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How To Start A Dopamine Journal

February 10, 2025admin

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Dopamine – aka the “feel good” hormone – has become a bit of a buzzy word on the internet lately. You may already be familiar with the widely popular “dopamine detox” trend. If not, you can read more about it in this article. (EXAMPLE LINK: NEED TO CHANGE!!!) But, today, we’re going to be talking about how to start a dopamine journal. In this article, we’ll discuss what a dopamine journal is, why you need one, and how to start one.

What is a Dopamine Journal

Dopamine journaling is the act of recording activities that bring you happiness. It’s about capturing the everyday moments that make you feel most alive.

Adopted from the One Line A Day journal, the goal is to write one line, or sentence, each day about something that brought you joy. (Note: you can write more, if you choose, but I find the one line approach to be less intimidating.) You can include simple details like when and where these activities occurred as well as how they made you feel. Write down any other factors that contributed to a positive experience. These activities can range from having coffee with a friend to going to a concert or sporting event.

The purpose of dopamine journaling is to track and identify patterns in the activities that naturally boost your dopamine levels. This way, you can ultimately focus on implementing more activities into your daily life that boost a sense of fulfillment and well-being.

Benefits of Dopamine Journaling

The primary benefit of dopamine journaling is that it brings awareness to both healthy and unhealthy patterns in your life. Once you’ve observed these patterns, you can then begin to better understand what drives your behavior. By knowing what your key motivators are, you can leverage those to be more productive in all areas of your life.

You can also then differentiate between activities that provide quick, but fleeting, dopamine hits (e.g., social media scrolling) versus those that offer lasting satisfaction (e.g., building meaningful relationships). By becoming aware of these discrepancies, you can work to replace short-term reward activities with more meaningful, long-term ones.

In this way, dopamine journaling can be a means to self-improvement. By taking the data you record, you can identify and work on breaking any negative habits or behaviors and begin to focus on fostering positive ones. You can utilize the behavioral patterns you observe to improve all key areas of your life (career, relationships, personal growth, wellness, etc.).

How To Start A Dopamine Journal

Starting a dopamine journal is simple. All you need is a notebook or bullet journal. You can even keep a digital dopamine journal if you’d like. This YouTube video does a great job of going in-depth on how to set up a bullet-style dopamine journal.

Once you’ve defined where you’ll keep your journal, you can determine your style. Are you planning to write one line a day? Or, is writing full-length entries more your style? If you choose to write longer format entries, then consider logging some key metrics such as the time, place, and feelings surrounding your ‘highlight’ for the day.

Schedule a time in your day when you’ll sit down to write in your dopamine journal. All you need is three to five minutes. You can do this whenever works best for you. I keep my dopamine journal on my nightstand so that I can fill it out before bed.

Define your key pillars. Key pillars are the major areas of your life that you want to focus on and improve. Some examples include career, school, social life, personal growth/development, adventure, finances, etc. Try to focus on no more than six key pillars at a time. If your focus is too wide, you risk your time and efforts backfiring and not making any major progress in any one area.

Each month, strive to come up with at least two goals in your desired areas of improvement. For example, if you want to focus on growing relationships, then setting a goal of having lunch with a friend is reasonable.

Then, at the end of the month, you can reflect on areas where you made progress as well as see which areas you’d like to give more focus to in the next month. I like to highlight my top three favorite moments and how they made me feel. Afterward, I plan on how I can generate similar experiences in the future.