08:31which is exactly why journaling is the repair mechanism. The one practice that lets you find what's actually broken and fix it at the same time. Now the first thing journaling does for your mind is externalization. Meaning it takes the thoughts and patterns that are running inside your head and puts them outside of your head when where you can actually look at them.

08:49And that simple act of moving something from internal to external changes your relationship with it. Because the moment we put attention on something, we create separation from it. So once a thought is on paper you have distance from it and that distance allows you to observe it to examine it objectively rather than being inside it.

09:08And the difference between thinking a thought and reading a thought you wrote is surprisingly large because reading gives you the perspective of an observer rather than the participant. And you're no longer identifying yourself with the thought.

09:27And the observer perspective is really where insight lives. Because when you're inside the thought, you can't evaluate it. You just experience it. But when you're looking at it from the outside, you can ask whether it's true, whether it's useful, and whether it's really serving the life you want to build.

09:39And those questions are impossible to ask from the inside. And so the externalization also brings

The repair mechanism and externalization

09:50clarity where thoughts that felt overwhelming and tangled inside your own head become manageable and structured on paper. And the act of translating them into words forces you to organize them in a way that often reveals their actual structure for the first time.

10:04There's also an immediate psychological relief that comes from externalization where the cognitive load of carrying those unexamined thoughts decreases. Right? And cognitive load really if if it's too high, you basically can't do anything and you can't focus, you can't concentrate because there's all these open loops at the back of your mind.

10:28And so if you start examining those thoughts, that cognitive load decreases the moment you put them on paper. And that relief frees up mental resources that were previously being consumed by the unconscious processing of unresolved patterns.

10:46The relief creates mental space and then that space is essential for the deeper repair work because a mind that's fully occupied with unexamined noise doesn't really have the capacity to do the kind of focused self-examination that pattern change requires.

10:59And the relief compounds over time where each journaling session clears a little more cognitive debris. And then after a few weeks of consistent practice, the baseline of level of mental clarity is noticeably higher than it was before you started.

11:13And so that elevated clarity becomes the new normal. Now the second thing journaling does is enable pattern recognition. Meaning it basically allows you to see through walls. That's how I like to uh to see it. It gives you enough data points over time to see recurring themes, to see patterns, to see triggers, not just in yourself, but also in the world and in other people, and to see loops that are otherwise invisible.

11:44And this pattern recognition is the core diagnostic function that makes

Pattern recognition

11:49everything else possible. Pattern recognition requires data. In order for you to be able to recognize a pattern, you have to have seen it many times. And to have seen it many times, you need data. Each journal entry is a data point. And when you accumulate enough data points, the patterns start to emerge on their own where you notice that the same trigger keeps producing the same response or the same belief keeps showing up in different contexts.

12:15And those noticed patterns are really the targets for repair. So there's a threshold of accumulated entries. Usually around two to three weeks of daily journaling, you get those where the patterns start to become visible and before that threshold really the individual entries might seem disconnected and unremarkable.

12:34But once you cross it, the connections start to jump out at you. Especially if you do a monthly journal as well on how the month went. And basically how you do that one is by looking at all the weeks before that and all the days before that and looking at your own patterns over the past few weeks, over the past four weeks.

12:53And then on a monthly basis, you can notice your patterns, right? And so the depth of pattern recognition increases the longer you journal where the first patterns you notice tend to be surface level and obvious, but after months of practice, you start seeing deeper and deeper layers of pattern that were completely invisible at the beginning.

13:12And once you see a pattern, naming it gives you power over it. Labeling it gives you power over it because you've now created separation. In order for you to label something, you have to have put your attention on it. And the moment we put attention on something, we create separation from it.

13:24And that means we can have power over it. Where an unnamed pattern runs your life automatically, but a named pattern becomes something you can actually observe. you can choose to engage with or not and gradually modify through conscious repetition of a new response.

13:44And so the act of putting language to a pattern literally changes your brain's relationship with it where the pattern moves from the automatic unconscious processing to the conscious deliberate processing system. And that shift in processing is the mechanism by which awareness creates the possibility of change.

14:03And so naming the pattern also creates a sense of ownership where instead of being something that happens to you, it becomes something you're aware of and responsible for. And that ownership is the first step towards choosing differently. And the third and most powerful thing journaling does is really provide the mechanism for actually rewiring the patterns.

14:22Meaning it doesn't just make them visible cuz I

Rewiring the old patterns

14:28mean even that would be enough by itself because the moment we have awareness over something we tend to change it change it if it's if it's not serving us but it doesn't just make them visible. It gives you a structured daily practice for gradually replacing those old broken patterns with new functional ones.

