Five Reasons You Should Keep a Journal

You should keep a journal and ideally write in it every day. You’ve likely heard that advice already. The internet is full of articles and research on why journaling is good for you. I’ve read a lot of these myself.

One memorable take on journaling came from the Asian Efficiency Podcast last year. While I agreed with most of the points made by the hosts and was thankful to learn some new tips to improve my journal process, I chuckled at their youthful exuberance, and frankly, inexperience with journaling. Neither had kept a journal beyond a few short years, so they couldn’t speak with much conviction about the tangible benefits of journaling.

Creating and sustaining a habit of keeping a journal can be difficult, regardless of the benefits, so I thought I might share some tips from someone with more than 30 years of constant journaling.

This is the first of a multi-part series on journal-keeping. Subsequent articles will address more advanced topics, but today let’s focus on the benefits of keeping a journal. Why dedicate the time to keep a journal? Let me describe five key benefits that matter to me.

1. Slow Down the Race of Time

Life is short. Time does seem to speed up as you age. For me, keeping a journal slows down the race of time. Spending a few minutes to review thoughts on events or feelings from a year ago, five years ago, or even twenty years ago, brings the memories to life so vividly. Photographs do this too, but reading your own words, reliving the emotion you felt, the happiness or sadness, reminding you of something you thought so essential but had forgotten is like a time machine that helps connect the individual days into a more extensive mosaic of my life. Once reminded of that time, our super-computer brains start to fill in other forgotten details, and before you know it, you’re back in that time and place again. I love this feeling of connectedness to my past from the present.

In its most basic form, a journal is a record of your life; a natural place to write down significant life events: births, deaths, marriages, etc. But for me, I prize those past entries that record the small things in life that I would have most certainly forgotten, like this passage from fourteen years ago when my now college/high school age kids were four and one:

“I took Mallory and Connor to Dockton Park on Saturday. The day was chilly, so we all bundled up and piled into the van. Mallory and Connor sit side-by-side in car seats, close enough for Mallory to give Connor food or toys, etc. When we arrived at the park, I found the two of them holding hands. Very precious. I set Connor in one of the baby swings and swung him to his utter chagrin. He seemed genuinely afraid so I slowed him down to a mere sway and he settled down a bit. Mallory knows how to swing, of course, and she did so with gusto until her hands got too cold. We moved to the play structure. A few minutes there and then a stroller ride down to the docks. The ramp down to the dock was very steep because of the tide, so I carried Mallory in one arm and held on for dear life to the stroller with the other and slowly wobbled down the ramp. Walking along the dock, Connor peered out quietly from under his fleece. From above (my angle), it look like the cap was pressed down over his eyes, but because of his angle of repose, he could see through a small gap between cap and cheek. Mallory jumped from one side of the dock to the other, picking up shells, pointing out bird poop, admiring a bucket full of freshly caught crabs. After a while, we headed back for the car and home. When I went to unbuckle them from their car seats, I found them holding hands again.”

I am glad I captured these memories of my children now that they are mostly adults and share few of these tender behaviors. Reading about times long ago with dear family members who have now passed on, just little anecdotes really, pack an emotional punch today. All sorts of notes and worries litter my journals, but every once in a while I run across an entry like this, and I thank my former self for keeping these journals.

2. Reduce Stress and Be Happier

Reducing stress is one of the most immediate, tangible benefits of writing in a journal. When I was younger, I would get painful headaches in the afternoon and early evening, pulsing in a particular spot on the back of my head. These pains occurred on weekdays, and almost never on the weekends which pointed to work stress as the culprit. I began using my journal time as therapy for these headaches and discovered that just 15 minutes of reflective writing would do better than three Advil could, and faster (and healthier!). The trick for me was to forget about the headache and focus my writing on what I was feeling that day, what was bothering me. That simple mindfulness exercise became such a blessing that I learned how to perform it eventually in the moment and eradicated the awful headaches from my life.

One theory I have for why work can create physical stress symptoms in me has to do with two things: introversion and something I call the Input/Output Balance. Introverts make up nearly half the population, but some small fraction of the everyday chatter in the workplace. Extroverts get energy from sharing their thoughts verbally, often preliminary and sometimes contradictory ideas as a way to refine their thinking. I can share from personal experience that Introverts prefer time to process before openly sharing ideas. Couple all that talking with the avalanche of digital information that we absorb in the course of a workday: email, social media, reports, spreadsheets, etc. By the end of the day, the typical introvert can be overwhelmed by all this input and may feel out of balance. Keeping a journal, particularly at the end of the workday, is an excellent escape valve to process all that input and balance out the scales with considered output.

A popular way to use a journal to boost your happiness is through a gratitude journal, also called the “Five-minute Journal.” Author Tim Ferriss of the Four-Hour Workweek explores the method: every morning, you list three things for which you’re grateful, three things that would make the coming day great, and one or two affirmations about yourself (“I am a good listener”, “I have good ideas”, etc.). Doing this first thing in the morning helps create a success-oriented mindset. At the end of the day, you finish the entry with a description of three amazing things that happened that day and any notes on what could have made the day better. This process should take no longer than five minutes with practice. Keeping a gratitude journal for thirty consecutive days could change your brain and make you feel happier. I’ve practiced this gratitude approach in my journal at various times in my life when I believed I could use a lift in spirits. Being thankful for the good things in your life does indeed change your mood, and prepping your subconscious with thoughts on what could make today a great day really does work. Starting a gratitude journal would be an excellent way to get going with your journal keeping habit.

