How to Use a Pocket Notebook: Snapshot Journaling


Imagine walking along a trail in the early morning. You see a beautiful sunrise in the distance and hear the calm lapping of water from the river next to your path. You feel calm and content for a moment. But your brain begins to obsess over how good the moment feels. You worry about your emotions returning to baseline after the experience ends. Intrusive thoughts enter your mind, "what did I do to feel so calm and content a minute ago?" and "how do I remember this feeling and process so that I can experience this happiness again?". When your mind begins to stray from the present moment and spiral into a rabbit hole of worry, you should take a break and journal. This is the perfect situation to write down your emotions and necessary cues to remind you of this experience and, most importantly how this experience made you feel. This is a process I call snapshot journaling because documenting experiences immediately after the fact is like taking a snapshot of one's mental state. Snapshot journaling is the practice of writing down thoughts immediately as they appear and jotting down cues to remember specific emotions.


Snapshot journaling has many benefits besides reducing stress and increasing well-being. It improves your memory because people tend to remember emotions felt during an experience more than the experience itself. Therefore, using cues to retrieve emotions will overall improve your ability to recall important experiences that significantly affect your mental state. In contrast, photographs only store visual cues of a memory, so you might not remember all the emotions you felt at the time. As a result, you might fully remember the emotional significance of that particular memory. For example, let's assume I visited a cafe and want to remember how tranquil and inspired I felt. If I took a picture of my tea, pastry, and journal on the table, I can't later recall the music playing in the background or the smell of fresh hot chocolate from the table next to me. If I instead wrote in my journal: "Inspired, reading in cafe, Chopin Nocturne, fresh hot choco, cherish the present moment.", I could more accurately recall what cues induced the emotions of contentment and inspiration. 


Snapshot journaling has also taught me that writing is not just about finding something to say and scribbling it down for people to read. Writing also serves as a means to forget things. When an idea spontaneously enters my mind, I write it down to forget it; if I want to remember the idea, I can reread my journal. If ideas don't move from my mind to physical paper, they will live in my mind rent free until I tire of thinking about them. Writing down ideas a they pop up gives me permission to forget things and frees up mental space to focus on one important idea. If I don't have an external reminder, my mind will be scared of forgetting ideas. By default, my mind fiercely holds on to fleeting thoughts because it needs an answer to the question: what if the current spontaneous thought is an important idea that will eventually alter my life in a nontrivial way? Ironically, if my mind is preoccupied with this question, it won't have the bandwidth to actualize any of the ideas I create.


3.5" x 5.5" Mini Notebooks


Tips to Practice Snapshot Journaling

  • Use a 3.5" x 5.5" thin notebook that can fit in your pocket.
  • Keep a pen attached to your notebook.
  • Date your notes to keep a more organized timeline of your notes
  • Write down all your spontaneous thoughts in your pocket notebook as they come up. Sooner is better to free your mind from obsessing over every single impulse.
   

            


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