Leave Yourself Some Breadcrumbs: Why You Should Journal the Good Days, Not Just the Bad Ones
We've all been there: life falls apart, and suddenly we're journaling like it's our job. We're googling "how to fix my life," downloading a meditation app for the fourth time, and texting our therapist "can we move up my appointment." Crisis mode turns all of us into amateur researchers of our own lives.
But here's what almost none of us do: take notes when things are going well.
Think about it. When was the last time you were having an unremarkable, genuinely good Tuesday and thought, "let me jot down exactly what I'm doing right now, in case I need to find my way back here someday"?
Yeah. Me neither. Until recently.
The idea (aka the breadcrumb theory)
Here's the thing about good stretches of life: we rarely know we're in one until it's over. We don't get a calendar alert. We just eventually notice that we haven't felt this steady, this ourselves, in a while — and by then, we're usually already down the other side of the hill trying to remember what worked.
So what if, instead of waiting for hindsight, we started leaving ourselves clues in real time? A kind of trail back to happy, dropped one breadcrumb at a time, made of the boring, unglamorous logistics of a good life:
What am I actually doing day to day?
How am I sleeping?
How much time am I spending outside?
What am I eating, and how regularly?
How am I handling stress — what's actually working?
Nothing profound. Just data. Your data, about you, collected by the one person who will always have full access to your own life: you.
Turns out, this isn't just a vibe — there's real research behind it
I got curious whether anyone smarter than me had already tested this idea, and it turns out the answer is a hard yes, from a few different directions.
The most striking one, for me, has an actual Vermont connection. The Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) is a mental health recovery model that's been around since the late '90s and is now a recognized evidence-based practice. Here's the part that made me sit up: it was developed out of a workshop on mental health recovery held in northern Vermont in 1997, led by Mary Ellen Copeland. One of its core building blocks is something called a "Wellness Toolbox" — a personal list of simple, low-cost self-management strategies, built around exactly the categories you'd expect: diet, exercise, sleep patterns, and staying engaged in the roles that matter to you. The whole point is to build that list before you need it, so it's sitting there ready when things get hard.
Separately, the clinical research on depression relapse says something similar. People who've recovered from a depressive episode are encouraged to build a relapse prevention plan — one that names their own personal early warning signs (things like changes in sleep, energy, appetite, or motivation) so they can catch a downturn early instead of realizing three weeks in that something's off. The research consistently points out that these warning signs tend to be highly individual, but strikingly consistent for a given person across episodes — meaning your own personal pattern is worth knowing, because it will very likely repeat.
Then there's the positive psychology side. Psychologists Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff spent years researching something called "savoring" — the deliberate practice of noticing, appreciating, and prolonging a positive experience instead of letting it fly by unremarked. One of the three core forms of savoring they identified is reminiscing: mentally revisiting a documented positive memory to regenerate some of the good feeling it gave you the first time. In other words, the notes you leave yourself now aren't just informational. Rereading them later is itself a mood boost.
And the outside-time piece checks out too. A well-known University of Exeter study of roughly 20,000 people found that people who spent about two hours a week in green space — a local park, a trail, your backyard, doesn't matter — were meaningfully more likely to report good health and psychological wellbeing than people who didn't hit that mark. Two hours was described as a real threshold, not just a nice-to-have.
So: sleep, food, movement outside, stress management, daily structure. Not exactly groundbreaking categories. But apparently they're the categories that show up again and again when researchers study what keeps people well — which means they're worth tracking on purpose, while you're actually in a good season, instead of only reconstructing them after the fact from memory (which, let's be honest, is a garbage narrator once you're in the middle of a hard time).
Your breadcrumb trail: a simple way to start
You don't need a bullet journal with a color-coding system (unless that's your thing — no judgment, I have a friend with a laminated one). You just need a few honest sentences, jotted down whenever you notice you're having a genuinely good stretch. Try answering these, even loosely:
The day-to-day: What does an average day actually look like right now? What time am I up, what's the shape of my morning, who am I spending time with?
Sleep: How much am I getting? Am I falling asleep easily, staying asleep, waking up rested?
Outside time: How much of my day or week is spent outdoors — even just a walk, even just the porch?
Food: Am I eating regularly? Am I cooking, or mostly grabbing things? Am I actually enjoying meals, or just refueling?
Stress: What's stressing me out right now, and what am I actually doing about it that's working?
That's it. Phone notes app, back of a receipt, voice memo while you're driving — the format doesn't matter. What matters is that future-you, on a rough day, gets to read present-you's actual words instead of trying to reverse-engineer a good life from a fog of "I don't know, things just felt fine."
We don't get advance warning when the good stretch is ending. But we can leave ourselves a map anyway — written by the version of us who was actually standing in the good place, breadcrumb by unglamorous breadcrumb.
Go ahead, drop your first one in the comments: what's one thing you're doing right now, on a good day, that you'd want to remember later?
Keep reading:
The Summer Reset: 30 Journal Prompts to Retune Your Leadership Compass