14:40And that rewiring is really where the real repair happens. So rewiring requires repetition. And the daily journaling practice provides exactly that where each day you observe the old pattern and you note it and you label it and you choose a different response and record the outcome.

14:59That daily cycle of observation and choice is really what gradually weakens the old neural pathway and strengthen strengthens the new one. So the rewiring only works with consistency. Meaning you can't journal about a pattern once and expect it to change.

15:16You have to engage with it day after day, catching it at the trigger, choosing differently, and then recording the evidence of the new response. And that sustained engagement is really what produces the real neurological change. And the rewiring takes time as well, usually longer than you'd like, where deeply entrenched patterns might take months of daily work to fully replace, but the progress is visible in the journal if you're looking for it.

15:35And that visibility sustains you through the long meadow phase where the change feels slow. And so the journal provides the evidence that the rewiring is actually working which is essentially essential for sustaining the effort where you can look back through your entries and see that the pattern fired three times this week compared to seven times last month and that quantified progress is what keeps going when keeps you going when the change feels invisible from the inside.

16:06Visible progress is one of the strongest motivators for sustained behavior change and because it gives you feedback and so the journal provides it automatically through the accumulated record of your entries and seeing the trend line of improvement over weeks and months is really what transforms the journaling from a daily chore into a practice you can actually look forward to.

16:24And so the evidence of progress creates momentum where each successful interruption of an old pattern makes the next one easier. And each documented win reinforces the belief that change is possible. And that belief momentum cycle is really the engine that drives the entire repair process forward.

16:41So now that you understand what journaling actually does to your mind, the last piece is really knowing how to physically do it. And the good news is that journaling isn't one fixed thing where the specific format you use matters far less than the simple act of getting what's stuck inside your head out into the open where you can finally look at it and create separation from it.

17:07So you've basically got four ways or five let's say to to do this practice and honestly any of them work as long as you actually stick with it. So pick the one that fits how you naturally like to express yourself and don't overthink the choice.

17:19So the first one is a video journal. So where you just turn on a camera, you look into the lens, and you start talking to yourself like you're explaining your life to someone who genuinely wants to understand it. And there's something about watching your face while you speak that pulls thoughts out of you that staying quiet never would.

17:38And you don't also have to just look at your face the whole time. You can look around, of course. You can look into the distance and think, but and it feels a little awkward at the start, but most people will find the camera makes them more honest than they expected, especially if you know that the video is just for yourself.

17:51So looking at yourself while you talk creates a strange kind of accountability where it's much harder to lie to your own face than it is to lie inside your own head. Right? That visual feedback keeps you grounded in what's actually true for you.

18:09And over time, that honesty becomes the whole point of the practice. On top of that, video gives you something that other methods don't, which is the ability to go back later and actually watch yourself working through a problem. And not only that, but see how you looked at the time, how you had dressed at the time, what what mental state you were in because you can often see that just by the way you look and your energy and your frequency.

18:29you can catch the expressions, the pauses, and the tone that plain text would wouldn't be able to, right? So, you end up with a far richer record of where your head really was at. And that said, video does carry the most setup of any method where you need a decent lighting if you want or a bit a bit of privacy and the willingness to see yourself on a screen.

18:54Um, for some people that extra effort is well worth the depth it brings. But also, don't overthink it. like just turn on your computer camera and just start talking to it essentially. And for others, it's the very thing that stops them, which that's completely fine because there's other ways in, right?

Video and audio journaling

19:16The next one is audio journaling, which is basically the same idea except you drop the camera and just use a voice recorder talking through whatever whatever is on your mind while it captures every single word and is the lowest friction option for of the whole bunch where you can just do it walking, driving or lying in bed with the lights off.

19:35And for a lot of people, that ease is exactly what makes the habit actually stick. And talking out loud tends to unlock a kind of natural flow that writing sometimes interrupts where one thought rolls straight into the next without you stopping to fix your grammar.

19:48And that interrupt uninterrupted stream often surfaces connections that you'd never have reached on paper. So audio can be the fastest route to a genuine insight. On top of that, the near zero setup removes the most of the excuses your mind likes to make about not having enough time.

20:07You just hit record and start speaking wherever you happen to be. And that low barrier is often the difference between a practice you keep and the one you quietly abandon. Now, there's finally the the classic written journal where you put pen to paper or fingers to

The written journal

20:24keyboard and translate the noise in your head into actual words on a page. And this is the most deliberate of all the methods where writing forces you to actually slow down and organize your thoughts. And I think it's still beneficial. Uh it's probably has its own benefits that the other ones don't because of that specific um feature of it which is to literally slow down and organize your thoughts and think about what you want to write down in a way that obviously talking never does because uh when you're just talking you can just you know yap for for hours on end if you wanted to.

