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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryan is here and this is Stuff you Should Know. Dear Diary edition.
Well, I guess I'll just ask the obvious question. Have you ever kept a diary of any kind, any kind of journal?
Yeah? I think I did when I was younger, but I haven't in a long long time. And it's one of those things like I'm like, gosh, this is such a great idea, do it a couple of times, and then just fall off, Yeah, fall off the wagon.
I think it's one of those things that you can either be inclined to be one of those people that does it and keeps up with it or not. But you can also learn to do it, I think, with practice, like anything else, by setting that habit. And the reason I assigned this idea to Livia, who did a great job, is because my good friend Mike Anderson has kept a daily journal since nineteen ninety one. Dear Mike, it's pretty amazing. Obviously,
never read it, but it's just it comes up. It comes up every now and then because it's it is a journal of his life. But what it serves, as far as the friend group goes, is a journal of all of our lives to a certain degree. And sometimes we'll be talking, we'll be camping or just hanging out or something, and we'll be talking about something that happened in the old days and we won't be clear on it, and Michae will just be like, you know, I can find that out for us, and it's just it's cool.
It's a it's a bit of a time capsule, and you know it's a he's he's currently getting them, i think, digitized from his old handwriting days, oh handwritten days, rather and I was like, you know these are important, right and you need to make sure you know, we're all getting older, and like, what if a UFO picked you up and took you away, and he's like, I got that cover of my friend there going to his daughter already there will be preserved by her. And I would.
Mike's a crazy, weird, creative genius, so I would. I'd like to see these like published one day.
Yeah, that's who you want to keep a journal for that long? For sure.
It could be one of those things that comes out, you know, one hundred years from now, and that's when he becomes famous.
What year did he start?
Nineteen ninety one, so it's twenty twenty three, So do the math.
No, wait, thirty eight years?
Do the math?
Are you sweating my upper lip is?
Anyway, So this is on diaries And this actually turned out, at least in the history section, to be way more woman centric than I imagined it would be. But it makes a lot of sense now that I see the history of it.
Well, yeah, and if you kind of dive into tenth century Japan, which we'll talk about in a second, there was a kind of a movement of journaling. What a lot of people point to is the first real historical example of people using diaries. They're writing because they're not allowed to be externally, So the only way to share themselves is to write to themselves. And women have so long been repressed by men that I could see journaling being a largely woman affair for most of history.
I should say, yeah, I mean we can actually start with that, because the earlier examples aren't really diaries. Like we're talking about a papyrus logbook by an Egyptian official named Marror about limestone blocks being delivered for the pyramids at Giza.
Not a diary.
Not a diary because there's nothing you know, A diary is something personal about someone's experiences. So he wasn't like ten blocks delivered today, also feeling a little depressed. If anyone cares, it was just recording of things. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor, got a little closer with his meditations because he did talk about things like here's how i'd like to I'd like to develop these character traits and cultivate these things in my life. But it still was
sort of abstract. It wasn't like today, this happened and I felt this way about it. So it's kind of these pillow books that are kind of the first diaries.
Right, Yeah, and again they came up among the ladies of the court in Japan in the tenth century, and again they were extraordinarily repressed, but they were able to share themselves so eloquently that a lot of these these what are called pillow books survived, and one of them was essentially so they would kind of veer into fiction and poetry and stuff in addition to recording, you know,
historical events at the court, both large and small. It could be gossip, it could be the death of an emperor. They're really good historical records, but they're also really good inward records of historical figures who otherwise wouldn't have who would have been lost to history, and that from that tradition of kind of veering into fiction a little bit was considered. The first novel, The Tale of the Genji,
came out in the eleventh century by Murasaki Shikibu. I think I got that right, and that was basically the first novel. It came out of the pillow books.
Yeah, and there was there were the pillow books, which were written by many women. They used a specific writing system that was I think the first purely Japanese system called hira guna. I'm probably going to get a lot of the stuff wrong. And that was compared to the official writing system called kanji, which I think was derived from Chinese and used exclusively by men, and this other writing system was used only by women, at least at first.
