Hey friends, welcome back to the blog. So, if there is one single habit that’s most changed my life that habit is journaling I’ve been journaling pretty consistently since like 2015 and I can attribute so many of the good things that have happened in my life as a result of journaling consistently now you might be thinking that you don’t have time for journaling what good is writing about your thoughts and feelings going to do anyway maybe you’ve tried it a couple of times, and it hasn’t really worked for you, but something that I put a lot of money on is that if you approach journaling in the right way then I can basically guarantee that it can change your life for the better.
So, in this blog I want to share the why behind journaling why it’s such a powerful tool for changing your life we’re going to talk about how actually to journal and the three levels of journaling and along the way I’m going to be sharing a bunch of different powerful questions and journaling prompts that I find incredibly useful for driving positive change in my life. So broadly, there are three main reasons.
Why Journaling Can Change Your Life:
Why journaling is incredibly effective firstly it’s a nice way to look back on your memories if you’re right about what you’ve been up to and how you’ve been feeling it’s super nice I now look back from journal entries for the last like eight years and I can see what I was doing on this date a year ago two years ago four years ago five years ago and it’s really cool to see the progression of my life.
But then we’ve got reason number two, which is even more powerful, which is that journaling helps you take control of your own thoughts and your own mind, especially if you’re prone to stress or worry or anxiety or fear or you’re letting fear of judgment and fear of failure and fear of self-doubt you’re letting these things hold you back from doing the things that you really want to do the reason for that is that your mind has a thought like I don’t know I am unworthy I’m not good enough I’m unloved I’m not good enough to do this thing and because the mind is so powerful it can immediately Marshall up evidence to support that limiting belief now.
The benefit of journaling is that by writing this stuff down by writing down your thoughts and feelings you cut through the BS that the mind is very good at generating and when you see these thoughts written down on paper it’s easier to not believe them so much because our minds can lie to us our mind is ultimately a survival machine that’s just trying to you know keep us out of danger and the more you write about your thoughts and feelings the more of this sort of Detachment you get from it.
You stop identifying so much with your thoughts and feelings and this really helps for people who are struggling with anxiety or fear or unworthiness or lack of self-love which to some degree is literally everyone on the planet but the third and I think the most important benefit of journaling is that journaling can completely change the way that you approach your life so how does this work so.
Let’s imagine this kind of diagram and it’s pretty uncontroversial to say that our results and the outcomes that we get from Life are broadly correlated with what actions we consistently do so in a way actions lead to results if for example you eat well and you exercise regularly then the result is that you’re going to be fairly healthy and fit but what is the thing that leads to the actions well I would argue that that thing is decisions initially before taking an action you decide what decision to take and then that decision dictates the actions and then the actions lead to the results.
For example for me the decision to start writing blogs six and a half years ago dictated the action by writing blogs consistently which has led to the results of my life being completely transformed whether you decide to take this job or that job whether you decide to marry this person or that person whether you decide to move to this city or that City completely changes the direction of your life.
Level 1 of Journalling:
How to journal in the three levels of journaling so level one is the most basic form of journaling and this is where you just write down what are the things you have done today now one of my favorite ways of doing this is from this book story worthy by Matthew Dix which I read in 2020 and was the best book that I read that year hands down Matthew Dix is a world champion Storyteller he’s won competitions like World competitions for the thing which are apparently a thing and one of the exercises that he uses to tell better stories is called homework for life and the idea behind this is that at the end of every day you ask yourself what was the most story worthy thing that happened to me today and you just write this down as a maximum of two sentences and you’re kind of imagining.
