Journaling as Written Meditation: What Zen Can Teach Us About Slowing Down
Growing up in Japan, you become oddly illiterate in the concept of "religion." Ask most Japanese people what they believe in, and you'll get a shrug.
Statistically, this isn't just a feeling — a 2022 Japanese General Social Survey found that 71% of Japanese people report no religious belief and no family religion. And yet, if pressed, many of us would eventually land on "Buddhism" almost by default — not out of devotion, but because temples are simply everywhere, our history classes taught us that Nara-period Japan adopted Buddhism as a state religion, and there's a butsudan (Buddhist altar) at our grandparents' house where we light incense without ever asking why. We're Buddhist the way you're a member of a gym you never visit.
What never happens, though, is community. Temple Buddhism rarely organizes Japanese people into anything resembling a congregation — especially among younger generations.
So imagine my surprise when I moved to France and discovered that Zen — the very tradition I'd grown up next to and never once practiced — is treated abroad as something close to a science. Mindfulness, it turns out, traces directly back to Zen meditation.
Nobody ever told me that in Japan, despite a temple being a ten-minute walk from almost anywhere. I had to leave the country to rediscover its own culture.
A quick detour through Zen's actual history: the practice originated in Indian Buddhist meditation, traveled to China where it became Chan, and from there entered Japan, branching into Rinzai, Sōtō, and Ōbaku schools. Sōtō Zen, shaped by the monk Dōgen, is built around shikantaza — "just sitting" — which is probably the image that comes to mind when most Japanese people picture zazen at all.
Despite loving temples and shrines as a kid, I'd almost never actually sat zazen or copied sutras — and most modern Japanese people haven't either. If anything, meditation gets filed under "spiritual," in the slightly suspicious sense of the word. It wasn't until I actually looked into it that I realized this was exactly what I needed. I started practicing, and slowly — not dramatically — my thinking began to shift.
I'd recommend this especially to fellow overthinkers: people who spiral into negative thought loops and can't climb back out. Meditation, at its core, is the practice of noticing a thought, acknowledging it, and returning your full attention to now. You're not trying to silence your mind — you're training yourself not to get swept away by it.
When I tried it myself, I realized how surprisingly hard this is, and how directly it seems to engage the brain's metacognitive function — your ability to observe your own thinking. That's not just a personal impression: research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (Tang, Hölzel & Posner, 2015) found that regular mindfulness meditation strengthens attention regulation, body awareness, and emotional regulation — the very faculties zazen seems to be training. It's also worth noting that this entire scientific field exists partly because of Zen itself: Jon Kabat-Zinn, who studied under Zen teachers, founded Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at the University of Massachusetts in 1979, the program credited with launching mindfulness research in Western medicine.
We're drowning in information now in a way that didn't exist when I was in elementary school. With so much noise, it's easy to lose track of what you actually want, what your goals even are. Meditation doesn't require an app, a class, or any equipment — just five minutes, your own body, and quiet. If you have somewhere you're trying to get to, this is one of the fastest ways to get your inner compass working again.
If you want to start: put your phone out of reach, tidy the space a little, avoid harsh light or strong scents, skip music (or keep it to ambient sound), and don't sit on an empty or overstuffed stomach. Morning or just before bed tends to stick best as a habit.
The one thing to remember: you are not supposed to think about nothing.
Thoughts will come — that's the whole game. The loop is simple: a thought arises → you notice it → you don't chase it → you return to your breath. Repeat.
Work stress, old regrets, tomorrow's schedule, something someone said — none of it is a failure. It's just "oh, I was thinking about that," followed by a return to breathing.
Five minutes a day, repeated, and your focus starts coming back — which means your goals start feeling reachable again. Real Zen practice involves sittings of thirty to forty minutes, but there's no need to start there. Just 1% a day is the whole point.
And if sitting still isn't your thing, there's a written equivalent: journaling, sometimes called "meditation on paper."
Like zazen, it's not about producing polished sentences — it's about getting what's inside out where you can actually look at it.
If you don't know what to write, "I don't know what to write" is a perfectly good first line. Write down what's tiring you out, what you're feeling and why, or simply what you want tomorrow to look like. Putting it on paper has a way of making your real wants visible.
Zazen is returning to yourself by sitting quietly. Journaling is returning to yourself by writing quietly. Neither will transform your life in two days — but kept up, small and steady, they become a quiet ritual for hearing your own voice again. And one day, without any single dramatic moment, you'll notice the results were there all along.
If you have a goal you can't seem to focus on or follow through on, try starting — not the goal itself, just the next five minutes of sitting or writing. It tends to be the longer-feeling, faster shortcut there is.
That's really the whole philosophy behind 1% Better Diary — not a five-step plan to overhaul your life, just a page a day to notice one thought, one shift, one percent. Some days that's all zazen ever asks of you too.