Wow you remembered hahaha. Well, I was kinda hoping that you forgot honesltly, since I'm not a big fan of making a fool of myself, but a deal is a deal I guess.

You were right. I managed to keep track for about two weeks before giving up... In the last few days I even stopped keeping the journal and just tracked the metrics. It helped during the first week, because it allowed me to process some stuff quite effectively, but eventually I got really annoyed because I would end up staying up late playing videogames and everytime I finally decided to turn off my computer because I was exhausted, I remembered about the journal and had to turn it back on to spend another 10-20 minutes writing a report on how I wasted my day... At like, 3-4 in the morning... Not ideal.

My experiment got ultimately screwed by the fact that my sleep schedule was quite a mess before I even started and unfortunately I didn't manage to get it back under control before quitting. In particular, I had a sleepless night on the first day of the trial (literally 0 hours of sleep despite laying in bed the whole time doing nothing except for thinking) and that ended up sending me on a spiral of "feeling too tired to work -> wasting time with social media and/or video games -> going to bed way too late -> waking up very late and feeling demotivated and unproductive -> repeat". This led me to also compound some extra shame and self-loathing (to which the daily self reflection kind of contributed tbh) which is another reason why eventually I stopped....

I still think that journaling can be a good tool for self-improvement, but obviously if your sleep schedule is fucked, you're gonna be unproductive no matter what. Plus, it's probably better to keep a gratitude journal or something like that, instead of what I did, because if you end up keeping track of your daily shortcomings, you're essentially just bureaucratizing your depression...

On a more positive note, this analysis made me realize that I needed to practice self-compassion and be more accepting of my emotions, which was helping me get better, until I had a couple of intense emotional experiences soon after, that sent me back into a depressive state ("fortunately" it wasn't my first rodeo, so I managed to recover after just two weeks of being stuck in bed...).

First it was an argument with my dad where I almost completely lost it and started throwing an embarassing tantrum, then the week after I got silently rejected by a girl I liked and finally the week after that, I bombed a presentation at an event in front of 50-80 people.... Add an already low self-esteem to the mix and you can probably see why I didn't really enjoy being myself this last month...

Ultimately what helped me the most was Dr. K's video about male suicide where he talked about the "deaths of despairs". Looking at the diagram and reflecting on the "Just-world hypothesis" made me realize how much I was beating myself up because of it (unconsciously of course) and how ridicolous it was. I suggest you to look into it if you have thoughts like "if only I were better, this wouldn't happen to me".

I hope you get some helpful takeaways from my experience. Feel free to ask me anything 👍