Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
A podcast about practices to promote healthy lives featuring experts, businesses, and clients: we gather to share our stories about success, failure, exploration, and so much more. Our subscription episodes feature some personal and vulnerable, real-life stories that are sensitive to some of the general public.
Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Journaling: The Hidden Tool for Self-Discovery
Searching for answers to your health challenges? The solution might be simpler than you think. In this illuminating episode, we examine the profound power of journaling as a transformative tool for anyone seeking meaningful health improvements.
When facing weight issues, sleep problems, chronic conditions, or even cancer, our natural tendency is to look externally for sophisticated solutions. Yet the most powerful catalyst for change often begins with the simple act of documenting our journey. As your host shares from decades of personal and professional experience, our minds frequently distort reality—not necessarily through deliberate deception, but through unconscious filtering and selective memory.
Through compelling stories and practical examples, we explore how maintaining a consistent journal creates the mindfulness necessary to break unconscious patterns. Whether tracking food intake, sleep quality, medication effects, or emotional states, written records reveal connections and patterns invisible to casual observation. This awareness becomes the foundation for sustainable change through the compound effect—small, consistent adjustments that yield remarkable results over time.
Most significantly, your relationship with your journal serves as a reliable indicator of your readiness for transformation. Those who maintain their journals invariably achieve their health goals, while those who abandon the practice typically aren't prepared for the changes they claim to seek. This isn't about judgment but about honestly assessing your commitment to your own wellbeing.
Ready to unlock insights that could transform your health? Grab a notebook, download an app, or find whatever journaling method works for you—and take the first step toward becoming your own best health detective. Your future self will thank you for the clarity and direction this simple practice provides.
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Joe Grumbine, md, mph. Well hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and today we're going to be talking about some tools, or particularly a tool to finding answers. For those of you who are new to the show, this is a podcast that is designed not only to provide a wealth of information about healthy living from many different perspectives, but also an attempt, an effort to build a community with the common thread of people seeking health, and so far it's been pretty successful. The podcast has continued to grow. We've had a wide range of guests and if you're interested in participating as a guest, contact me. I'm easy to reach. If you think the show is valuable, I would ask that maybe tell somebody about it or share a link or put a comment or review or something to let us know that you think this is an important show or valuable and really excited about the progress. It's all been organic and grassroots and the community that's been building around this through the gardens of hope in Paris, california, has been remarkable. We've been working together with many different health related activities and events, including sound baths and yoga and plant medicine, ceremonies, retreats, workshops all kinds of things been growing. We've had people travel 12 hours to come down and participate in our events and not only make the trip but come back again. So we're really excited about the progress of this. We're really excited about the progress of this. We'll be talking about more activities and events in future episodes.
Speaker 1:Today I want to talk about a tool that I think is maybe one of the most valuable tools you can use if you're seeking to find answers within yourself, and this is a tool that I use kind of as a filter in some ways and then as a very valuable tool in others. Excuse me, and it's the idea of a journal. So a lot of times people will come to me and say, oh, I want you to consult me on this or that. Maybe it's losing weight or finding better sleep habits, or you know cancer, and I like to kind of get a baseline. You got got to figure out. Where are we? What am I dealing with? Because people will come and tell you about their problem, but they'll miss things, maybe intentionally, maybe unintentionally, but they'll leave a piece out that affects the outcome dramatically, and so they might say, well, I don't sleep very well, and they forget to tell you that. You know, the person in the apartment next door plays their music at four o'clock in the morning or whatever. There's a million things that get left out. And you know we're working together on this strategy and nothing's working. Nothing's working and you go, finally you find out this missing piece and you're like, well, if I had known that ahead of time we could have gone a different direction.
