6 Months of Using The Five-Minute Journal!
Last November, I asked my friend to buy the five-minute journal for me as a birthday present. I was so fascinated by the overwhelmingly positive reviews, and how lifechanging everyone made this single journal out to be. Now, I already have the habit of journaling – endless rambles that can go on and on and on for pages or just a quick little note depending on the day. So the idea of journaling your entire day in 5 minutes was particularly intriguing. One five-minute journal is supposed to cover you for 6 months of daily journaling and so, I made a mental note to talk about this journal here after 6 months. Just a quick heads up, I did not journal every single day for the past 6 months in here and I will tell you why later in this post. Let me tell you what I love about it first instead.
What I Love
I’m not going to lie, a huge reason I had my eyes on this journal was because of how pretty it looked. It’s very chic and minimal and you're welcome to call me shallow, but I’m a sucker for great design. This for me was one of the most significant reasons to get this specific five-minute/ gratitude journal rather than any other ones in the market.
The prompts for your morning journaling and night journaling are already featured on the website. So initially I thought, why pay the extra money buying the journal when I can write it out in a notebook I already have, or in my Google Keep? I thought I was being so fiscally responsible. It never took off! Having a physical journal dedicated to this, with the prompts already filled out page after page makes it that much easier to make this a habit. Further, each page has a lovely quote, and a weekly challenge, which adds a nice touch and as something to look forward to when journaling on a fresh day.
It’s nothing fancy-schmancy – you can literally flip to the first page and start using it because it’s so intuitive. There are over 30 pages introducing what the notebook is about and summarising the effects of positive psychology but you can gladly skip them and feel the effects for yourself! (As I’m writing this, I realise this can be quite a waste of pages if you’ve already committed to this habit and know what it's all about!)
It works! If you do this day after day, you tend to see things in a more positive light as it truly reframes things for you. This especially works for someone who has a mood issue like me and finds it easy to fall back on a pattern of negative, unproductive thoughts. But somehow, when I do it for more than five days, the effects on me are particularly counterproductive. Which brings me to what I didn’t love about this journal.
What I Didn’t Love
On most days, I find myself still reaching for my BUJO or other journals after writing in my five-minute journal; to write more because I find I’ve not talked about the day enough – like I have not gotten enough off my chest. This is especially the case on some of the difficult days I have - I don’t even reach for the journal on such days!
I've always believed it’s important to seek the good in the bad; that negative experiences add value to our lives in a way positive experiences never could. It’s not like I want bad things to happen to me but I would say I'm more accepting of the circle of life – that some days have to be good and some days have to bad. If every day was good, you could never grow. So I try to ride out the bad days. And on such days, I find the prompt “How could I have made today EVEN better?” slightly grating. Other prompts in this journal include “3 amazing things that happened today” and 3 lines each for gratitude and “what would make today great”. Something about these prompts makes me feel like I’m being denied the experience of the negative things. Or to be allowed to process them. And that is why I don’t find myself wanting to write in this to try and think of the good in the world on bad days. I rather scribble down exactly what happened and what I could have done, what was in my control, what wasn't, and process my emotions in the safe space of my personal journal. One that doesn't restrict an entire day to a page and does not have prompts asking me how said day was.
I suppose you could put a positive spin on things by saying “a blog post I was really hoping to take off failed BUT I got a DM about another post I wrote”. But it just doesn’t ring true, and when I look back at the responses I’ve given to these prompts on such days, I find them fake. The "good" that I try to compensate for the bad never feels adequate. Or my brain automatically denies it because I remember the bad. Perhaps if it asked me to list 3 significant things that happened today, both positive and negative, I would be more accepting of the ebb and flow of life.
When I first got this journal, I used it every single day for about six weeks. My understanding was that it’s supposed to make you more grateful. The reality was very different. First of all, I found myself running out of things to write about. There were days where the spaces for gratitude, "what would make today great", and "amazing things that happened today" had maybe one each in place of the three you’re supposed to list. There were even days where they were completely blank for one or all three. Intuitively, I know I am grateful for having a roof over my head, and the time and space to continue doing what I love during a time like this. There are even things I'm very aware of, things I remind myself fairly often to not take for granted. A day that I wrote is always an amazing day because that sense of accomplishment is like no other. But somehow, writing these things back to back in a journal starts to feel insufficient at some point, and in the long run, started to make me indifferent about such things. So I find that there's a threshold at which this journal is still effective for me, and something I enjoy. But this could just be me because of how my brain is wired. I understand mindfulness is not a practice for everyone; some studies have found an increased sense of awareness to counteract the intention of such practices and in extreme cases, to even damage one's psyche.
Even though using it every single day gives me a sense of complacency, and even a kind of apathy to things I’m grateful for on any given day, I would still say it's great to have this lying around! When I’m in one of my slumps, or as I’m coming out of the slumps, I find this to be a great tool to use for three to five days (the maximum I’ve gone is a week) to reboot my outlook. It works as a great boost and a great reset to my negative patterns of thinking. And since it's only for 6 months, it's fairly slim and doesn't take up much space either! If you've used the five-minute journal, I would love to hear your experiences! Were they similar? Let me know in the comments below!
*Subscribe to my monthly newsletter, "Thendral's Telegraph" here!*
