End of 30-Day Digital Journaling Challenge

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In my Midway Check-In for the 30-Day Digital Journaling Challenge, I reported that I was going to try digital journaling at home, first thing in the morning, then continue to journal by hand later when I got to the office.

30-day-challenge-682x1024One question I wanted to look at was whether the early digital journaling would prevent me from having anything to write by hand about a while later. I’m pleased to report that it did not. Many days I didn’t write as much by hand as I often do when not journaling digitally, but I still had more to write about when I had started by typing earlier. Usually what I wrote about by hand was some kind of amplification of what I had typed.

Another question I’ve been thinking about during this whole month-long challenge is whether the input method (typing vs. writing) would make a difference in my journaling. When I focused on journaling digitally for the last 15 days, I initially found that working on the computer made a big difference. When typing, it’s too easy to constantly use the backspace or delete key and correct typing mistakes rather than continuing to write uncensored and unedited. Also, since most of my daily work involves writing, which I do on the computer, journaling looked and felt too much like a work project, which needed to be edited and polished, rather than a spontaneous outpouring of my unconscious mind.

But early on in this second-half experiment, I tried closing my eyes when I typed. I originally tried this approach as a way to avoid constantly editing and correcting, but I soon discovered that it freed up my writing in other ways as well. Closing eyes causes the brain to transition into producing alpha waves, a state of relaxation similar to meditation and that dreamy feeling between wakefulness and sleep. The alpha state forms a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious, thereby tapping into our creativity and intuition. Poised on that bridge is where we do our most penetrating and revealing journal work.

As I result of my experiences during this challenge, I have concluded that digital and hand-written journaling are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary. This is something I will continue to experiment with on my own.

I’d like to thank all the sponsors, organizers, and participants for making this challenge so meaningful to me. As I concluded in my midway check-in post:

I want to thank all the challenge participants for being willing to share their experiences with each other. That has certainly been the most important result of my experiment with the 30-Day Digital Journaling Challenge.

© 2014 by Mary Daniels Brown