How Daily Journaling Is Changing My Life
I deeply believe that daily journaling can change your life.
To put the payoff upfront – to give the “so what” before the context – let me list a few, tangible things the practice of daily journaling has done for me:
enabled me to change my career
led me to move to a different city
helped me develop deeper and more meaningful friendships
and most importantly, and the throughline through all these changes, is it has reintroduced me to myself, creating a deeper sense of self-understanding, self-trust, self-love and peace
Before I tell you the “how” of journaling, I think it’s important to define what I mean by “daily” and how I got into it. In early 2021, I got out of a long-term relationship. Or to put it more accurately, a long-term relationship left me. To say I was lost and confused is an understatement. A large chunk of my identity was fused with another person, and when that person was no longer in my life, a large chunk of my identity departed as well. This should read as a cautionary tale for how not to be in a relationship, but I digress, this article is not about my failed relationship. It’s about journaling. But this context is helpful. This is the emotional milieu that kickstarted my writing habit. I started journaling because I was sad, lonely and lost.
You don’t need to start there. In fact, it would be lovely if you’re feeling the opposite of those emotions right now. But at some point or another, we all feel sad, lonely and lost in our lives. And that’s a great mental space to start a new habit. You’ll have the motivation and drive because if you are sad enough, you’ll do just about anything to feel better.
My medicinal recommendation to stave off those feelings for as long as you can, or to put it another way, learn to cohabitate with them (you will never not be sad, lonely or lost for too long – this is something that journaling makes abundantly clear) is to try daily journaling. It’s easier on your body than running, it’s better for your liver than drinking, it’s less confusing than meditation and it’s cheaper than buying stuff. I’m not demonizing or condemning any or all of these other options, trust me, I’ve tried each one, but through a scientific experiment with a sample size of one, my evidence shows that daily journaling is the most effective habit to treat existential dread.
So what is daily journaling? Let me break down both words:
Daily
In an oxymoronic twist, this journaling practice does not have to be daily. But daily is a satisfying proxy for habituality. I don’t necessarily journal every single day, but it is enough of a habit now for me that it has become interwoven into my daily life. It’s as natural for me to journal as it is to make a cup of coffee in the morning to start my day. That’s the level of habit I’m recommending here. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good enough.
As with any other hobby or investment in your life, the results are compounding. And journaling is no different. If you want to learn the guitar, playing once a week for thirty minutes will not get you very far. You might be able to play one John Mayer song in its entirety after a few months. But that’s hardly worthy of calling yourself a guitarist or impressing people at parties with your six-string skills. Not that either of those are real reasons to pick up the guitar (they aren’t), but they are helpful heuristics for determining if you’re any good at the instrument.
Journaling is no different. Other than the fact that it is far easier to do than playing guitar. It requires a lot less hand-eye dexterity and zero musical talent.
tl;dr - treat journaling as a compounding skill that takes daily-ish investment to realize real results.
And how might you form this daily habit? I recommend reading Atomic Habits by James Clear for techniques on how to weave this into your daily life. He has written far more about how to develop habits than I can ever hope to communicate. A few of his tactics that I think will help you pick up daily journaling are:
Habit Stacking: Pair daily journaling with something you already do. For instance, if you make coffee for yourself every morning, when you hit the brew button, go sit down and journal for the duration of the brewing. Since you already have a coffee-making habit, pairing journaling, or “stacking” journaling, as Clear writes, is an effective way to make it a habit.
Two Minute Rule: Make the habit take no longer than two minutes. This is my favorite habit tactic for journaling. You don’t need to write the next great American novel every time you sit down to write. In fact, oftentimes, I write no more than a few sentences each day. Everyone has two minutes in their day to do something new or different (commence eye rolling).
Prime Your Environment: Also known as reducing friction. Make it as easy as possible to journal. For me, this means leaving my journal on the kitchen table with a pen inserted into the next blank page. I walk past it multiple times a day and all I have to do is flip open the journal and start writing. This is far easier than opening a drawer, grabbing my journal, rummaging for a pen – you get the picture.
So now that you understand what I mean by daily, let’s shift to my definition of journaling.
Journaling
If you take nothing else from this article, my one hope is to humble the word “journaling” from any temporal ivory tower where it might reside in your head. Journaling is not about being deep. It’s not about writing like Joan Didion.
It’s not for anyone except yourself.
My first rule of journaling is there are no rules. When you look back at past entries, if you’re not feeling juvenile, if not feeling insecure, if you would not die of embarrassment at the thought of someone finding your journal, then you’re not being fast and loose enough with the practice.
If there’s any nectar in life that is the sweetest, it is the taste of freedom. And I’ll be damned if there’s any greater freedom than writing down whatever you want on a blank page. The page can’t judge you, the page can’t laugh at you, the page certainly can’t eat you. This is your place to unabashedly be you.
So what should you write? Anything and everything. Write down the tasks you want to do in the upcoming week. Write about the dream you had last night. Write the insecurity you’re feeling this morning. Write a stupid joke that came to you as you were daydreaming during that really boring meeting that you don’t know why you still attend. Draw pictures of flowers. Sketch designs for the tattoo you are never going to get. Make a pro/con list for the decision you are trying to make. Draft a nasty email to that person you will never send.
In short, do not confine yourself to any definition of what journaling should be.
What I hope the above paragraph elucidates is that journaling is the practice of putting what’s in your mind, whatever it is, in whatever format, into physical reality. Making the temporal, tangible. Why is this important? Because there is so much shit going on in your mind.
Psychology experts claim humans average 6,000 thoughts a day. That’s terrifying. And what journaling does, is it takes that mental exhaust, and distills down the most salient things in your mind – consciously or otherwise – and tattoos them into physical reality. As nauseating marketing folks would put it, journaling helps you find the signal amongst the noise.
It’s also important to state that the medium for your journaling doesn’t matter either. You can write on napkins in restaurants. You can purchase a beautiful leather bound diary and nice ink pen. You can use the notes app on your phone. You can pull open an email draft on your computer and send it to yourself. You can live Tweet your stream of consciousness like Kanye West (although I might not recommend this one).
My only true recommendation for the medium is to pick the one that has the least friction for you. What’s important is to write. What’s not important is where the writing lives.
And this pontification on medium here leads to my final advice on the art of journaling, which is, there should be no expectation for you to re-read anything you’ve ever written. The thought of chronicling my life and saving notebooks and the relative utility of re-reading them to help my future self was a large barrier for me in ever getting my journaling habit started. That’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself. As I’ve stated above, write with reckless abandon. Don’t try to teach your future self anything. Don’t try to be poignant. Don’t think about how the words or doodles will stand the test of time. They won’t. Nothing really does. Especially whatever you put in your journal. Give yourself the permission and freedom to write whatever, whenever. This is how journaling becomes powerful and effective.
There are so many places in your life where you try to be “good” and “respectable” and “not a shit head” – your place of work, your cousin’s wedding, with your kids, etc. – your journal is not one of these places. It’s a place to be sad and messy and uncomfortable and honest. It’s a friend that’s always there to listen to you, no matter how pathetic or self-involved you are each day. And maybe that’s why journaling is so helpful. It’s a crystallization of the characteristics of what a good life is but what reality often prevents in each of us – vulnerability, honesty, curiosity and freedom.
I hope this essay is helpful. I hope you try to pick up journaling. I hope it changes your life as it has mine.