I have kept a journal for about twelve years. For the first half of that time, I wrote long entries — sometimes a full page, sometimes more. For the last six years I have written, almost without exception, exactly five lines. The short form has held. The long form did not.
The five lines fit on a single small page in the notebook I use. I write them in the same notebook for about three months at a time before a new one. The notebooks accumulate on a shelf in my bedroom. I rarely re-read them. The point is not the record. The point is the writing.
Why five lines
A long entry tries to capture the day. It is, by its nature, a kind of essay — what happened, what I thought about it, what it meant. This is a useful piece of work, but it is also a piece of work that the evening mind, tired from the day, is not always good at. The long entry frequently becomes a re-living of whatever the day's small frustrations were, written out in a way that does not actually metabolise them.
Five lines does not have room to re-live. It has room for the truth in compressed form. What was the day. What was true about it. What was good. What was hard. What I want to remember. That is the structure I tend to use, though it varies.
What I write
It varies. A typical entry: 'Long morning, three clients, the third one had been crying before she got here. Afternoon writing went better than expected. Walked home through the park. Felt thin around the eyes. Tomorrow I want to start earlier.' That is the day. It took ninety seconds to write.
Sometimes the five lines are observations. The light in the studio at four o'clock. The texture of someone's shoulder. The smell of rain at the door. Sometimes they are questions I want to think about. Sometimes they are simply a sentence describing the day in a way that I can stand to leave on the page.
What it does for the sleep that follows
The reason the practice has held is that it noticeably improves the next twenty minutes of falling asleep. The day, having been written, has a place to sit. It does not have to keep cycling through the mind looking for somewhere to land. The unwritten day is much more likely to keep me awake than the written one.
This is, as far as I can tell, the mechanism. The writing is a kind of small ritual goodbye to the day. Once the goodbye has been said in ink, the mind is more willing to let the day go.
A small note on the medium
On paper. With a real pen. Not on a phone, not on a laptop. The slowness of the writing is part of the practice. A typed five lines does not work the same way — the speed of typing prevents the compression that makes the practice useful in the first place.
Five lines on paper, every evening, is the cheapest sleep aid I know.
