Journalling (the Herman way)
With his latest post on Active Recalland the post awhile back on keeping a journal.txt file, Herman made me realise that my memory is something I've been thinking about a bit recently and had started to worry it's been declining somewhat. It's time to do something about it.
Ever since I stopped drinking, I've been acutely aware how much I'm not sure I remember correctly. I have started to wonder if drinking has actually damaged my memory, but then upon reading Herman's post (specifically the part about free recall and how just jotting down your memory of an event can increase your ability to remember accurately), it's pretty clear to me that I haven't done much to train this ability specifically. So instead of thinking about what I'm losing and wallowing that it's just the way things are, I'm going to do something about it. And that thing is... writing more!
What I've been writing already here has been a sort of historical snapshot of moments in my life, so based on the science, I'm already on the way to improving my memory. What I don't do is journal just for myself every day (actually this will not be the first time I've tried writing daily, or at least in the journal format regularly). I need to keep it simple and to the point. Now, after reading Herman's post, I realise that there's actually a hidden benefit to this that may just give me the encouragement to keep at it more regularly. Is it a bit sad that I'm now so excited to journal because it can hack my brain to be less useless, but 2026 seems to be my year of self-improvement, so fuck it, why not.
I've been really consistent with my posts here and for that, I'm very proud. It's become a beautiful part of my Friday routine and it will stay. However, now, armed with an excuse to get off my phone, I'm going to instead take a few moments each day (or every few days), to just reflect on what happened on that day. I think the eureka moment as well for me was reading in Herman's post that it's not really about reading these posts back in the future, but simply writing down the memories that serves the purpose of memory improvement. Something about that resonates a lot with me: that a clear action can have a clear output/result. I suppose that's why I'm in operations for my work.
Will I adopt the journal.txt file? Actually no, because I've been using Obsidian for ages to make handy-dandy markdown files and it serves just fine for this. It even has a super useful Daily Note function to create a new file for the day's journal entry, and I guess I forgot, but I already have a few of these dating back to 2024! Good work past me, it seems you were on the right path, even back then in more debaucherous times. The irony here is that I almost forgot I'd started journalling and how much I'd written.
Anyone else got any more hacks we can do to improve our brains?