I'm not sure if that changed, and I think it was a little simpler, but what it allowed for was if you weren't like formally educated, you could learn this writing system and it allowed for more expression of emotion and like inner thoughts than it seems like Kanji was a little more rigid and didn't have words and characters for that stuff pretty neat. So they wrote these pillow books. There's also one called the Pillow Book, and that was a specific book written by how would you pronounce Sei
as a first name? Say saye, say say e? Shona Gun And that was made into a movie in nineteen eighty six, Peter Greenaway the Pillow Book with what's his face? Obh oh, what's the guy you? And McGregor was in that.
I thought he was talking about Sir Alec Guinness. No.
Uh, Europe. They started doing this in the Renaissance, right, started journaling.
Yeah, And what's interesting about that is this is when journaling really kind of became more widespread because the idea of individualism became more widespread around the Renaissance, so people started reflecting on their own experiences rather than you know, just counting themselves as part of the crowd. It became it mattered how they felt about something that happened. Then
they started writing it down. So even though the pillow books kind of really kicked it off, there were several centuries where that just kind of fell away, and then it was picked up again and really kind of took off off, at least for those of us in the the West, beginning in the Renaissance. Renaissance Europe.
Yeah, around the same time Puritans started doing the stuff, Quakers started doing it, but these they were diaries, but it was a little more of a you know, how can I be a better Puritan or a better Quaker? And you know, very sort of religious based rather than just like hear my feelings about you know, Goodie Procter exactly.
They Oh my god, I can't imagine they would write something like that.
The French got really into it too during the French Revolution.
Right, Yeah, I don't know exactly what kicked that off, but they came up with what's called the journal Intimate, the intimate journal, and the British also said, hey, that's a pretty good idea. So they're writing about their inner lives, their inner feelings, thoughts, experiences. This is the I guess the early nineteenth century and that same century, so this is so now people are like everyday people are writing journals.
So there are suddenly self important. And one of the other big things as far as diaries and journaling are concerned, that came about in the nineteenth century was publishing old journals in diaries. Yeah, as not just historical records, but it's like kind of like for mass consumption as well.
Yeah, which is really interesting because I think it's super cool that you can go back and read first hand accounts of the westward expansion, and again a lot of these were written by women and what they were going through at the time. It's just a fascinating peak into these times that you can't get any other way. I mean, you can get artifacts, you can recreate scenes in a museum, you can paint pictures of stuff that happen, but like, there's nothing like being able and I know they say
pictures worth a thousand words. But I think it's kind of reversed in this situation. I think it diary is worth like a gazillion pictures.
Very nice. You know, I was going to say a thousand words and a diary is worth.
A picture, right, you have worth one picture.
But the idea that people were now willing to publish other people's journals and diaries that were not intended for publication, it actually created a new form, a new literary form, the journal, the diary, usually historical, and Olivia points out that that kind of raised the question from that point on, like are you really just writing for yourself?
Right?
Or can you ever overcome the idea that if you don't destroy these before you die, that there's a chance that somebody might discover them and find them worth publishing. And so are you paying attention a little more to sentence structure, to grammar, to the words you're using. You're trying a little harder than you would and therefore is it a little less of something than it was before people started publishing these?
Yeah, yeah, I get that question. There's one of our old favorites, Oscar Wild. There's a very funny line and the importance of being earnest when a character won't let another read their diary and she says it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form, I hope you will order a copy.
Pretty hilarious.
It's good stuff, very oscar wild.
So the importance of being earnest came out in eighteen ninety five, which means that that idea was established by then, very well established, and not a lot happened for about a century, and then blogging came along in the late nineties, and all of a sudden, the whole point was to share your diary, your journal, your innermost thoughts. The thing about doing it online, though, is now you had an option. You could share it with your intimates, your closest friends
and family, or and like keep everybody else out. I don't know through password protection, who knows. Or you could go the other way around and blog anonymously and share it with everybody, but your closest friends and family have no idea to you. If you do it correctly. Either way, you're sharing things in ways that that diarists never ever did before.
Yeah, or blog non anonymously for just anyone to read anything. And that's kind of what social media ended up being.
Yeah, just like all hang out there.
And isn't it great? Yeah that happened.
If everybody's ruining their own life, then nobody's ruining their own life.