Speaker 1:And so when somebody comes to me on a consult, usually what I'll do is I'll say, okay, well, the first thing we're going to do is let's start journaling. You know, a lot of times it has to do with diet. Diet will have something to do with it. I'll say well, you need to write down everything you're eating and when you're eating it, and that way we can start to understand what is food. How does food fit into the equation? If it's related to sleep, we'll talk about everything that we can that's related to sleep. If it has to do with whatever, it has to do with cancer especially. You know, diet is such an important part of solving the problem of cancer that if you don't pay attention to what you're eating and sometimes when you're eating it, I don't know how you're gonna come up with answers. And then you know things like medication and all of that, and most people will not discipline themselves, will not discipline themselves to do that, and so I don't waste any time anymore. I used to spend.
Speaker 1:I can remember about a year ago I had a lady and she contacted me. I didn't know who she was, where she came from. I think she had used some of my Willow Creek Springs products and that's how she found me. And she says I, I know you can help me with this, it was. It was pretty much a weight related issue. And she says I've tried this and I've tried that. And we talked oh my God, you know my, my policy is you get 10 minutes for free and then then we either figure out we're going to work together and establish some kind of a collaboration or partnership or you know, you pay for your services and we go that way.
Speaker 1:But no, no, I didn't listen to my own rules and I sat there with her for close to an hour hearing her story and all the details of the ailments she had, and you know, I think she was a nurse and all the stresses of this and that she a lot of times people just want to vent, they want to somebody to hear them and you know that's cool. But if I don't know you and I don't have the time necessarily to just give to you for free, I don't know why. You know why I would do that, and I've learned over many, many, many years and many, many, many people and doing that that it just never works and maybe you'll help somebody a little bit, but it's generally a colossal waste of effort and so. But no, I didn't listen, and so after all of this, I said, okay, well, here's your assignment, you need to go and journal this and then we'll go forward. And I didn't hear from her for about a week and then, finally, she did send me an email or whatever. That said, okay, I got my journal and she scheduled an appointment to sit down and start working on it. And appointment came and went and she wasn't there. She didn't show up and I never heard from her again.
Speaker 1:I thought to myself, wow, okay, even when you said you did the journal, maybe you did, maybe you didn't, I don't know, but still that the integrity and the wherewithal to complete a task like that is very telling. And so I would say, if you're looking to solve any problem, health-related or otherwise start to journal and it's going to give you a lot more than just some basic facts. So what happens is, when you start directing your attention to a topic, things start to shift and I think when you say I want something to happen in your mind, a change begins to make a quantum change, if you will, and I don't know how it works, but I do know that wherever you direct your attention, those things start to happen on some level. They could happen positively, negatively, but something will happen as soon as you start to think about a thing. So if I say, well, I want to lose some weight, or I got this cancer that needs to go, or maybe I just found out I've got MS or an addiction I finally need to kick, or whatever it is, maybe it's a relationship problem and you say, you know, I think it's time for me to make a change.
Speaker 1:Whatever that change is, well, I think that what happens is we have a perception of times, we sugarcoat things or we will overlook things, or we will sometimes even change things in our mind as to what happened. And it happens all the time you talk to somebody. Maybe it's somebody you know and love. Maybe it's somebody you don't know at all, maybe it's somebody you have some limited relationship with.
Speaker 1:But if you talk to people about things that happen, you'll realize that people make shit up all the time and I don't know if it's intentional, I don't know if it's just how they actually remember things, but I've been present at events or you know, when something happened and witnessed something, and then I've gone back and listened to or later on heard somebody describe the thing that happened and I think to myself, wow, how did you come up with that? And then you think, wow, if you're going to do that for maybe something that doesn't have any real importance of you know, why would you even bother to make something like that up? You go, wow, what are people willing and capable and able to do, whether, again, intentional or not? And you think to yourself, wow, how do you find any answers when there's so much just bullshit out there? And you know. Then you get into the dissemination of information and all of that with purpose and you go, man, how does anybody find any answers? And so, again, this journal becomes an important tool when you decide you're going to start being honest about things, things, and I really don't think that most people are dishonest on purpose. I think they just don't think about things.
