How to Use Journaling to Make Better Decisions
Clear your head and find the choice hiding underneath the problem.
5 minute read time
Memory doesn’t keep a clean record.
It keeps pieces.
Temporary relief can stay vivid while the true cost becomes harder to feel. Hangovers don’t seem as bad in hindsight. Arguments feels smaller. Consequences lose their weight.
Then an old decision starts looking reasonable again.
I started journaling in early 2023. I was burned out, stressed across every area of life, and carrying more than I knew what to do with.
I needed somewhere to put what was happening.
At first, my entries were short and shallow. A few sentences about the day. Nothing I would’ve called useful. The value showed up later.
I went back and read what I’d written during one of the hardest seasons of my life.
The entries weren’t perfect truth. They were still my perspective from those days.
But the words hadn’t changed.
My memory had.
Read what you wrote at the time
During that season, I was trying to build my business while dealing with money pressure, relationship stress, burnout, and problems that had started merging into one large problem.
Later, I remembered myself as someone who hadn’t tried hard enough.
Then I reviewed the entries.
I’d been showing up
I’d been doing the outreach
I’d kept trying while the rest of life was getting heavier
I saw the version I remembered later was incomplete.
The journals gave me another account to compare against it.
That changed how I saw myself. It also made me slower to assume other people were lazy, weak, or making excuses.
I had no idea what they were carrying.
I still believe people are responsible for their choices. Journaling didn’t remove responsibility.
It helped me see the conditions around the choice.
That’s one reason writing matters in recovery.
A journal can’t tell you the whole truth.
It can preserve what you noticed, believed, feared, and did before memory had time to simplify the story.
And when your mind starts telling you the past was easier, cleaner, or less costly than it was, you have something else to read.
Three ways to use writing
Not every journal entry needs to do the same job.
Sometimes you need to clear your head, think through a decision, or look back and notice what keeps repeating.
These are the three practices I return to most.
1. Morning free-writing
Some mornings your brain opens twenty tabs before your feet hit the floor.
Money
Anxiety
A conversation from yesterday
Something you wish you’d said
A craving you don’t want to admit is there
Set a timer for five minutes and write whatever is moving through your head.
Don’t try to sound smart.
Don’t worry about making it useful.
If you don’t know what to write, write that.
If it feels stupid, write that too.
You can use a notebook, type it, or dictate it into your phone.
The format matters less than getting the thoughts somewhere you can see them.
This kind of writing helps me lower the noise. It gives me a chance to notice what’s going on before I react to it.
This is a shorter, looser version of what’s often called Morning Pages. The original practice is longer and handwritten. I just use the part that helps me start.
2. Action journaling
A diary records what happened.
A journal reflects on what it meant.
Action journaling adds one more question:
What decision am I circling?
Pick one open open-loop.
A problem you keep revisiting.
Something you’ve been avoiding.
Write down what’s happening.
And how you feel about it.
Then ask if there’s a decision underneath.
I’ve found that a lot of my stuck situations become easier to understand when I stop treating them as one giant feeling and start looking for the choice inside them.
A few questions I use:
What decision am I avoiding?
What am I afraid will happen?
What part of this is a fact?
What part is my interpretation?
What would make the next decision clearer?
Use the entry to understand the problem well enough to choose what comes next.
3. Life reviews
Daily entries preserve moments.
Reviews help you compare them.
A weekly review shows you what kept coming up.
A monthly reviewreveals where your time, attention, and energy went.
Quarterly or annual reviews help you see whether something is changing or repeating.
Daniel has been journaling since he was ten years old. He said free-writing often brings out ideas he didn’t know were there.
He’s also gone back through old entries and found things he’d forgotten about his own progress.
That matters because, without a record, you’re asking memory to reconstruct an entire week, month, or year after the fact.
Sometimes it’ll get the broad outline right.
Sometimes it’ll leave out the parts that don’t fit the story you’re telling now.
A review gives you another source.
Not a perfect one.
A useful one.
This week’s AI prompt
A lot of people can write down what happened.
The harder part is knowing what to look for afterward.
That’s what this week’s AI prompt is built to help with.
You paste in a rough diary entry, and the prompt asks the AI to:
organize what you wrote
separate events from your interpretation of them
suggest possible patterns or questions
identify a decision you may be circling
help you consider one realistic next action
The prompt tells the AI to stay within the information you provide.
You should still check the response against your own knowledge.
AI can offer an interpretation.
It can’t tell you what’s true about your life.
Daniel tested the prompt with a basic entry about his day. He said it gave him angles he hadn’t noticed and made him want to keep looking at the entry.
I use it with my own journal entries because it helps me slow down and examine what I wrote instead of filing it away and moving on.
How to use it
Paste in one short entry.
It doesn’t need to be polished.
See what it helps you notice.
Leave yourself a record
Memory can soften the past.
It can keep the relief and lose some of the cost.
Writing gives you a fixed record to return to when your memory starts changing the story.
Write down what happened.
Write down what you thought.
Write down what it cost.
Future you may remember it differently.
Give that version of you something to read.
David & Daniel
P.S. After you run the prompt, reply and tell us what it helped you notice.