Uh, all right, baby, let's take an early break. Yes, okay, we're gonna take an early break, and we're going to talk about some of the more famous historical diaries out there. All right, we were talking before the break about historical diaries and how I haven't ever really read one. I've read memoirs and things, which is fine.
That's different.
Yeah, it's a different deal. I'd love to read one of these. It really like prime to my pump.
Oh yeah, did that happen while you were letting it all hang out there.
There's a naval administrator, a very famous person named Samuel Peeps who wrote a journal for about nine years in Shorthand even and this is sort of a classic example of a historical diary because he wrote about you know, restoration and the Great Plague of London and the Fire of London, and so not only do you have that stuff, but you have this stuff from his perspective, and you also have him getting annoy in his marriage and talking about how excited he was about his new watch and
like kind of fun things like that.
Yeah, he's considered the greatest English diarist, and I'll own it. Last time he came up, I called him pepees I think probably, but people wrote in and corrected us, so we got it right this time.
Yeah, this watch. Can you read that? That's a pretty fun entry. I think about his new watch.
But lord to see how much of my old folly and childishness hangs on me still that I cannot forbear carrying my watch in my hand and the coach all the afternoon and seeing what o'clock it is. One hundred times. That was my Samuel peeps.
I love it. That's fun. He's like, what that does is that makes it relatable because everyone has gotten a new watch or a new shirt that they're like, I gotta look in the mirror again and see how this thing looks like. People get excited about that stuff, and it's fun to see someone write about, you know, the fire of London in one hand and also talk about how excited it heard about their new watch.
He wrote more than a million words dude, which on its face sounds like a lot. But get this, the entire Harry Potter series is just over a million words. So he wrote about the same amount of words as the entire all the books of Harry Potter by hand, in less time than JK. Rowling wrote them.
Oh, all right, pretty nuts, little shade.
Uh No, not really. I'm just it's a good touchstone.
Sure, plus we could shade her for all kinds of reasons. Sure that don't involve speed of writing, if you really want to do that. Who's the Game of Thrones guy? That's what everyone's mad at him? Cc cc deville.
No, it was his named George R. R. Martin.
Yeah, are they still mad at him?
Cheeses? People give him a break?
I mean, isn't that the deal. I don't even know anything about that stuff, but I think everyone's just like, why aren't you finishing yet?
Huh? Well? What about Michael Schiner Chuck?
Yes, he was an enslaved person in Maryland and in eighteen oh five was eventually a freeman. But he worked at the Washington Naval Yards for many decades and ended up keeping a fifty six year diary that was maybe like my friends Mike one day that'll be published after he died by historians. So all of a sudden, you have this amazing account of the life of an enslaved person over fifty and then a free person over fifty six years.
Yeah. He also was not educated. Born a slave, you typically weren't educated. In fact, that was usually illegal to educate a slave at the time. So he taught himself, apparently. So he uses his own spelling, his own grammar, very little punctuation, and he had to conserve paper as much as possible, so he would kind of like write stuff wherever there was space on an old page that he left.
Oh wow.
And yeah, I think his grandson came along and kind of organized it and it ended up being published.
That's amazing. Yeah, And that's one thing you'll see as a tip later on, is to is to write as good as you can write. If you're not some fancy great writer, like, don't worry about it.
Yeah, I mean, you can just write punctuation and academics centuries later will come along and digitize your stuff and translated essentially for everybody. It's it's that it can be that important.
Yeah. Absolutely. Josie Underwood is another great example, probably the most famous civilian account of the Civil War. She was au in a unique position because she was from a Southern family in Kentucky, very prominent family in Bowling Green, of slaveholders. But she was sympathetic to the Union cause. And you know, she writes a very sort of honest first person account as someone from that perspective throughout the Civil War and it became very famous.
Yeah. But then interspersed with that with being occupied by the Confederate Army and then the Union army, she also like talked about normal life for like a society person in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where you know, going to parties or things like that, or looking for what she called her true prince a husband. So it has it's very much like Samuel Peeps. There's historic events, but it's written from the perspective of the individual who also writes about themselves too.
Yeah, and this stuff is this is history. I mean, this is how we learn about history. If you read history books and they describe in great detail about how life was. Some of that is from research and clues and things like that, but some of that is from first person accounts.