Speaker 1:Or you know, your brain sort of patches things up for you a lot of times without you really paying any attention to it. And so let's say, example, you are overweight and you come to me and say I need to lose 20 pounds, can you help me? And I'll say, yeah, sure, let's. Let's start looking at the obvious things and then we'll work our way through it. So you'd say to yourself, okay, what factors are likely to contribute to weight? And you say, obviously, my food intake. That would be certainly one of them. I would probably go to sleep, because people that don't sleep, generally you have a different way of metabolizing food. So I would look at that. I would look at things like mobility, exercise you know what are you doing that counteracts the food you're taking in. I would look at when you eat, the frequency of meals, other factors like health conditions, blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, anything like that.
Speaker 1:Medications a lot of medications affect weight gain and loss. I know for me they had me on a steroid and I gained a ton of weight as a result, and it wasn't just that, it was a series of things, but that was definitely a contributing factor. So you start off and you say, okay, well, try to make things doable. So if you start out with a task and it is too complicated, it's just like a New Year's resolution how likely are you are to complete something that has 10 working parts, that maybe you get through it once, twice, three times, but after that you're like geez, is it worth it?
Speaker 1:So much hassle, so many things I know with my journey to resolving cancer the amount of activities, restrictions, supplements, foods, all of the things I've had to do. It's been arduous things I've had to do. It's been arduous and it's probably just simply my sheer will to live that has kept me going on it. And I know most people that I consult about cancer don't follow through. And it's sad because I know that I have answers that could help people. But frankly, people are not willing to put the effort that it takes more often than not to solve their problem of, I don't know, staying alive. I would think that's kind of an important thing, but you'd be surprised how many people find that too much of an effort to do the thing that would solve the problem. And again, journaling can be instrumental in that. In fact, one of the tells that I have for myself if I'm on point or not is that I'm keeping my journal and sometimes it's just a planner. You know you keep a planner together and what do you do? You start making a record of things you do, things you plan to do. Hopefully you follow up a planner with little notes about things that happened or didn't happen so you can look and say, well, gee, I have all these things planned for the next weeks and months, whatever it is, and then you go back and look at what you did or didn't do, how it worked out. You start to be able to gain some insight from those things.
Speaker 1:For me, I've been journaling since I was a kid, off and on whether it's some kind of a diary or hell. I used to keep a fishing journal as a young teenager. I love to fish, so much that and I was, you know, fairly obsessive when I came up to something that I liked to do, that it became my life and I lived to catch a fish and I would go to different places and I would journal everything the time of the day, the bait I used, no-transcript Field and stream, peak feeding times were the tides, I mean. All kinds of things I would track and then I'd look back at my results and I'd say, wow, okay, I did this when the moon was. Even I've had planting journals. You know I grew pot for a lot of years 40 years and there was times where, you know, I'd grow hydroponically, times I'd grow out in the field, I'd grow with soil, I'd grow all different ways and some years you get a great crop, some years not so much.
Speaker 1:And I learned that if you journal what you're doing, how often you're watering, what the temperatures were like, what the pH of things were, you would be able to replicate your successes and avoid your failures. And so I know that when my planner is kind of my general journal, for a long time I was writing down just thoughts and maybe sort of a diary type description of daily activities and I thought that one day I was going to make a book out of these things. But going back and reading them I realized that my observations often didn see progress. I've made both spiritually, emotionally, mentally, all different ways, and in some cases physically. By looking back at what was I thinking back. Then I can go back. You know, five years, 10 years, 15 years. Sometimes I don't know if I've gotten, if I know where any journals are prior to that. But you know they've been helpful. It never hurts. But helpful enough to write a book, no. So I generally don't do that anymore, but maybe I should and sometimes I think about it.
Speaker 1:Sometimes a prayer journal. You know just so many different things we and sometimes I think about it. Sometimes a prayer journal. You know just so many different things we can do. I think even writing down what you're doing ingrains it and brings your mindfulness to a thing. So you know, know, we do things mindlessly. All the time we eat, we have activities like scrolling through your phone or watching tv or getting into an argument or whatever. Is your the thing you do playing video games? You know how many people Is the thing you do playing video games, how many people play games and have no idea how much time they actually spend doing that, or spend time scrolling or watching videos. And nowadays there's apps that monitor your screen time, which is kind of helpful.