3. Make Better Decisions

A personal journal is an excellent place to think through big decisions in your life. I’m a finance guy, and for a lot of choices, I have an Excel spreadsheet that helps me articulate the decision process, financial ramifications, pros and cons scored and weighted, etc. And for black and white decisions, that’s usually enough. But many decisions aren’t so easy, and I would find myself staring at the spreadsheet in indecision, or worse, gaming the inputs to get to the decision my emotional side wanted. My elaborate spreadsheet on whether to buy a sailboat is a terrific example of this.

That’s where my journal comes in.

I have debated many, many decisions in the pages of my journal over the years. My journal is a safe place to explore an uncertain future without anyone but my subconscious looking over my shoulder. I will usually try to articulate what would be the worst thing that could happen if I take a particular path. In my case, I have a healthy fear of failure which can hold me back in making decisions. Facing this fear and putting into a broader context has helped keep me balanced in my decision-making.

Deciding to go back to school to earn my master’s degree while working full-time is a good example of a decision I wrestled with in my journal. At the time I had a brutal work schedule and two small children at home. The idea of taking on another 20 – 30 hours of class work and study each week seemed impossible, maybe even suicidal. But I knew that my career advancement would stall without the degree, and I would probably come to regret not going for it later in life. I must have written dozens of journal entries on this one decision over the course of a year, weighing the pros and cons, facing the fear of letting down my family or performing poorly on the job, or burning myself out. In the end, I convinced myself to do it, and while it was incredibly challenging, it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.

There’s a cumulative benefit of recording your thoughts about pivotal decisions over a longer span of years and even decades. Steve Jobs once said:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

It is helpful to me now to look back over twenty years of life decisions, some small and some tremendous, and retrace my train of thought on how I was dealing with the uncertainty surrounding the decision. With hindsight, I now see where I was over-emphasizing particular risks or downplaying others. I can critique my decision-making style to seek out blind spots and biases. Of course, this doesn’t allow me to see the future any better, but it does help me better understand myself, and I believe, help me make better decisions as a result of the insight my journals provide me.

4. Achieve Your Goals

You hear it all the time. If you want to change your life, you need to set goals on how and where you want to improve. And to make them stick, you need to write them down.

Early in my career, I read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. One of these habits is to begin with the end in mind, and Mr. Covey suggests a goal-setting process centered around the most critical roles in your life. For example, father, friend, spouse, community leader, team leader, etc. This advice helped me stay balanced in my priorities and goals, and I think without it, I may have over-emphasized some areas of my life (i.e., work) over others.

I set my goals for each role in my life every year during the end of year holiday season. I use this quiet time to reflect back on how I fared last year with my goals and give myself letter grades on my performance. I am a pretty tough grader within the safety of my journal, and I believe this self-assessment helps create stronger commitment and accountability to the goal-setting process. Once I’m done looking back, I write out what I hope to accomplish in the coming year for the major roles in my life. These goal setting journal entries are time-consuming to write. I may take a whole week to reflect and prioritize, to soul-search, before committing. During the year I will frequently look back on this goal-setting journal entry to check my progress and make sure I’m dedicating the right level of energy and time to each role and goal.

I’ve used my journal for goal setting for a long time. Again, I’ll share how gratifying it is to look back over the years to see my progress, achieving things that my younger-self worried might be difficult if not impossible.

5. Understand Yourself

Over time and with practice, your journal can be a blank canvas to address life’s big questions. I’ve found that getting at these universal mysteries is a bit tricky. A blank page or blinking cursor still strikes terror in me when I force myself to write about anything serious. Instead, I might start an entry about some small event, and many end up just that, but a few of these start to tackle some deeply rooted belief once my subconscious mind loosens up enough to unlock. When I write without any agenda — free writing — I sometimes indirectly land on a universal question:

What is important to me? Where do we go from here? Why are we here?

Rereading journal entries that made this detour remind me a little of a Ouija board – for the author of the banal part of the entry sounds a lot different than the soul-searching part. Who’s indeed penning these words? But I love these heart-felt honest missives. I apply a unique “insights” tag to these entries in Day One (more on this software in a future article), so I can see how my questions (and some answers) have evolved over the decades I’ve kept a journal. Patterns have emerged that paint a pretty complete picture of who I am and what I believe. Having this sense about myself, who I am, gives me a pretty solid footing and compass as I approach the chaos and contrary winds of everyday life. I think this self-awareness that my journals have taught me has made me a better human being, one more capable of helping others. Like we’re told every time we fly: “please secure your mask before assisting others.” Knowing who I am and what I stand for is the oxygen that I need to serve others.

So Is It Really Worth the Effort?

Yes! After thirty years, thousands of entries, and countless hours, I heartily endorse keeping a private journal. I can’t think of a better tool I’ve used to help me stay happy, healthy and successful over the course of the past thirty years. Wherever you are in life, there’s no time like now to start. If you’re lucky enough to heed this advice in your twenties or thirties and commit to a regular habit of journal writing, I believe it can change your life.

Getting started is easy. Sticking with it is harder. I’ll share my tips on how I was able to start and keep a regular journal habit spanning three decades in the next post. Stay tuned.

Are you keeping a journal now? What has been your experience? Leave your feedback and questions in the comment section below.