The main thought record practice would generally take around two weeks. It’s not a permanent practice, it’s a path that leads to a point of being generally mindful, disciplined (happy and successful) with good recall and concentration. What I mean is that, nowadays, I did a thought record a long time ago, and I used to journal every day to chart my progress. I’d have set times to practice disciplining my mind, and nowadays, it’s kind of worked and I’m generally happy. I still journal as I’ve written a journal anyway since I was a teenager, but it’s more about events and the story of my life than the contents of my mind — because the contents of my mind, my stream of consciousness, who I am, is chosen in each moment by me.
The early journal writing, as I said, has two benefits. One, to see the obvious absurdity and insanity of much of what the mind naturally does (due to conditioning) and to apply reasoning where the insanity is less obvious — but also the writing records change over time, change in the contents of the mind. To begin with, it might be hard to actually write a thought-record, the mind is simply distracted and unfocused all day. You could perhaps set an hourly beep on a watch to check in on the mind throughout the day. You could also have a few periods, like late morning coffee break, or a quick five minutes after lunch. A few minutes in the car before driving home etc. to write down what has occurred in the mind.
One of the problems is that it’s subjective and fleeting. I mean, what is going on in the stream of consciousness. If I say to you, give me an overview of what your mind was doing three or four or five hours ago, at around 10.15am for the sake of argument. What were your mental-pictures, daydreams, thoughts, emotions, sensations in you body, YOU in other words, how were YOU existing in reality?
Then it’s hard to remember. It’s like waking up in the morning and trying to remember a dream. It’s possible but it takes training or practice. I know because that is also another thing that interests me. I included my dreams in my journaling since I was a teenager. Most people remember very few dreams, and even when you do, the images and ghostly sequences are wispy and soon fade from the memory. Actually, I was quite obsessed with dreams as a kid when I first started journaling. Originally, it was a bit silly. I read some book about gypsy dream interpretation and it was a type of dictionary of dream symbols, and was like fortune telling. So if you dream of a certain thing, it foretells a certain thing happening to you. Say if you dream of a black cat, something lucky is going to happen. I’m laughing now, but I was fifteen and so was really excited, wondering why everyone doesn’t do this. Politicians could do it and just avoid all the problems in the future (ah, the dreams of youth. I do miss knowing everything!).
So I would wake up and for the first couple of mornings I would try and remember a dream and there was just nothing at all. Some people are convinced they never dream. But we know, from scientific evidence, that we all dream every night. But there is something about this subjective dreamword that doesn’t encode into long-term memory. So sometimes, you do wake up with a dream memory, of being in a dream world and having an adventure and perhaps there’s a long story and loads of detail, and by the time you get up, fart and have a glass of water, the memory has completely gone. You could sit and rack your mind and you cannot even recall a single detail about it, where you were, if it was night or day.
Think of any experience in this world like that. Imagine if you went to some music concert and it was a great band and they were jumping about and dancing and there were thousands of people there and these famous musicians invited you, out of thousands, up on stage to sing with them and you do a great job and are up on the big screen and the thousands of fans are singing along with you.
After the concert you go home and want to tell your partner about this amazin…. but can’t even remember where you were, let alone what happened, just some vague feeling that some significant thing you can’t remember happened, and even that fades after a few seconds. If that occurred in this world, you’d assume it’s some neurological problem, and go and get it checked.
But it’s normal when you dream (or go to the dreamworld, if we can put it like that). But as a kid, I persevered because the book told me I could learn to remember, and it worked. Within a few days I was not only waking up and immediately writing huge, long, complex dreams up for ten minutes, but multiple times throughout the night; I had to bring a bedside lamp in so I could write everything down. I remember now, I actually had a poster-sized whiteboard next to the bed specifically to write them down.
Decades later, I still keep the journal and still write dreams down, but maybe one a month. In the past dreams were really useful, but once you get some self-understanding, mindfulness, in the mind then they tend to confirm what you already know. Nowadays, they are an interesting addition to my main journaling, which is about the events of life as my mind, on a good day (most are good at the minute) is controlled.
Anyway, the point I am making is, you want to, at this stage, become aware of what is happening in your mind on a moment-to-moment basis and the best way to do this is to arrange for interruptions throughout the day to stop the stream of consciousness so that you can write it down and build up the record. Now you could just write down the whole thing before you go to bed, but the stream of consciousness, all the mental-pictures, whispers, inner-talks, feelings and sensations, does not automatically encode into long-term memories… without training. You can learn this. This is really the end goal. Being very mindful and disciplined naturally, always, and recalling everything before sleep, going backwards in time to the moment you woke up, remembering all the things you did in the world and what happened to you, but also your inner-world, all the fantasies, daydreams, reactions, inner-talk and so on. This is doable and a great exercise. To start with, almost everything recalled will be objective, things which occurred in the outer world, and not so detailed. With practice, the details will become more and more … detailed, comprehensive, and the inner-daydreams, fantasies, thoughts etc. will be included, but the mindfulness aspect is a permanent practice. It shouldn’t drop out of use like a dream practice as irrelevant, as nothing is ever more relevant than this as it is who you were throughout the day and who you are now.
So the criteria for what you are actually recording would be like this.
Thought: what was it? Was it a mental picture, a daydream, an inner-voice of you talking to yourself and saying something? If it was a thought, then you might note, was it evaluative about something, action-orientated, was it a fact or a viewpoint, memory, reaction. Whatever.
Trigger: what caused it? You might have to trace the thought back to something that happened quite some time earlier, something you read in the media, something you saw. There might be no trigger, it’s a Negative Automatic Thought, something that just pops into your head unrelated to anything.
Sensation/Emotion: in a way these two things are separate, and in a way they are the same. Say the chime or reminder or whatever it is goes off and you are ‘angry’, then there is a series of unfolding events in the stream of consciousness, which are both separate and connected. There is the mental fantasy, say of punching someone in the face who triggered you, and then there is ‘anger’. So, in your body, it might feel like a butterflies in the stomach feeling with a constricting energetic ‘tightness’ in your back, and you label that ‘anger’, mainly, the label, the word, is explaining this sensation to what is occurring in consciousness. The mental sequence (punching someone in the face) lets you know that it is coming from a place of anger.
If you were sitting with a cup of coffee planning next years holiday, then noticed the same sensations in your body, you would perhaps label them ‘excitement’. Now, different ‘states’, produce different sensations in different places, and you’ll notice this over time. This fact is actually encoded into the language, like feeling UPlifted or HIGH on life, because sensations (emotions) that you experience as pleasant tend to occur higher in the body and they tend to have a movement of being upwards. Then there is feeling DOWN in the dumps, on a DOWNer, or having a LOW mood.
So another criteria you might add is ‘behaviour’. The goal is to observe how these mental processes shine out into the world and so influence and create your world and circumstances. You wouldn’t always fill this in concerning individual thoughts, but over time you’ll see a theme. So say with the earlier daydreams from my own circumstance that I noted, then (for the sake of illustration) say I built up many similar variations with essentially the same theme, of avoiding social contact, then the behaviours could be not going to bars, leaving the city, I (come to think of it) often avoid eye contact with the expats around me, not because of shyness, there’s just an “expat scene” which seems to involve large groups of men sitting around with only shorts on talking about the problems of the sh**hole countries we’ve all left, which is fair enough, but I don’t really have time; I came here to write this!