Yeah. There was another very very famous journal I don't know if you'd call it a diary, but it was from Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who led an expedition to the South Pole in nineteen twelve, was trying to be the first expedition to the South Pole, and in fact they reached the South Pole to find that a rival explorer had beat them by one month, and so they
had to make it back to civilization. They never made it back, so Scott chronicled their slow demise over weeks trudging through the Arctic or the Antarctic, I should say, just trying to get back to safety and then just not doing it.
I bet that's a heavy read.
It is. I was reading it today and it's just it's, yeah, it's crazy to put yourself in that situation, which he makes it easy to do in just these little, you know, few sentence what do you call them, not inscriptions or installations, entries, just a few sentences each typically, But yeah, it really kind of draws you into like inside the tent where blizzard's going and one guy's nose is falling off because it's so frost bit, and everybody's trying to keep their
spirits up kind of thing. Like he really, it's a really moving journal. For sure.
There's another one. And I never knew how to pronounce his name A nice nin But I finally, do they listen to who the men? On YouTube? Yeah? You ever listen to that guy? Yes, today we will learn to pronounce the name. Who is that a real person?
I don't know anymore, No one knows anymore.
I gotta figure that out. That'd be a good short stuff. Maybe even who's real? Who is that person?
Okay? Who are these people?
All right, we'll do it as Jerry Seinfelcker. Anyway, he said, it was pronounced a nice nin. And this was the course of very famous diary that she kept from age eleven until and this is nineteen fourteen until she died in nineteen seventy seven. And it was noteworthy and that it was very sort of body stuff for the time. She talked very personally about, you know, sort of romantic escapades that people did not talk about at the time.
It was published in sixty six like a sanitized version and was a big hit with the ladies largely, and then she said, hey, after I die, why don't you publish the full and uncensored version.
But even the sanitized version was like, I've been ing a double life. I've been having this affair. I'm married to two guys. I've split my life between New York and Los Angeles, and my husband doesn't know, like just all sorts of stuff. And she purposely published them while she was alive. And I mean, that's a tremendous amount of risk that she took on. She ended up becoming a feminist icon, like basically overnight as a.
Result, another icon. You can't talk about diaries without talking about Anne Frank. And this is something that I never knew. Obviously, if you know, we'll tell you who Ann Frank is, because I always think everyone knows, even because it's the second most widely read book in the world after the Bible. But Anne Frank wrote a diary between nineteen forty two and nineteen forty four as a teenager, started at thirteen hiding from the Nazis with her family and wrote this diary.
The thing I never knew is that she had planned to publish it. As the story goes, she was inspired by a radio transmission in nineteen forty four from the Dutch government that said, hey, collect this and put it on paper. All this everyday material about Nazi occupation, like write it down so people know. And so she did that and like rewrote it with the aim of publishing it before she was captured.
Yeah, so her original diaries considered diary A. Like there's entire people have written theses on parts of this stuff. So the first one's Diary A, the one that she rewrote intended for publication, that's considered Diary B. And her father Auto, the only one who survived the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands of the family because they were found out by the Gestapo and taken to concentration camps, which
is where Anne Frank was murdered as a girl. Still, she would have been maybe fifteen or sixteen at the time. Auto survived and he was given her journals and basically had them put together journal Diary A and Diary B to kind of create like a a version of it for public consumption. And after he died, they published the whole thing, and that's considered Diary C. And like you said, I mean, it's probably the second most read book in the entire world after the Bible, and for good reason too.
I mean, like this the insight into history that it gives is just amazing and unparalleled. But also there's a poet named John Berryman who put it like this. He said that the book is about the conversion of a child into a person, and Frank's going through this conversion from age thirteen to fifteen. Big big difference in ages. Right there, thirteen to fifteen, A lot happened. Yeah, and she's doing it hidden away in an attic in the Netherlands, hiding out from the Nazi, hiding for her life.
Have you ever been to the an Frank House?
No?
I haven't you ever been to Amsterdam? Yes?
Okay, make me feel bad, though, why don't you?
No, you shouldn't feel bad. I've been there a few times, and I went once. I didn't go two times.
Well, at least she went once, though. I don't even have that to boast about. But I would like to go though. I mean, I can't imagine how moving that place is.
Yeah.
