for the past few months I've started using a journaling technique that literally takes me 2 minutes to do and I call it dopamine days and I'm going to be honest with you guys I've always loved the idea of journaling and I've constantly sort out new techniques and methods that I could do to try and stick with that habit because I'm sure you're aware of how important journaling is if you want to stick with your goals make progress towards kind of the future life you want to build but also to reduce stress and just kind of
calm any anxiety that you're feeling by writing down all of your thoughts but the problem is until I discovered this method of using dopamine days I was never able to stick to journaling and make it a habit if you're anything like how I was you've probably tried every technique out there maybe you've tried bullet journaling youve tried journaling on your phone or you've even invested in one of those nice kind of journals you see advertised all the time on Instagram none of them actually work and this was something that really stressed me out because I
wanted to get all of those benefits from journaling that I just spoke about but if I'm being really honest this dopamine day technique has completely changed my life and I want to share it with you guys and hope that it also helps you to get started making journaling a habit so as always the time stamps are on screen and they're down below in the description but that's enough hanging around let's just get right into the video I want to tell you a story and let me know in the comments if it sounds familiar let's say
you wake up in the morning about 7:30 a.m. you get dressed you get ready you make your breakfast then then you commute you get to work or school or whever you have to go to you get back you make dinner you look at your watch you realize it's getting kind of late so you put on some Netflix and all of a sudden you sort of drift off to sleep and wake up and repeat the cycle the next day then you don't really think anything of this routine that you've got yourself into until one random Wednesday
you're just scrolling through Instagram if you're on your commute or maybe if you're a little bit of downtime at work or school and you see one of your friends just doing random things on a Wednesday afternoon this could be really cool stuff like maybe they're going rock climbing but it could also be really simple stuff that you're kind of envious of maybe they're just going out for a coffee with a friend and this makes you feel really sad because you compare it to your life which has this kind of monotonous routine and you're really envious
that your friend has all of this going on and you feel like because you're not doing these things you're somehow falling behind so whil you might feel like your life is really busy and you're kind of filling all of your days with some sort of task actually none of this is actually contributing towards a life that you want to build and none of it is particularly exciting energizing stuff so whilst you might feel busy you don't actually feel fulfilled and there's no kind of crossover no bridge between those two areas of your life and for
me at least this was one of the biggest reasons why those journaling techniques like bullet journaling didn't actually work for me because if I wasn't doing any of this exciting stuff in my life that was making me feel fulfilled how was spending 4 hours was designing this beautiful bullet Journal actually going to help me at all if I got to the end of the day and didn't have anything kind of meaningful to write about well what was the point I wanted the journal to inspire me to go out and do things and seek these kind
of fun opportunities but it wasn't doing any of this and I think that's why the dopamine days Journal works so well because whilst routines are clearly important and giving your life a sort of structure and something you can build from if you let your routine consume you when well you're actually going to find that your life is quite boring instead of using your journal to kind of inspire some of that creativity that I know you've got deep down inside of you actually your Journal ends up just being like a calendar and that's where the dopam
mean day's Journal really stands apart because I can guarantee that it is finally going to make you more creative more spontaneous and actually just feel like you're having more fun but how do you get started with the journal so if we take a look at my journal you'll see that I've tried a lot of different techniques over the past few months and this is just one of my books that I keep all of my notes and kind of my different journal entries in however if you look closely there is one constant between all of these
methods and that's that I've been using some variation of this dopamine days journaling hack so I want to show you April of 2024 as an example of this technique in action because I think it's a really good month where I didn't have a structure I just finished University and I was waiting like a month or two before I was going to go work in Canada so because I didn't have a routine or a structure my life had this kind of opportunity to just get really boring really quickly so I needed a technique to give me
a bit of fun and essentially the way this dopamine days journaling technique works is that at the end of each day we're just putting in a highlight something that we found the most enjoyable part of the day but if we look a little bit further like the 12th of the month you'll see that I went to a really nice Italian restaurant in London so there's kind of different levels to what you can write down as your highlight because I appreciate we're not all going to be craving those new experiences every single day because we don't
have the money we might not have the time we might not even have the energy but the point is there's a huge variety of things that you can decide as the highlight of your day the reason why the dopamine day journaling technique is so so effective is because it only takes literally 2 minutes so you can keep your Journal next to you at the side of your bed and then before you go to sleep every night you can just literally write down a sentence of the Highlight from your day and the great thing is that
even if you miss a day or two the likelihood is you're going to remember what you did and you can just fill in the gaps if you do leave a gap like sort of I have here it's not a problem and you can just move forward and start aresh from the day that you remember to write down your highlight okay so at this point you now understand how dopamine days works if you want to get started and you also know why it's such an effective journaling technique compared to all of those different methods we talked
about but you might still be wondering how how you can have more fun and more spontaneity in your life and what sort of things you should try to get started writing down if you've never done this before or if you're feeling like you're really stuck in a rock if that sounds like you I want to tell you a little secret of how you can easily kind of level up your life and get started finding a little bit more fun in your daytoday because ultimately if you're not enjoying the moments and you're not enjoying the days
or you're not really enjoying your life that's how important this is to get right if you've seen any of my videos before or you're familiar with the channel you'll know that I am a huge fan of the three pillars of life system and that basically says that there are three different pillars holding up our life happiness we need to balance our health we need to balance our wealth and we need to balance our mindset and if we do this then we're going to feel very fulfilled and if we look at our dopamine days if we
look at our journal entry you'll see that realistically whatever we're writing down can fit into one of those three different categories and my theory is that if you're feeling like your life is boring or it lacks meaning or purpose then realistically one of these pillars is out of balance so a great technique that you can use now is just to grab three separate colors at the end of the month when you've got each of your dopamine days Britten down you can go through with each of these colors and just give them a code depending on
which pillar of Life they correspond to and then I'm sure you'll see some sort of pattern emerging maybe you've been focusing too much on your wealth and as a result you're feeling really kind of lonely and isolated because you've been neglecting some of those relationships or maybe you're feeling a lack of energy and really tired because you've not been focusing so much on your health eating right and exercising if you do this you're going to get an excellent Glimpse and insight into the balance of your life if your life doesn't look so balanced you can
then pivot and make changes going forwards whilst the dopamine days technique is a fantastic way for beginners to get started journaling and I'm sure that you're going to feel more confident to make this a habit if you want to step up your journaling game even further you're going to want watch this video on the crash journal and if you like this type of content and want to see more of it please hit subscribe and stick around for the next video
