Journaling with Neovim to Manage my Mind

For those of you who know me one of the things I’m open about is my struggle with my mental health. I tweet about it pretty often and don’t like to shy away from talking about therapy or medication. My mental health issues usually manifest as depression and anxiety.

One of the symptoms I face is when I particularly stressed or having an episode is my thoughts start to race at an alarming rate. This can be as simple as being unable to focus on one thing and constantly context switching so that nothing gets done to just going down deep thought loops that are assumptions built on assumptions that just make me feel bad. It affects my productivity quite a bit and can lead to really bad downward spiral.

Over the years I’ve gotten a bit better about managing my emotions when I reach this state. Being able to talk out and unpack my thoughts is the key for me — often I can disarm negative thinking by picking apart at the contradictions I’m making or just simply add some organization to the chaos. However, I’m not always around someone I can talk it through with, so I picked up journaling as a grounding tool.

I started journaling initially when I was struggling to fall asleep during the pandemic because my thoughts were just going nuts. I would handwrite in a journal for a bit to get everything I was thinking on paper and then once I was satisfied I could go back to sleep a lot easier. The problem with journaling by hand for me was that I really wasn’t able to write as fast as my brain was moving. Still it was better than nothing and a drastic improvement from having nothing.

Recently, I switched jobs to one that has me doing a lot more development work and with that I’ve been having a terminal window open pretty much permanently. When I was having one of these fits of racing thoughts I randomly opened up a new file in vim and just started writing down everything. I found this to really help me organize everything and get to work a lot faster. I’m a massive vim fan and at this point struggle with using other text editors because I can’t achieve the same speed. That was the key, the speed I can open and manipulate text in vim was unparalleled and immediately it became clear to me that this was the best tool I could use to completely unpack my thoughts.

I’m also a pretty big personal knowledge management nerd, being that one person in a friend group who tries every new productivity app. From that I’ve become familiarized with a lot of the concepts in Obsidian, and the idea of creating a daily note. This is actually how I managed my notes when I was working at Microsoft. Helped to organize the chaos of each day with situations changing so often. I figured I could try to apply this same idea with my neovim workflow, so I could journal each to unpack my thoughts and stay more productive. I ended up setting up a simple ~/notes folder in my workspace and then wrote a small bash function, so I could quickly edit today’s note from anywhere. Below is the snipped I added to my .zshrc.

today () {
  local_root="$HOME/workspace/notes"
  file="$local_root/daily/$(date "+%Y-%m-%d").md"
  if [ ! -f "$file" ]; then
    cp "$local_root/templates/jrnl.md" $file
  fi
  nvim $file
}

I just get the current date and make a copy of a journal template I made then open it with neovim. The template is also quite simple. It contains a section for my daily todo items, a section for thoughts, and a reflection section that I fill out at the end of the day. Below is a markdown example of this.

# Date
 
## To Do
 
- [ ]
 
## Thoughts
 
## Reflection

Conclusions

I’ve been using this workflow for about a month now, and it has been incredible how much better I have been at staying grounded on my tasks and not losing time to random context switching. It’s also very accessible since I always have a terminal window open anyways for whatever reason and searchability is great with ripgrep available.

Turns out I didn’t need all the bells and whistles available in other PKM tools like notion or even obsidian. The speed and ease of access of just using vim has trumped everything.

If you’re struggling with similar issue of racing thoughts I hope my experience has some takeaway that can help you with managing your own thoughts. That being said I’m not a mental health professional, and I’m not a therapist.I encourage everyone to talk to a professional to find something to that fits them. Mental health is not something to be ashamed of and is a very real part of the human experience.