Journaling just enhances sleeplessness about serious urgent issues...

This is one reason why I write a short poem for my journaling. Maybe just four lines, does not matter if it rhymes. Poems are for fun, not work. Unless you are a poet, I suppose.

I disagree.

I find journaling a bit like physical exercise: It feels like _work_ in the moment, but you never regret writing it after. And you feel a lot better - there's a therapeutic effect to it. There's studies on this.

And dumping it out by journaling is much better than letting bad thoughts swirl in your head, which leads to even more rumination.

That still sounds like you're describing work & labor - but instead of being paid in dollars or a clean kitchen, you're being paid in feeling better.

It doesn't mean it's not worth doing, but it is an effort, yet another thing to add to the pile.

I've always found that journaling without an intended structure (a few sentences about a baseball game, or some coding paradigm, or a good memory) helps me to relax. If I task myself to "write about my day" like my parents taught me to as a kid I'd have a grand total of about 12 journal entries in my life.

Therapists suggest writing whatever is on your mind, including thoughts about the process itself, unfiltered. E.g. basically start with an F and how you hate all this bs and everything. If journaling itself is an issue, address it first. It’s another stupid …ing thing that you now have to do too for your idiotic mental health and your life became full of this … so quickly and …ing WHY, it was so normal just a few years ago, even with…

This is the fundamental shift - accepting everything including meta. People tend to distance from themselves, as if they were two distinct parts, one broken and one debugging. But the debugging part is also broken.