The Old Practice That Saves Me From My Own Spirals (5 Tricks That Made Me Love It)

Nº4 will do more for you than any prompt.

Jun 21, 2026

I keep thinking about this idea: Imagine if at the end of each day, we could press a little button, and print out a full inventory of every single thought we’d had that day. What would that transcript look like?

I’m sure some of us wouldn’t be very interested in reading it. That document would be very long and repetitive. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of thoughts each day.

Amongst those who do read it, the most analytical minds would immediately feed it to AI and turn it into clear metrics and charts:

% of thoughts about what other people think of me
% of Negative vs Positive thoughts
Imagined conversations count
Inner critic appearance rate
Worst-case scenario count

“Let's set targets, KPIs, run monthly reports, and analyze the trends.”

Others might turn them into art. Little illustrations of our inner dialogues. I’m sure some of those would be hilarious. Isn’t this one by Allie Sullberg great?

And let’s not forget about the creatives who’d finally be reunited with those fleeting, brilliant ideas they didn’t write down because they were sure they’d remember them, but didn’t.

No matter what we do with it, that transcript would be revealing.
By looking at our thoughts with a fresh discerning eye, we’d gain incredible clarity on our patterns and fears. We’d also detach from them and see them for what they really are: thoughts, not always facts.
Sometimes brilliant (keep), sometimes harmful (discard).

Maybe this device will exist someday, and bring a whole bunch of ethical issues with it (imagine someone hacking into your thoughts, what a nightmare), but until then, we still have the exercise of manually pulling out our thoughts from our mind.

If you get the reference, we should be friends ✨

And I don’t mean Dumbledore’s pensieve (I wish). I just mean good old pens and notepads. When you think about it, this practice is the closest thing we have to that transcript. It’s slower, messier and incomplete in comparison, but it’s the same idea. A way to look at your own thoughts from the outside and see what they're really made of.

2,425 years ago, Socrates said:

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

And it still very much holds true today.

Yet, I used to resist journaling like my life depended on it. Until I figured out a few tricks that today genuinely make me want to sit down with a notebook. Let me share them with you.

1. Get Stationery You Love

I absolutely love a good pen. One that’s satisfying to use and that flows easily on the page. I get a good deal of joy from the smooth running of the ink on a piece of paper. So much so that I keep begging the marketing director at my job to give me a few of the “good” pens. She always generously indulges me and laughs at the disproportionate amount of gratitude and joy that triggers in me.
Mireia, you’ll never read this, but I love you forever.

And then there’s the other issue… notebooks… It’s a sickness, really… I want to buy them all. The last time I was at a stationery store, I almost sent an SOS to my husband to “come get me out of here.” But I decided to be a big girl, took a deep breath, put the 6 notebooks back on their shelf and only kept one. It’s gorgeous. I have no use for it yet, but its time will come.

And here’s the one I’m currently using:

It was handmade at an authentic little shop in an Italian village. Every time I open it, it reminds me of that trip. I love the touch and smell of the leather and the paper is super soft. When I reach for it, it immediately engages my senses and primes me for a good session of looking within.

My point is: find micro things that make the experience enjoyable for you. It makes a difference, I promise.

2. Phone out of sight

I don’t know about you, but I’m growing increasingly sick and tired of my phone. I know I’m not the only one. There is a rising movement towards going back to a more analog life, and for good reason. Our phones are making us miserable. Be it the constant bad news, the hellish social media comparisons, the addictive scrolling, or simply a perpetual state of brain frying, our bodies are telling us “enough, please” and we can feel it.

Image from Akanda Kilicarslan on Unsplash

Nothing will ruin a good journaling time like pop up notifications. I don’t always succeed, but I try to be strict with this rule: if I’m going to have a calm moment of contemplation, my phone has to be out of my sight, ideally in another room.

And I didn’t come up with this. Science did. Findings have shown that the mere presence of our phone on our desks harms our focus. Isn’t that wild?

3. The Setting Matters

Here in Europe, the days have started getting much longer since March. This means more time outdoors this time of year.

I either go to my favorite bench at the nearest park or, on lazier days, make myself a drink and sit on my terrace. I’ll take out my journal and put it in front of me, but I won’t immediately start writing.

Soon enough, I’ll start paying attention to plane traces on the sky, male ducks making a move on the same lady duck, the shape of the clouds, birds chirping, the outfits of strangers, dogs saying hi by smelling each other’s butts, and an array of tiny mundane moments.

After a while, I’ll start to notice my own voice from within. And it’s a different one. It’s calmer, contemplative and generally wiser.

That’s my cue to open my journal and grab a pen.

4. Pressure off

This is the most important tip, and I want to be as clear as possible:

It does not matter what you write. The only thing that matters is that you write.

You’re not writing a novel, your text won’t be published, nobody cares.
In fact, here’s a list of things that don’t matter about the output:

That you sound like a good person, or even a sane person
That your thoughts come out in any particular order
That you make any sense at all
That your style is beautiful
Spelling mistakes

My technique is:
Thought emerge —> Write thought as is. Repeat for a while.
That’s it. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than this.

5. Pauses are allowed

There will be moments when you’ll run out of things to write. That’s okay. I take frequent breaks during these sessions and go back to watching my surroundings. Sometimes I’ll doodle a little until another stream of thoughts shows up.

You don’t have to force anything, there are no rules (other than “phone out of sight”. Seriously that one matters).
You’re the boss here, you’ll know when you’re done.

And one last thing: It doesn’t matter much whether you handwrite or type. After years of typing, I switched back to handwriting this year and I love it. This note by Jonathan Nott says it all:

The truth is I’ve never once regretted spending time writing my thoughts. It clears out the clouds in my head. And every once in a while, I go back to old entries and can see how far I’ve come. It reminds me that progress is happening, even when I can't see it day to day.

But most of all, I write down my thoughts because it feels good. And that’s reason enough.

Tell me: what stops you from sitting down with a notebook? I want to hear what your version of the resistance looks like.

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