So those are some famous examples of famous journals. I guess you want to take another break and talk about why people might write journals in the first place.
Yeah. I think it's another earliest break. But it aligns nicely.
Okay, So, Chuck, there's all sorts of reasons to write in your journal, whether you're talking about limestone being delivered to build a pyramid, or being enslaved in the navy yards or being occupied by the Confederate Army. People have been doing it for centuries and centuries and centuries without any real intention to do anything other than get their thoughts out on paper. And it wasn't until the nineteen sixties that psychotherapists were like, you know, there's something to that.
People are putting their internal lives out into written form. They're getting out of their minds and into the world. There has to be some therapy to benefit to that. And a therapist named Ira Progoff came up with what it's called intensive journaling.
Yeah, and like you said, it was in nineteen sixties, and his version it was basically a notebook like a three ring binder, with color coded sections about topically arranged thematically arranged. It could be like dream recording your dreams, which we'll talk about again a little bit later, could have been just daily life stuff. It could be very like, hey, write about a big event in your life, and we'll talk a little bit more about trauma journaling later. Because
that can be very valuable and painful, I imagine. But basically it's all about like almost like a meditation and allowing things that were important to you or related to you at different points of your life to come to the forefront of your mind and just sort of write out through the pin onto the paper or through your fingis onto the keyboard.
Right. Yeah, you sit there for a few minutes reflecting on the topic you've decided to focus on for that journal entry. Then you write it, then you read what you just wrote, and then you write your feelings about writing it and then reading it.
That's got to be helpful, got to.
Be And that's the point of all this. Like we're going to get into some pretty deep bs here eventually. But the upshot of it is there's a very very little chance that it will be in any way harmful and possibly very beneficial, and that it could be.
Difficult, yes, but that doesn't mean harmful.
Right, And that that alone makes it worth at least giving it a shot. And if it works for you, great, It doesn't work for you, then you gave it a try.
Yeah. There's another guy named James Pinnabaker from Texas University of Texas Austin. He's a psychologist that did studies on what he called expressive writing. Been doing this since the eighties, And he said, you know where I found or where he found it helpful was when you would just start out with like very disjointed sort of raw feelings and things and then transform that into a story and into
a narrative. And the process of taking like a difficult experience, maybe just writing down the eight feelings you had about it, and then that gets a little more detailed and more detailed until you've turned it into a story can help you handle that stuff more easily and help you live with it.
Yeah, and there's actually studies to back this up. His whole thing is like, you don't need to journal every day.
If you do, fine, that's great. But he found that just one fifteen to thirty minute session of writing about a difficult or traumatic experience can help relieve not just psychological symptoms, but physiological symptoms as well, and that a lot of studies have found that if you do like three to five for fifteen to thirty minute sessions writing about the same experience, it can really help work past trauma that you've been carrying around. It's pretty amazing just writing about it.
Yeah, some of the things they found in studies, a short term increase in distress or negative mood. That's what I was talking about, Like, it may be difficult in the moment, you know, bringing up these bad memories, but it pays off in the long run. Evidence of improvements in depressive systems, long term and emotional well being. Benefits to physical health like lower blood pressure, better lung function, less illness, less doctor visits, better immune system, more antibodies.
Pretty neat, pretty amazing.
Yeah, And they think that it's just by getting this thing out of your working memory, essentially, by documenting on paper, you don't have to worry about remembering or thinking about it, ruminating about it anymore. You put it out there, and that that alone can lower your stress levels and your immune system can kick back in to higher gear again.
Yeah, and I think he's the guy that really stressed, Like,
do it how you do it? If you want to write it with a pen, fine, you can put it in your phone, don't and don't worry about like writing well, and don't worry about being fair even like you're doing this for you, you're not doing this for publication, So write about how you really feel, even if it's a very selfish thing in the moment, and try and really bring up a lot of sensory details and you know, deep emotional, physical, sometimes feelings that you had at the
moment of this trauma. And be careful as you're doing it. It's not like a therapy replacement, but ideally to be used in conjunction with therapy.
