My morning and night journal
The morning pages were elevated by Julia Cameron in the book “The artist’s way”. The idea is that the first thing you do when you wake up is to write 3 pages of thoughts manually that come to mind.
Last year I was using a diary, a high-performance planner, which in addition to its basic function, had two sections that contained questions that I would have to answer after waking up and others that I would answer at the end of the day.
The High-Performance Planner was created by Brendon Burchard, High-Performance Coach, based on one of the largest high-performance studies. I didn’t find much information on how this study was done, only that it analysed more than 170 thousand participants in 190 countries.
Initially, I did not see much interest in so many questions, and sometimes only with the work of having to think what would answer so many questions, I chose not to use the agenda.
Over time, I realized the importance and adapted the questions to facilitate their completion so that I could make this a habit.
In this post, where I talk about self-love, and in this where I talk about 4 steps to maintain and create habits, I mean that you should have 10 minutes on your agenda for you. My 10 minutes are 15–17 more, where in addition to 10 minutes of meditation, I dedicate a few minutes to fill in my morning and evening diary.
Today I will talk to you about my morning and night routine and why I decide to make this a habit.
My morning journal
Below I leave the questions that I answer (almost) every day to the taste of my morning coffee.
What makes you anxious?
Write about what worries you and makes you anxious. This will help you to free your mind from anxieties and to have an opportunity as to why that particular thing leaves you like this.
When answering this question, you also think about why this particular thing makes you anxious, what you can do or think if that thing happens.
Do you ever happen to be giving advice to a friend and thinking “It is easy because I am not in the situation, but if it were you, I would / thought so”. When we are out of a situation we tend to think more rationally, answering this question is a way of doing this.
Thankful for:
This is one of the questions that I think is most important.
Do you think as often about what you are grateful for as you think about our problems?
A study that followed 3 groups, which he asked to write weekly about topics in life, 1st to write about what they were grateful for, 2nd about things that irritated them, 3rd about events that affected them, whether they were positive or negative. The latter, after 10 weeks, concluded that the 1st group was more optimistic and felt better about their lives. This group also exercised more and had less need to consult doctors.
In this video, Rober Emmons talks about the power of giving thanks. He explains power in two major components:
Think about the positive point for which we are grateful
Where does this positive point come from, if we have to thank someone specific or simply thank ourselves.
Writing down the reasons why I am grateful makes me appreciate those same things better because, if I am grateful, I should take advantage of them when they happen, or I should thank a certain person for that.
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity … it makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. ” Melody Beattie
Something that makes me excited
The goal is to start waking up excited, either because of work, or because you are going to meet a friend, or because you are going to train. Start the day thinking about what makes you want to embrace the day.
Something that could make today’s spectacular
This is the one so that you do not arrive at the end of the day and think that you have not learned anything or that you have achieved nothing. You define what you would like to happen, it is crucial that here you define something that is minimally within your reach. It is useless to say that the day was spectacular if it didn’t rain since I don’t have those powers yet. You can say, it was spectacular that even if it rains I have the willpower to go running. And when the time comes to run, you will remember that in the morning you thought it was spectacular that this would happen and this will give you an extra motivation to do so. You will stop seeing only what might seem to be a problem, the rain, and you will see your happiness after doing so.
I am:
Here what I do is write what I call self-affirmations. Phrases or words to give me a boost of motivation. It doesn’t do much good to write “I am weak”, even if you think that partly, you will be feeding your bad goblin (see in this post about self-love where I talk about bad goblin and good elf).
Write phrases that empower you and are not afraid to look like idiots to write these things. This is a message from you to you. If there is anyone you cannot be ashamed of, it is yourself.
“The story that you tell yourself becomes who you are!”
Someone who might surprise you with a message, gift or token of appreciation:
Sometimes we do not realize the importance of the people around us and we do not always appreciate them.
This and this study concluded that small random acts of kindness were associated with happiness, not only from the person who received it but also from the person who performed the act.
Kind people experience more happiness and have happier memories (Study 1). Simply by counting acts of kindness for one week, people appear to have become happier and more Grateful (study 2).
My night journal
Something that I learned today:
After a day of work or rest, we always have something we learn. Be a great revelation, be it that the combination of any fruit with cinnamon is delicious.
Stop to think about what you learned from the good or bad things that happened to you.
Today you were unable to make a certain habit that you wanted? You have learned that you have to have your priorities well-defined, so that when it comes time to define what is most important, you will be able to make the decision quickly and consciously. Or it could have been a bad planning of your day, and then learning how to be able to define the time you need for each task and how to fit in your agenda all the tasks you consider to be priorities (either for work or for your well-being).
Some task that I handled well today:
We should congratulate ourselves when we can achieve something positive.
“Congratulations on exercising even after a long day at work”
“Well done for keeping calm in that complicated meeting today!”
Something that stressed me and What I did / could have done to deal with the situation:
Finally, it is important to think of something that has stressed you during the day (there may be days when you have nothing). After realizing what this moment was, think about how you felt, how you reacted and how you would like to have reacted. Was it different, and how would you like it? Because? What can you do to improve it next time? It is not always easy to make the right decisions in stressful situations, but if with a cool head, we start to reflect on them, we start to react better when they actually happen.
Summing up
These questions are my example and not the rule. I adapted what I thought was best for me and the points I needed to improve the most. Over time, I changed it several times. You can use these questions as a guide and adapt to your needs and the time you want to spend responding.
Benefits I saw in me:
- Being able to be more present at the moment, taking advantage of the little things that life provides us.
- Do not stress so much about things that I already knew would affect me and think more quickly how I could deal with them.
- Thanking the people who help me.
- Be kinder, and praise to people that provide any product or service that you liked. For example, last week I told a person who sold me a vegan cheese that was the best I had. I don’t really know who was happier if me or the person.
- Learn to give more value to my achievements, even if they seem small.
- Don’t have second thoughts about me.
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