Writing your thoughts down makes it much easier to think clearly. By making yourself pick out words to describe your thoughts, you also shape what you are thinking. There’s not a lot of room for fuzzy emotional logic when the words are down in black and white.

It is still easy to get caught up making the same mistakes over and over. Something I’ve noticed when reviewing my journals much later. This is where having a coach or a therapist comes in handy, if you keep bringing up the same problems they can push back on that.

Trusting a coach enough to share everything, or affording a long term therapist, isn’t something we can all do. Thankfully AI models have become smart enough to start helping us with this. I stumbled over this idea on X, and tried it out:

I dumped 4 months of journaling into a claude project, asking for advice

Here’s what you do If you don’t already journal, start taking down problems or thoughts every morning or night. Take your journal entries from the last months or weeks. Copy it into Claude3.5 sonnet (or llama 405B, or ChatGPT4o)

Ask questions about your recent thoughts. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

• What are some things that are obivous to outsiders, but I don’t seem to notice?
• What advice would you give based on these thoughts?
• What 3 things would be most impactful for making me succeed and/or feel better?

Some of the advice I got was bland. But some of it was really good.

Remember that the model does not think, so you can’t ask it for logical conclusions. But it can give you insights if you ask more or better questions.