Remember in our meditat Now our mindfulness episode where we talked about some people who engage in mindfulness activities like find that there they freak out because they accidentally uncovered trauma and they weren't prepared right, Pennebaker kind of warns about the same thing. He says that there's too soon
for journaling. It can be that with that potent and powerful that if you if it's if it follows too closely after the actual traumatic event, it can be too hard on you, and that you should have at least some distance of time. And probably the more you know, for a seriously traumatic event, you probably want to do this under the advisement of a therapist. Don't necessarily try
to do it on yourself. So it's probably not going to harm you, but the potential is there enough that if this is, you could probably only be the only judge for yourself. Right, this is so weighty that it could break you mentally. You should probably talk to somebody first about how to do it correctly or when to do it.
Yeah, totally agree. A gratitude journal is something that I had never really heard of.
Really.
Uh yeah, I never heard of though I've heard about course gratitude and thankful and ruminating on that stuff, but like actually writing it down a list or a journal is a pretty popular thing that I'm a big dummy for not knowing, because they've even done a meta analysis and so that means there's a lot of studies on it. In twenty twenty one, Japanese researchers did this analysis and they found that it really helps with stress and depression if you do it at least like six times, it
said over the course of a study. I'm not sure what timeframe that is, but basically, like you know, it can take a lot of forms. Noticing generosity that you see walking around in the world, things that you're just
thankful for. It can help lead to you expressing gratitude and thanks to others, and you can also note that, but it's you know, sort of a version of what's called positive affect journaling, which is basically focusing on positive things and gratitude and ideally that's going to increase your well being. And then it seems like it would.
Yeah, for sure. And they also say you want to be very detailed, you want to typically focus on people, not necessarily things that you're grateful for, although you can focus on that, and that it's much better to focus on a single topic rather than you know, list off five things like I'm grateful for this, this, and this. More like I'm grateful for this and this is why is much more helpful as far as gratitude journals go.
I like that. Also, going back to the trauma things just real quick, there was a twenty sixteen study by a researcher named g. Jung Park, and they found that people who use expressive journaling, which is writing about your experience getting it out in those fifteen to thirty minute sessions, they showed more self distance after journaling. And self distance
is actually it's a psychological term. It's a concept where you are more detached emotionally from an event that you experienced, and that by being able to distance yourself from it. You're able to cope with it much easier, process it better than when you're super all up in it and it's overwhelming you. And they found that self distancing can be helped along by journaling about the event. Yeah.
I mean it's sort of that time heals wounds things, And I think the idea here is it can help sort of speed up that process, speed up that time.
Yeah, and it helps you get things off your chest. It helps you clarify your thinking. And one other thing that it really helps you do is see other people's perspectives.
And I imagine you may be able to put stuff down on paper in private that you might not even tell a therapist that you think that you can be completely open to you know.
Yes, ideally that you are sharing that level of openness with your with your journal diary. That's from what I can tell. The more you're able to do that, the healthier it could conceivably be. Although I don't know if you said it or not, but Pennebaker says, maybe you don't want to journal every day because that can actually potentially make you ruminate more on negative stuff because you're talking.
Like you said that actually did. I there are several truths in your life. There is the truth you tell your therapist, there's the truth you tell your doctor, and then there's only one real truth, and that's the truth that you tell yourself. Probably yeah, when no one else knows anything, even the closest people in your life, I think the truth you tell yourself is probably the truest thing.
You can also delude yourself though, too.
Oh well no, no, that's a completely different thing.
Oh oh sorry I brought that up.
No, you can lie to yourself. But uh, I think that I don't know. That's just an opinion of mine, you know, sure, And that's why I think that journaling very privately could be like a really there thing.
For sure. It seems like, yeah, that's the thing when I said we were going to wait into BS, Like, there's a lot of people out there who have tried to qualify this, quantify it. Hr people who are like, maybe we should get all the employees to journal every day. It's like this thing may work. So everybody's turned it into a thing that you have to do, and if not, then you're not you're not trying to achieve your goals, and you're you're not living your best life or whatever.
It's it's just it's meant to be one of those things that like, if it helps you, great, If it doesn't, move on, it doesn't. It doesn't have to be this thing that everybody has to do and benefit from in exactly the same way.
Yeah. I have a fun small collection of two to three journal entries from various points in my Life's nice where I would say I'm going to start doing this, man, because I'd do something like this, or a teacher would talk about it, and then all right, here we go, and a few days then I stopped doing. Yeah.
