Repeating patterns in our journal entries

One often overlooked benefit of journaling is recognizing our own thinking patterns. Because journaling records our thoughts, after some time we should have an index of the things we think about. We can use this to our advantage to tackle worries or negative emotions in a structured way. When we write, we tend to use the same phrases, the same nouns, or the same names in our journal entries. I am often able to notice these patterns during a writing session, because the phrases feel so familiar, like I am repeating myself. But we can also actively search for these repetitions by browsing through the pages or searching for words that we think we have written before (when journaling digitally). Investigation We often combine descriptive writing with a more reflective approach after it, to make sense of a situation or to draw conclusions from it. If we rely solely on descriptive writing, we can only see the pattern in the things that happen to us and what they made us feel. Because we now…