If I had to tell a five-minute story about something that happened today what would that be now Matthew writes not every day contains a story worthy moment for me but I found that the longer I did my homework the more days it did contain one and my friend Plato has said that I can turn the act of picking up a pebble from the ground into a great story neither of these statements is true the truth is this I simply see more story worthy moments in the day than most people they don’t go unnoticed as they once did I discovered that there is Beauty and Import in my life that I never would have imagined before doing my homework and that these small unexpected moments of beauty are oftentimes some of my most compelling stories
And what I love about the homework for Life strategy which admittedly I’ve been fairly on and off doing since 2020 since reading the book but in the months where I’ve actually been sticking to this consistently I have found that it’s actually increased my appreciation for life because now I remember the small details if I think back to what I did last week I have to look at my calendar I’m like I’m not anybody last week I have no idea what it I did last month but when I look back through my journal I can see ah that was the day that this happened that was the day that happened that’s fine that was a cool thing that happened here and there and there and there and you could take this a step further you could talk about what you’ve learned that day you could talk about any new people that you’ve met you could talk about something that surprised you but this is a fairly straightforward way of getting started with journaling you just open up a journal it can be physical it can be digital you can use an app I like the app a day one I also like pen and paper journaling and you just start writing about a few things that happened that day.
All right, next we have a strategy from this book, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a spiritual path to higher creativity. It sounds a bit weird, but this is like such a fantastic book, and like almost every creative person that I’ve ever met has read this book and swears by the methods that Julia Cameron talks about, but in this book, there’s a technique called morning Pages, which you might have come across before.
Basically, the idea is that every morning, you just write out three pages by hand, ideally of just whatever’s on your mind now. When I do my morning pages, I get out my notebook and I start with the phrase, Today is going to be a great day If I don’t know what else to write, I’ll say it’s on a Monday morning, and I’m sitting on the dining table in the house, the sun is streaming in and I’ll just start writing.
Level 2 of Journalling:
That was level one. Level two of Journaling is where you write about how you’re feeling, and there’s actually quite a lot of scientific evidence around these forms of journaling, and there are two that I want to talk about in particular, so firstly, have a look at this study from 2015 that was published in the Journal of Social and clinical, and in this study, the Researchers were looking at the effects of expressive writing, which is a form of journaling. So, they recruited 70 students and they randomly chose 35 of them to write expressively about a past painful event, and they got the other 35 to write about a neutral topic, and a really cool thing was that four months later, they followed the students up, and they found that the students who were in the expressive writing category, they seem to have better mental health and were less stressed than the students in the other category who just wrote about a neutral event.
The second form of journaling about feelings. Have a look at this 2017 study that was published in the Journal of Happiness Studies now. This was a really simple study where they recruited 91 participants, and they split them into a few different groups. Now, the first group was the Gratitude journaling group, and they were writing about events or people that they were grateful for, and then there was a control group, and they were just asked to write about what they did Today, which is basically level one of journaling, and they were just asked to do this four times in total across a two A week. This is not very much time at all, but then when the researchers followed up a month later, they found that the people who did just gratitude Journaling seemed to have higher happiness ratings, and also rated their relationships with their friends as being stronger than the people in the control group.
The final thing is to be brave and to actually share what you’ve written with the person in question, and this is where this becomes really powerful because now it’s not just gratitude that you’re doing for your own sake.
Level 3 of Journalling:
Wouldn’t it, and then finally we come to level three of journaling, which is, I think, the most powerful, and that is where you Journal about what you should do, what direction you want to go, what decisions you want to make, and what actions you should take in the here and now there are a few different ways of doing this and this is where prompts are particularly powerful and one thing I like to do is collect the most powerful questions and the most powerful journaling prompts that I can find across different places, and I actually put all of these into a single Google doc that I always keep up to date, completely for free and then it’ll be updated whenever I come across new powerful questions so you can check that out if you like okay so one prompt that
Odyssey Plan:
You can do The Odyssey plan, that’s one of my favorite prompts, I love this. This is from the book of designing your life, and basically the idea is that you write down what my life looks like five years from now if I continue down the same path, and then you Journal about that for a bit, then you ask yourself, okay, what does my life look like five years from now, if I take a completely different path, and you generally about that for a bit and then you ask yourself. What does my life look like five years from now if I take a completely different path, but if I’m not worried about money, and I’m not worried about what other people will think of me in the new Journal, about that it takes a while, it’s a bit intense a lot of people are like oh I don’t want to do this because it feels hard I don’t know I don’t have time. But genuinely doing this exercise in 2019 was what fundamentally prompted me to
The Wheel of Life:
Leave medicine option number two. There is something called The Wheel of Life, which is basically where you split up life into like eight, nine, ten different components, and you just rate how happy you are, how satisfied you are with your life across these different domains, and the idea is you’ve got your wheel, you split up your circle into a bunch of the different categories, and you just rate out of ten how like if you had to pick a number how satisfied are you how aligned do you feel with that particular domain of your life, and again, this is helpful because the numbers don’t lie.