I mean, it's so easy to not do anymore.
I did have. I think the longest one I ever kept was for one full quarter when we were in quarters. Back then in college, I had a play writing class I took, and my playwriting teacher had us as part of the class, so it wasn't optional to do what he called a commonplace journal, and that was just not even your thoughts and emotions, just more in the as a writer might do, like things you notice and things
that might inspire you in this in that commonplace. Then Okay, so I did that for a quarter, but I don't think I have that one. That's my biggest, most robust one, and it's lost to time.
Poor guy.
There are all kinds of journals that have become popular as far as like, oh, this person says this is a very good way to do it. The artist way, a self help book from ninety two by Julia Cameron, talked about morning pages. So you just sort of and this is based on the Jungian idea that you're ego defense doesn't wake up until for forty five minutes after you wake up.
Yeah, I look that up, and I don't think that's actually a thing that you never said.
Oh really, yeah, so did Julia Cameron, Like, I mean, it is a self help book, right, anyway, that's the idea, at least that sounds like it may or it may not be true. But the whole idea is you do this first thing in the morning, sort of stream of consciousness style to get just sort of drain out your brain of like stuff that might plague you throughout the day later.
Yeah, the point isn't to just write anything like inspirational or good or where just to get it out like you were saying, Yeah, that's a good example of what I was talking about with the BS, like does it have to be based on a Jungian idea? And that is exactly forty five minutes. It's just like, hey, this works, you guys should give it a try. Don't try to write anything worth while. Just get out the crud that's going to plague you for the rest of the day.
Why can't people present ideas like that anymore?
Know, yeah, just say do it when you're sweepy. That seems to work.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, what do you got to bring young into this?
It's like, don't drag me into this just because you use the word ego.
We talked about gratitude journals. What are bullet journals?
Theories are well, they were created by a digital designer named right Carol, great digital designer name back in twenty thirteen, and they're much more real world focused, like to do lists, calendars.
It seems like a life system exactly.
That's exactly what it is in written form, and so whatever you need to help you, like you're trying to keep up with the meals you're eating for the week, or the exercise you're doing, or the chores you have to do or whatever you have. These different journals all within this kind of bullet journal, these different sections or segments to it that are typically laid out over time a week, a month or something like that, or by section, and people decorate them in very pretty ways.
Well, and it's also can be though not literally just uh, things I have to get accomplished today, but like like go to the store or go to this appointment, but things you want to accomplish is in a holistic way, like today I'm gonna I'm gonna really work on either gratitude or thankfulness or empathy or something like that.
Right, here's I got to check the box next to empathy, I empathize today.
Check that sounded slightly cynical. Dream journals Yeah, well I don't do those either, no.
But so there are formal interpretation systems of dreams, like if your tooth fall out, you're worried about your looks or something like that. Right, those are clearly obviously just totally wrong. But there is a usefulness to dream journals in that it's it's very much like getting your thoughts
out with a with typical journaling. With dream journals, you're recording the thoughts that you got out while you were a dream before they you know, disappear, you know, in that forty five minutes before your ego defenses go up, right. But that's that's kind of the point of dream journal, And you're almost visiting or you're recording these visits to the other parts of your mind that you can't typically access, so you're just jotting down what happened, and it can
affect your waking life in ways. I read a New York Times letter from somebody who suggested doing this, and they were, like, it makes when I dream about somebody in a certain way, when I see them the next time, I noticed those qualities about them. So like the dreams, logging the dreams affects how they navigate waking life, which sounds pretty neat.
I mean that sounds like the most fun one. Yeah, just for no other reason than to go back and read about fun weird dreams years later. Exactly, have you ever woken up, uh, have you ever been like mad at you me in a dream and woken up a little bit like feeling a little mad, even though that's totally unfairing.
No, not that specific thing, but I have been out of works in many different ways from dreams, and it takes a little while, because I mean, think about the same neurochemicals are being released in your brain whether you're awake or you're asleep while you're experiencing that, and yeah, if they happen to still be flooding your brain when you wake up, you're still gonna be feeling that way, you know.
