---
up:
  - "[[Habits Map]]"
related:
  - "[[Important habits preserve mental clarity and a sense of control]]"
created: 2014-07-28
modified: 2020-05-28
---

**Steps**:
Immediately upon waking, roll over and grab your phone or notebook or laptop, and start journaling. Type or write for 5 minutes. 

You may find that 5 minutes is difficult to fill, but then after a time, it becomes difficult to stop. 

Try to limit yourself to 10 minutes - so you can leverage this jump-start of mental energy into the next golden habit: writing out your daily goals.

### Why the Morning Journal is so important
We live in the Information Age. The media - with its news, advertisements, and myriad of distractions - is only a click (or tap) away. (Or with phone "notifications" we don't even have to do *anything* to have our mental focus  hijacked by the avalanche of distractions that haven't earned the right to steal our attention). In this constant buzz of noise-feces, we lose touch with more than just our goals; we lose touch with ourselves - our intuition, our *own* thoughts, our voice, our *own* opinion, and the very sense of individuality that makes each of us unique. This is an invisible war for the soul, and we are losing — badly. By all external measures we can claim freedom, yet in the place where it matters most, in our ability to think and question and act on our own volition, we have unwittingly given up our minds to be shackled by the forces of outside stimuli. Stimuli that tells us how to think, that manipulates our emotions, making us incredulously angry at someone or some issue we've never met or likely don't truly understand, and telling us how to feel about it, and giving us talking points for what to share about it. The low-hanging fruit of distraction is tempting, especially when our guard is down or our willpower is low. At these moments, we unconsciously and voluntarily relinquish the rights to our minds to the loudest megaphone. We willingly allow our mind to be hijacked. We place our head in the scabbard, we lock the gate and forget the key, we sleepwalk into slavery - a prison for the mind.

Hopefully now it's clear that the Morning Journal is a fight for control over your life, because it's a battle for your mind. It's a fight for your authenticity. It's a war for the very essence of who you are. It reconnects you to you. It gets you back in touch with the most important voice you need to be listening to: yourself. 

Next step: [[Writing down daily goals in the morning is an important habit]]