Speaker 1:Again, it's a little journal for you. It says, hey, yesterday you were on that thing for six hours or eight hours or whatever. You think to yourself holy shit, what could I have done with that time besides mindlessly looking at stuff. Now I'm not saying mindless activities aren't healthy and helpful, because sometimes you just need to not think about things. But when you look at, maybe, the value of sitting quietly in nature over looking at some goofy meme that somebody did, or maybe even watching content that stirs negative emotions or is somehow the vibration of it is is is not on a high level, Well then why are you doing it?
Speaker 1:So I think sometimes identifying something that you want to do is a key part of journaling for health, and I think that sets an intention in place. I think that identifying goals so we say, okay, identify a problem, I'm whatever 10 pounds overweight I have I set a goal right off the bat. Well, I wanna lose I don't know a pound a week for 10 weeks. That's an attainable goal by any measure In 10 weeks. If you can't lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks, then I'd say you're probably not trying very hard and you should be able to maintain it if you can correct your behavior, correct your habits, establish a course correction.
Speaker 1:So I've talked before and I'll talk again about the compound effect, where making a real change in a small way will have more effect over the long haul, which, as we get older, we realize time goes by pretty darn quick. So if you say, well, I'm going to make one small adjustment to my diet, and that's maybe I just don't drink soda anymore, or maybe I'll eat vegetables once a day, a day more than I do, or whatever you pick the thing that you can stay with, as opposed to I'm going to go on this rigid diet. I'm going to start fasting, do intermittent, you know 20 and 4, or whatever it is that you decide that you're going to do as an extreme measure. You'll get extreme results with an extreme measure, but are you going to stick with it and are you going to journal it? And so I think that this compound effect, a small course correction that you can journal and watch, is important. And then I think, along with the mindfulness being accurate and not relying on your memory, you know people will go.
Speaker 1:I'll say well, you know, tell me about what you eat. And they'll go oh well, you know, for breakfast I had this, for lunch I had this, I didn't do dinner, or whatever, and they'll forget. They stopped at whatever Burger King and grabbed a number three on their way home because they were starved, because whatever, and they forgot about it. They didn't even think about it and so in their mind they did this, but in actuality they did that and the results are, you know, they didn't lose that weight or they didn't gain some, or whatever. So that's one element I think you just get yourself right.
Speaker 1:When you start writing it down, you start paying attention. You say, well, every time I put anything in my mouth, I got to write it down. So maybe you keep a little notebook with you or whatever it is. But if you do this correctly, then you'll be able to go back and look and maybe, more importantly, I could go back and look or somebody else could look and help you. And then you have things like contributing factors. So if you're not thinking about, all you're thinking about is the food part of it, but you're not thinking about exercise and you think, yeah, I'm pretty active, I get out there, but you don't realize you're sitting down at your computer, for you know seven hours at a time and the harm that that can do, or certainly the lack of good that that will do, you might not be mindful of that. So if you start saying, well, track when you sit down, just start paying attention to that, or sometimes set a timer for 20, 30 minutes. Say, well, I'm not going to sit down for more than 20, 30 minutes at a time and I would get up and walk around for five minutes. Well, I guarantee you, if you don't set that timer and be mindful of it, you're going to lose time and you'll be sitting there for three hours and realize that, oh shit, I forgot again. And so, again, journaling can be instrumental in just keeping your mind on that target.