20:58So that slower pace of writing is very often where the deepest insights end up showing themselves because you have more time. You actually slow down and you're doing it a bit more intentionally. And the act of writing also imposes an order on your thinking where you have to decide what comes first, what follows and how it all connects before any of it makes sense on the page.

21:23And that force structure is itself a form of clarity. So even messy writing tends to leave you clearer than when you started. Now, written words also sit still in a way that spoken ones don't, which means you can read them back slowly and study them almost like they belong to someone else.

21:41And that distance is exactly where the observer perspective lives. And the observer perspective, like we touched on earlier, is where the real insight happens. So beyond that, a written record is the easiest of all to search, to scan, and revisit months later when you want to track how a pattern has shifted.

22:00You can flip back through weeks of entries in just a few minutes. So, the written journal quietly doubles as the cleanest long-term archive of your own progress. Another option that's just basically a version of the video option is um and it catches a lot of people by surprise is treating journaling like a meeting you book with your with yourself where you

Journaling like a meeting with yourself

22:23actually open up Zoom or Microsoft Teams or you know Google Meet or whatever. Honestly, any software that lets you run a call, you start a session with no one else in it and then you just record yourself talking the whole thing through. It's the same as the video version, except now you the the feeling is as if you have a meeting with yourself.

22:40And it works almost exactly like video journaling, like I said, only you're borrowing tools you probably already use every single day for work. And because the recording saves on its own, you walk away with a clean file of the entire session without fiddling with anything extra.

22:58And the big advantage here is that you're using software you already know inside out. So there's no new app to learn and no fresh habit to build from scratch. You just open the same tool you'd use for any work call and just point it at yourself instead.

23:10And that familiarity also strips away one more habit um and one more bit of friction that might otherwise stop you from before you even start. On top of that, meeting software is built to capture and store calls cleanly, which means you get a tidy video file.

23:24Often you also get the audio file and often an automatic transcript uh the moment you hit end. So that hands you both the spoken session, the audio version and the written record in a single move. So, in a way, this method quietly bleeds into the hybrid approach we're about to get into.

23:45Uh, and finally, the hybrid approach where you simply combine a

The hybrid approach

23:50couple of the formats to capture the strengths of each. And the most common version is recording yourself on audio and then transcribing that recording into text afterwards. Uh, and that way you get the ease and flow of just talking plus the clarity and searchability of having everything written down.

24:03So, if you genuinely can decide which method suits you, I think this is usually the smartest place to begin because you it allows you to blend formats. Blending formats lets you sidestep the main weakness of any single one where the audio handles the speaking and the text handles the reviewing.

24:22So, you're no longer forced to trade flow for clarity or clarity for ease. And that balance tends to make the whole practice far more sustainable over the long run. And these days, turning audio into text takes almost no effort at all. Transcription tools do the heavy lifting for you in a matter of seconds.

24:36You just talk freely. The words appear on the page and you walk away with a searchable record without the strain of writing it all by hands. So the hybrid really does hand you the best of both worlds with very little added work. So with that said, let's cover the clear mind.

24:55So, what does it actually look

The clear mind

25:01like when the repair work produces results? When you've been doing this practice long enough that the old patterns have been identified, named and gradually replaced with patterns that actually serve you. And I call it the clear mind, which is not some kind of a enlightened state.

25:14It's just what happens when you stop living from old conditioning and rather from patterns that you've cons consciously chosen. Now the first thing you notice when the operating system starts to clean up is a persistent clarity of thought that wasn't there before where the mental noise decreases the emotional reactivity.

25:38The mental noise decreases and the emotional reactivity calms down and you start seeing situations clearly rather than through the distortion of your old patterns and unexamined beliefs. And so your perception becomes cleaner meaning you start seeing things as they actually are rather than as your patterns told you they were.

25:51And that cleaner perception affects the every area of your life from how you interpret conversations to how you assess risks to how you make decisions about what matters. And so the accuracy of your perception starts to improve dramatically where you stop misreading situations.

26:08You'll stop projecting old experiences onto new ones, and you'll stop reacting to what you think is happening rather than what's actually happening. And it's that perceptual accuracy that's one of the most practically valuable outcomes of the whole process.

26:24Cleaner perception also means faster processing where you spend less time second-guessing, less time interpreting, less time caught in uncertainty. And so that speed comes from the reduced interference of old patterns that used to distort and slow down your thinking.

26:38There's also a quality of mental stillness that develops where your mind isn't constantly churning through unresolved thoughts and unexamined fears. And that stillness isn't emptiness. It's it's readiness where your cognitive resources are available and focused rather than scattered across a 100 unfinished processes.

