In her book The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky describes the experimentally proven benefits of regular writing in a "Best Possible Selves" journal. This is a journal in which you "imagine yourself in the future, after everything has gone as well as it possibly could". In several studies, those who wrote in these journals saw a "significant lift in mood compared with a control group that wrote simply about the details of their daily lives".
When I've tried to write in this kind of journal before, I've found it hard to focus. The future is too big. I've jumped back and forth from the near future to the far future. Next week, next month, 5 years from now, and so on. And I've also jumped from one aspect of my life to another. Work. Family. Spiritual growth. Finances. Possessions. Fun. It's overwhelming to me to just sit down and imagine an ideal future.
This is why I've started, as described in my last blog post, to use different journals on different days. Some journals focus on the near term: the next 7 days. Others focus on longer term visions: 5 months or longer. And the subject matter alternates between health, home life, and work. Ever since I've set these kinds of boundaries on each day's journal, it's been easier and more rewarding to imagine the future and capture it on paper.
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