Secondly, you can do this exercise multiple times throughout the year, and you can see how your numbers change over time, and generally, when you see the numbers, you’re like Oh crap, I’ve only got a 3 out of 10 for like my friends category, it’s probably because I haven’t seen my friends enough, cool, what can I do to make this go from a three to a
five, and then you take some actions. This is where it generally becomes very effective because now the journey that you’re doing is not just about understanding your thoughts and feelings. Although that’s important, it also helps you figure out what actions you can take in the here and now to make a change.
Another good prompt is what I call the 12-month Celebration. By the way, I talk about a bunch of these in my brand new book, The Feel Good Productivity. It’s in the Final Chapter. This is a book about how to do more of what matters to you.
Solomon’s Paradox:
A strategy that I’ve been experimenting with recently, and that comes from Alex Halmosi and who calls it the Solomon conversation or something like that, and basically, the story is about the Biblical figure, I think, was King Solomon, who is like incredible at advising other people, but his own life wasn’t was a mess, and he was terrible at taking that advice for himself people give significantly better advice about their own scenarios if they don’t know it’s about themselves if you only just filed. Your own advice, it’d be way better than you currently are, and so the idea behind Alex’s kind of journaling method is that he has a conversation with his 85-year-old self in the form of a Google doc, a practice that I started doing, which is I have a coaching session with myself weird, I have a conversation with my future self, who’s 85, and I asked him for advice on what I should do now. That’s been really helpful for helping me realize that, actually, you know now, but the things that I’m thinking about, I’m worried about, just completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and my 85-year-old self.
Generally telling me to chill out and like enjoy life a little bit more because you know nothing is as serious as I actually make it out to be in my mind, and the Mind Tricks us into believing our own BS into thinking that the thing that we are doing has huge importance and it’s very serious, but actually getting that old dude’s perspective helps us realize hang on it’s all about enjoying the journey as we go along.
Conclusion:
In the end, journaling is far more than a self-help trend; it is a tool for transformation. Whether you are simply noting daily memories, expressing emotions, or reflecting on life decisions, each level of journaling helps you gain clarity, self-awareness, and direction. Over time, you start to see patterns, understand your own mind better, and take more intentional actions. Journaling becomes a mirror that not only reflects who you are but also guides you toward who you want to become.
FAQs:
1. What is journaling, and why is it powerful?
Journaling is the practice of writing your thoughts and experiences to gain clarity, self-awareness, and emotional balance.
2. How does journaling help with stress and anxiety?
It helps you detach from negative thoughts by putting them on paper, making them easier to process and manage.
3. What are the three levels of journaling?
Level 1 is daily reflection, Level 2 is emotional expression, and Level 3 is planning and decision-making.
4. How often should I journal to see results?
Even a few minutes daily or a few times a week can create noticeable improvements in focus and mindset.
5. What tools or prompts can help beginners start journaling?
Prompts like “What was the most story-worthy moment today?” or “What am I grateful for?” are great starting points.
6. How can journaling influence life decisions and goals?
It helps you reflect on your direction, evaluate choices, and align actions with what truly matters to you.