{"id":41297,"date":"2018-04-17T04:45:08","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T09:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelhyatt.com\/?p=41297"},"modified":"2018-04-17T04:45:08","modified_gmt":"2018-04-17T09:45:08","slug":"journaling-for-self-awareness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fullfocus.co\/journaling-for-self-awareness\/","title":{"rendered":"Journaling for Self-Awareness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charley Kempthorne has been keeping a journal for more than 50 years. Every morning before the sun is in the sky, the professor-turned-painter carefully types out at least 1,000 words reflecting on his past, his beliefs, his family, even his shortcomings. The prolific fruits of his labor reside in an impressive storage facility in Manhattan, Kansas, where his estimated 10 million words are printed, bound, and filed.<\/p>\n

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This project, Kempthorne says, is an end in itself: \u201cIt helps me understand my life . . . or maybe,\u201d he hedges, \u201cit just makes me feel better and get [the day] started in a better mood.\u201d But Kempthorne might be disappointed to learn that his enduring exercise may not have actually improved his self-awareness.<\/p>\n

The journaling trap<\/h3>\n

At this point, you\u2019re probably convinced I\u2019ve gone completely off the deep end. Everyone knows, you might be thinking, that journaling is one of the most effective ways to get in touch with our inner self!<\/p>\n

However, a growing body of research suggest that introspection via journaling has some surprising traps that can suck the insight right out of the experience. My own research, for example, has shown that people who keep journals generally have no more internal (or external) self-awareness than those who don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

How can we make sense of these peculiar and seemingly contradictory findings? The solution lies not in questioning whether journaling is the right thing to do but instead discovering how to do journaling right<\/a>.<\/p>\n\t\t