Journaling as Cortisol Download and Pattern Audit
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Swart gives journaling two distinct jobs. The first is immediate: holding negative thoughts, unfinished tasks and worries in your brain-body system raises cortisol, which correlates with stress, and the pressure builds like a pressure cooker. Speaking them out loud, writing them into a journal, or sweating them out through physical exercise releases them. The second job is the one she says she stumbled on herself and which makes sense from a neuroplasticity point of view: going back and reading old entries. You see your thought process laid out, your patterns of behaviour, whether your decision-making runs logical or intuitive, and what you wrote about your relationships. Because it is unmistakably your own words, you can't run away from it, which is what makes the read-back insightful rather than merely nostalgic.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Write daily, as a download
Empty out emotions, negative thought patterns, anxieties, worries about the future and unfinished tasks rather than carrying them in your head.
Pro tip Speaking aloud or exercising are valid substitutes on days you won't write.
- 2
Keep it unmistakably yours
Handwriting, or typed and synced, as long as you know they're your words and your thoughts. That ownership is what stops you dismissing it later.
Pro tip A distraction-free device with no browser removes the temptation to drift.
- 3
Pair it with a gratitude practice
Swart groups long-term journaling and long-term gratitude together as the practices that build resilience over nine months or more.
- 4
Schedule a read-back of older entries
Go back roughly six months and read what you actually wrote, rather than what you remember writing.
Pro tip Time the read-back to a recurring situation, such as before repeating a trip or a project.
Watch out Without the read-back you only get the cortisol release and none of the pattern insight.
- 5
Read for patterns, not for events
Look for recurring thought patterns, how you make decisions, whether you lean logical or intuitive, what you say about your relationships, and any repeated physical or emotional symptoms.
- 6
Act on what the pattern implies
A pattern is only useful if it changes something: a supplement, a boundary, a working arrangement, a conversation you keep avoiding.
In the wild
Swart used to fly to Boston twice a year to teach at MIT. On one trip, between the travel and the jet lag, she noticed small muscular twitches, most obvious in bed at night. Separately, and not for that reason, she decided to read back through her journal from six months earlier, her previous Boston trip. There it was in her own writing: she had recorded the same little muscular twitches then too. Connecting the two entries told her she was becoming magnesium deficient from flying, which she would never have worked out otherwise, since it felt like a new problem.
→ She substantially increased her magnesium dose around trips and the twitches never returned.
Common mistakes
Never re-reading what you wrote
Writing alone gets you the cortisol download. The insight, the patterns, the decision-making style and the repeating symptoms only surfaces when you go back and read entries from months earlier.
Journaling only when something goes wrong
Crisis-only entries give you no baseline to compare against, so a recurring pattern looks like a one-off event every single time it happens.
Keeping it all in your head instead
Thinking through emotions and unfinished tasks without externalising them raises cortisol and builds like a pressure cooker. The release comes from writing, speaking aloud or sweating it out.
From the transcript
“if you speak it out loud write it out into a journal or do physical exercise and literally sweat out some of that cortisol then…”
“if you go back and read over your Journal you see your thought process laid out in front of you you see your patterns of…”
From the episode
Change Your Brain: The Power Of Neuroplasticity And Braincare - Dr Tara Swart
Dr Tara Swart