Speaker 1:Things like sleep and the factors that can affect sleep we don't think about these things. You don't notice there's a blue light in your, your room and you think to yourself no, no, there's not. Then you look and, sure enough, on the cable uh box, there's this little blue light that is casting blue light in your room while you're trying to sleep, or whatever. There's a million things. Um, you know where's sound coming from? Know where's sound coming from or not, where's light coming from or not. You know where's my phone? You know let's not even talk about electromagnetic fields and things like that Where's the Wi-Fi signal at? You know, we can go endlessly deep into this, but even just again, being mindful of it, well, how much did you sleep? Now there are tools beyond the journal that you can use. There's apps, there's watches, there's trackers, and you know those are all journaling tools and using them is good.
Speaker 1:It doesn't mean a journal doesn't just mean a pen and paper although for me I happen to learn when I write things down in a different way. So when I use computer apps and things like that, my brain doesn't file them away in the same way as when I take a pen and paper and write it down. But you figure out what works for you. I think that's the key. But you figure out what works for you. I think that's the key. And then possible interactions of things that you might not see, a pattern. So when you start to look at things like supplements and medications, when you're taking them, and then you can start looking at when you ate and when you slept and when you moved and you can start to get a bigger picture. When you can start to look at these things, you know maybe you put it together as a table and if you journal in such a way where you're monitoring, you know things that can be overlaid. Maybe you do it in a spreadsheet or I don't know. There's ways to do it where you can without a whole lot of effort, start to overlap or even juxtapose things, that you can go oh wow, I can see when I do this that happens and you can start to look at causes and effects and start to add or remove a single item from the equation and sit there and look at it.
Speaker 1:And I think maybe the most important element of a journal, aside from the mindfulness aspect, is you can see long-term progress when it happens in small increments. So I think a lot of the problem that people have is we don't see results fast enough and we lose interest and so we say, well, I need to, you know, get a six pack, or I want to get strong, or I want to lose this weight, or I want to, you know, get this wrinkle off of my face or whatever it is the change you're trying to make, and you work hard for a while and you don't see those answers happening and you're just like, geez, why do I do it when it's so much work and I'm not getting these results? But what you don't realize is that you know it took you 10 years For me I had to look at this giant tumor on my neck when it was a giant tumor and I said, well, it probably took me 20 years to make this thing. What's my expectation? That's going to go away in six weeks to make this thing. What's my expectation? That's going to go away in six weeks. And you know, because of the huge effort I made and the choices I made, the research I made, I was able to make it virtually go away in nine weeks. But had I not done probably half of those things, it wouldn't have.
Speaker 1:In my opinion, we don't know what we don't know. But getting extreme results takes a huge amount of effort and again, I don't know that most people are willing to put forth that kind of effort. But when you're able to journal things and say, wow, I look back over a month, two months, six months, a year and you say, look where I was then and even if you're just making a small, maybe you only lose a half a pound a week, but you know, over 52 weeks you can say, wow, I lost 25 pounds and that's a year. You can lose 25 pounds in a year and keep it off. And with a small change and stay in the course, you're more likely to do that than going extreme and doing, you know, extreme exercise, extreme diet, extreme, you know, modifications and then trying to hold yourself to that for a long period of time, long period of time.
Speaker 1:So I think if you're going to pick a tool to make a change in your life and it can be mentally, spiritually, physically, trying to make a positive thing happen or make a negative thing get smaller or go away I think making a decision that you really want to do this thing and we will talk about that more in the future about you know decisions and things like that and then solidifying that decision by making a commitment to journal and then sticking to it.
Speaker 1:Making a commitment to journal and then sticking to it, I think the commitment you know, you make an agreement with yourself and you say I'm going to do this.
Speaker 1:And that's your first tell if you're not serious, because if you stop journaling you clearly are not serious about what you're doing, and so at least you can realize I'm not ready for this yet, or you know, or hopefully it'll be. Get back to it, you know, remember and make the correction. So this is my two cents on the tool of journaling, and I highly encourage you to begin in some way journal something and start to see the value of this tool and if you come to me for a consultation, expect that I'm going to give that to you as your first homework assignment. And if you're serious about wanting to make change, reach out. I can help most people with most things. If you decide you really want to do it, all right. Well, this has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine. I appreciate all the support and we will see you next week, or next time, I guess.