26:55And the stillness naturally produces greater presence where you're actually in the moment rather than mentally replaying the past or rehearsing the future. And it's that presence that improves the quality of everything you do of your whole life from conversations to creative work to physical performance anything.

27:13And the stoness also means greater cognitive capacity where the mental resources that were previously consumed by pattern maintenance and unconscious processing are now actually available for intentional use. and is that freed up capacity that suddenly uh is is like feels like you have all of a sudden more room to think.

27:38Now the second thing you notice is a fundamental change in how you respond to life where the old reactive patterns get replaced by chosen responses and you start operating from intention rather than impulse which changes the outcome of virtually every interaction and decision you make.

27:52Now the gap between stimulus and response which the journaling practice has been expanding for months now becomes wide enough that you consistently have time to choose your response rather than defaulting to the old pattern. And that consistent choice is really what it it means to be in control of your own behavior.

28:14And that gap is real freedom. Not freedom from external constraints. Freedom from your own automatic reactions. And that internal freedom is really worth more than any external change you can make because it means you're operating from your own choice rather than conditioning every every time.

28:28And that power that comes from responsive rather than reactive living is really difficult to overstate. Every situation becomes an opportunity to choose the response that serves your goals and your cap your identity rather than the response that your old patterns would have automatically produced.

28:49And so your emotional regulation improves significantly as well where emotions still arise and they should of course you're human but they no longer hijack your behavior and you can feel something fully without being compelled to act on it impulsively.

29:02And it's that regulation that is the direct result of the awareness and pattern interruption skills the journal has built. You're not suppressing emotions. That's important to say, by the way. You're feeling them with full awareness and then choosing to how to respond from a piece of place of clarity rather than reactivity.

29:28And that's a completely different thing from the emotional numbness that some people mistake for regulation from the coldness uh that some people think is regulation. And the regulation also builds genuine resilience where difficult experiences still affect you but they don't destabilize you.

29:40And the recovery time from emotional disruption gets shorter and shorter as the clean operating system becomes more established. And the third thing that happens is a deep alignment between your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions and your values where the internal contradictions and conflicts that used to create friction and confusion get resolved through the ongoing process of self-examinations and pattern repair.

30:11And what's left is a coherent integrated way of operating that feels natural and sustainable. And the coherence shows up in everything from the consistency of your daily behavior to the clarity of your communication to the stability of your emotional state.

30:23And people around you notice even if they can't name what's different. And that coherence is really the external manifestation of internal alignment. People trust coherent individuals more almost instinctively because coherence signals reliability.

30:39It signals integrity and that increased trust open do opens doors in your relationships and your career that were previously closed or invisible. And coherence also saves enormous amounts of energy because you'll no longer be fighting internal contradictions or maintaining inconsistent identities in different contexts.

30:56And that saved energy now becomes available for growth, for creation, for contribution. And so the alignment eventually reaches a level where the journaling practice itself starts to feel less like a repair tool and more like a maintenance tool where you've addressed the major patterns in the daily practice is now just fine-tuning and optimizing rather than identifying and fixing and just catching things on time.

31:22And that transition from repair to just optimizing yourself is one of the most satisfying milestones in the entire process. The maintenance mode is really where the compound effects really accelerate because you're building on a clean foundation rather than constantly repairing a broken one and the improvements start stacking on each other in a way that wasn't possible when your mind was still cluttered with broken patterns.

31:42And from that maintenance position, you can start expanding into territory that would have been impossible before and take on challenges, explore ideas, and build things that require the kind of mental clarity and emotional stability that only a clean operating system can sustain.

32:00So with that said, let's cover the review. So we talked about the

Review

32:07overview. We talked about your mind is broken and you don't even know it. We talked about the repair mechanism, the clear mind, the review, and finally your action items for the day. Tonight, sit

Your action items

32:20down with your journal and write out the three patterns or loops that have caused you the most problems over the past year. And be as specific as possible about the trigger, the response, and the outcome of each one. Then give each pattern a simple name that captures its essence.

32:33And starting tomorrow, note every time one of those named patterns activates during your day, tracking the trigger and whether you manage to essentially choose a different response. And then finally, practice expanding the gap between stimulus and response by pausing for three full breaths whenever you notice one of your named patterns activating.

32:58And then journal about what happened during that pause each evening. So, with that said, if you want to work with me one- on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training along with this document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description.

33:08And if you want weekly newsletters on how to improve in every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, I really hope you enjoyed this. I hope it brought a lot of value.

33:20If it did, let me know. Thank you for being here. Thank you for the support. and I'll see you in the next