Yeah. Emily and I both had dreams where like one of us did something to the other in sallity and you wake up and you know it's unreasonable, and you try to shake up. You're like, I'm sorry, I'm just a little mad at you for my dream, and then we laugh and talk about how unfair that is.
That happens to me in normal life too. With TV shows, like, uh, they'll go to commercial break, you know, when you're watching regular TV h and I'll be like, why am I so like tense right now or upset? And I'll realize it's because I just watched the kid get kidnapped on Law and Order, and like that sensation is carried over into the commercial break and now I'm suddenly paying attention to it and wondering why I feel that way.
Uh, that's fun. We were in New York one time and a similarly, we were we were leaving, like kind of finishing up at our table, and the waiter came over and says like, hey, you guys are about done right, because someone you know is waiting to be seated, like in a really nice way. We're like, yeah, yeah, we're getting out of here. You can go go ahead and bring him over or whatever. And uh, it was the actor from that TV show The Killing, the Billy Campbell.
That didn't sound right, but maybe it is. I thought he was like Swedish or something.
There was an original Swedish version of The Killing.
Uh is that what I watched?
I don't know where the titles.
Billy Kimball's the other he is in that show. But I was talking about Joel Kineman.
Is he the the congressman or the city councilman.
No, he was. He is Swedish, actually Swedish American. He he was the partner.
That's Billy Campbell.
Well, I don't want to get too involved here because I don't want to give anything away, but uh, Keneman was for sure her partner.
Okay, all right, I guess I only made a past season two.
Anyway, it was him and it was his TV show and he had again I don't want to give anyway, but he had just done he had been a bad person in that week's episode, and I kind of scowled and I was like you. I was like, I'm so mad at you. And he was like, I'm sorry, bro. He was like everybody he said on the streets this week has been so rough. He was like, I'm so sorry. And I was like, that's really kind of funny.
Actually, So you might be thinking of Peter Sarsgard, he was in it.
No, I mean I'm thinking about Joel Caky.
So we're talking about the same person. I thought his name was Billy Campbell. Billy Campbell was the or the city councilman.
Yeah, he's older, he's like in his sixties, okay, and he played he was the rocketeer.
Oh, I didn't know that. I never saw that movie. It just looked creepy an art deco.
But I mean, I mean cop partner.
Yes, I know what you're talking about.
Yeah, Joe Kinneman was the cop partner, right, Okay.
Yeah, we're talking about the same person. I just had the name wrong. You had the name right. Is that what you want to hear? Is that what you're holding out for here.
I'm not holding out for anything.
You got anything else about journaling or diaries?
Uh?
Nah, Well, I think I speak for us all when I say that we hope you find that quarter journal. What was it called? The what journal?
The commonplace note.
Common place notebook? What a great name. Yeah, it seems like something that would be stitched together with like fabric and twine. You know, there's like a mushroom on it.
Yeah, yeah, sure, Chuck said, yeh.
Sure, everybody. That means it's time for a listener mail.
I'm going to call this things that we have recommended. Did I read this? I don't think I did. I'll read it again. Hey guys, my name is Evan Whitby from Hendersonville, North Carolina. It's kind of a long one, but I'll just say that Evan really loves the show and it's meant a lot to him through his life. In one of the biggest ways that it means a lot is the recommendations movie recommendations that Evan has gotten
from us over the years. Sometimes it's a plug or just comes up in conversation, but by this point I trust your taste a lot, so I check most of them out and then list a bunch of examples what we do in the Shadows, Reservation Dogs, Larry Sanders Show, Nate Bargatzi's stand up Eyes Wide Shut, just to name a few that I particularly liked. And I just finished watching both seasons of Dick Town, which was is John
Hodgmanshow David David Reese's show. Yeah, and you were right and that it's the perfect length to finish it all in one sitting. And as a native North Carolinian who has lived all around the state my whole life, I found it particularly funny. Go wolf Pack. I look forward to many more lessons and many more laughs thanks to the whole team. One Love Evan.
That's awesome. That is so much better than cheers, Evan. Thank you for that.
I like it.
If you want to be like Evan and say hey, I really like this thing you guys recommended, or conversely, you can say, hey, I really like this thing you guys might not know about, so I want to recommend it to you. We are always open for both of those. You can send it in an email via One Love to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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