Transcription
So, I caught myself doing something really weird the other day. I was scrolling on Instagram and started to feel sad and scattered like I often do. So, I put my phone down and then maybe like 30 seconds later, I caught myself back on my phone midscroll on Instagram. It was like I was trying to escape social media with social media and I didn't even realize it.
In this video, I want to share three specific ways that you can use a notebook to help you collect your scattered thoughts, organize your mind, and stay focused on what actually matters to you. If you're new here, welcome. I'm Ryder, founder of the Bullet Journal Method, a technique that has helped people from around the world write a better life using little more than pen and paper. If you're feeling stuck in similar loops that leave you feeling stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed, here's three ways that you can use a notebook to help save your mind. Let's dive in.
Most of us carry phones these days. Many of us have to for work or for family. So, I'm not going to sit here and tell you to leave your phone at home. I will, however, point out a serious problem and a simple way to fix it. One of our most powerful abilities as a species is to adapt. Generally, the way that works is that we adapt to go towards what we like and away from what we don't. This includes our own feelings. As soon as we start feeling sad or frustrated or just bored, we now have the ability to simply pull out our phone and escape into our feeds. Each time we do this, we're programming ourselves to behave this way. This causes two major issues with our behavior. One, by suppressing or avoiding our feelings, we become less and less capable of understanding and processing them, which also means we become less capable of meeting our own needs. It makes us reactive and emotionally fragile. Which brings me to the second point. Algorithmic feeds target our emotional vulnerability. They feed us things that are often disregulating because that's what we automatically pay attention to. This is why they reliably make us feel even worse than when we started to scroll. So, it's kind of a lose-lose situation.
Of course, we can't simply just change that behavior, but we can replace it. When you're feeling bored or uncomfortable, replace reaching for your phone with reaching for your notebook. Now, why would we want to do something like that? There are many reasons, but the main one is quality inputs. As they say, garbage in, garbage out. And social media, for the most part, is garbage for your mind and for your nervous system. Instead, your notebook is packed with your thoughts, your feelings, your ambitions, your dreams. And chances are, when you look through the pages, you will find valuable information in there that you may not have seen as you wrote it down. In short, when you take time to look at your notebook, your attention is often rewarded with insight.
The question is, what do we do with that insight? As I mentioned earlier, we often use our screens to suppress or avoid our thoughts and feelings. On the other side of that spectrum is us expressing them in a reactive way online in ways that we usually regret. What's missing is a middle ground where we don't suppress our thoughts and feelings or use them to oppress other people. Notebooks provide a really useful way to express yourself in a safe and constructive way. It can help you clarify what you're thinking, process what you're feeling, and do all of that without hurting or confusing those around you while you're in process.
One simple way to do this is called affect labeling. This is when you simply name what you're experiencing. For example, "I am having the thought that this person doesn't like me" or "I am feeling angry." As they say, we can name it to tame it. This process allows us to create a little bit of distance between us, our thoughts, and our feelings. This has shown to have really powerful benefits for our mental health. And I found this is especially effective through writing, and notebooks are a perfect medium to facilitate this process. This is also true for capturing your great ideas or insights, many of which are often lost in the rush of our busy life or in the bowels of whatever app you're using this week.
To make capturing your experiences really easy, I created a system I call rapid logging. It's a simple notation for you to categorize what you think, what you feel, what you do, and what you experience as bulleted lists of single sentence journal entries or bullet journal. Here's a quick overview of how that works. We use a dash to indicate notes. Notes are for what we think, for information. We use a dot to capture our actions. We use an equal sign to capture what we feel both physically and emotionally and a circle to capture our events, the things that we experience. Using these four simple sentences, you can quickly capture any brilliance ideas you have or offload any alarming thoughts or heavy emotions in any moment. It often leaves you feeling a bit lighter. But there is one crucial step that many miss and it's what brings all of this together.
Before we talk about that, if you're liking this video so far, please be sure to like and subscribe to this channel. It really helps. Thank you. I appreciate it. Okay, so once you get in the habit of reaching for your notebook instead of your phone and then actually writing in it, something really interesting happens. Earlier, I talked about replacing your phone with your notebook when you feel the itch. That's a great first step. It helps us train our muscle memory. We talked about writing in it, which can be both cathartic and fun. The next step is what brings it all together. While a lot of journaling is kind of a hit-and-run experience with the bullet journal method, a core practice is to regularly read what we wrote. We do this daily, weekly, and monthly. This helps us see patterns we may never have noticed about our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We can then use that data to make much better choices moving forward. That helps us clarify our mind and our feelings over and over again.
If you want to learn exactly how to do this, consider checking out our foundation plan by scanning this QR code here. My team and I run these bullet journal rituals live every week and every month. In the meantime, you can start this process now by simply reaching for your notebook in the in-between spaces of your life. When you're waiting to check out at the grocery store, sitting on the subway on your way to work, when the baby is finally asleep, just pull out your notebook and notice. And feel free to write down whatever comes up. It's a productive alternative to doom scrolling that your mind will actually thank you for. It can be really surprising what you can see about your life when you actually take the time to look. There in these pages is the raw feed of our life, our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviors. The difference though here is that when you see something that makes you feel sad or angry or overwhelmed, you can actually do something about it. This is how your notebook can help you go from being the spectator of other people's lives to the author of your own, one page at a time.
If you like this video, be sure to check out this one next. Thank you for taking the time. See you in the next one. Happy bullet journaling.