5 Life Changing Journaling Habits from the Stoics

Do you have a copy of the Daily Stoic Journal? Get a special signed edition in the Daily Stoic Store or at The Painted Porch Bookshop. Journaling is Stoicism. It’s almost impossible to have one without the other. Ryan Holiday's journaling ideas come from his 15+ year practice of writing and reflecting on Stoicism. Journaling is one of the most essential exercises in Stoic philosophy. Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius all praised the benefits of journaling. In Stoicism the daily practice is the philosophy. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 50% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Stamps.com makes it easy to mail and ship right from your computer. Use our promo code STOIC to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. Go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Terri Cole: Homepage, Instagram, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I wish you could see my journals. They are... I'm almost finished with one of them. I've had this journal now for five years. And it's duct taped many times over. It's coming... It's limping across the finish line. But I'm not. I'm doing great, in part because the journal took the beatings and the frustrations out, or was the recipient of the beatings and the frustrations that otherwise may have landed on me. Journaling has just been this, you know, now multi-year habit of mine,

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  certainly a transformative, level-up habit. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Like, Stoicism is journaling. Journaling is Stoicism. It's almost impossible to have one and the other. And so, in today's episode, I wanted to give you some journaling ideas that come from my, what is it now? Seven-year practice. Certainly, my blog, which has been 15 years, was a form of public journaling. So you might even say a 15-year habit.

• 2:04Ryan Holiday?

  But here are some tried and true lessons from my experiences from the Stoics. I think you'll see why journaling was such a core practice of Epictetus, of Seneca, of Marcus Aurelius, and so many other people that you've admired and learned from throughout history. So in today's episode, bringing you five life-changing journaling habits from the Stoics. You don't have to use all of them. You don't have to follow my advice at all. But I do hope you start journaling, and I hope this episode puts you on the path to doing that. Enjoy.

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  The first lesson I would give anyone about journaling is like, just start. Don't stress about tools. Don't stress about time. Don't stress about how much, how little, should you read it? Like, just do it, right? Actually, one of the journals that I love, I love this one-line-a-day journal. It was helpful for me when I was getting started because it's just, you just write one thing every day. I've done one line a day now for five years. I'm almost finished with this. But the idea is, everyone has time and the willpower to write one sentence a day. So don't start by saying, "Oh, I want to write 10 pages, or I want to spend 30 minutes journaling." Just like with meditation, don't start with an hour-long solo meditation. Start with one minute or five minutes, right? Start really small.

• 3:21Ryan Holiday?

  So the idea is to build the habit, build the momentum, get into it, make it a habit, and then you can build. So I started with something like the one-line-a-day journal, or the Daily Stoic Journal is an easy one, too, because it's prompt. The five-minute journal is great. You've got five minutes, you know? So do something that helps build the practice. Maybe just start a workout journal. Just log your workouts, or a reading journal, or a food journal. Like, start something that's more of a practice, and then it's building the skill, the willpower for you to do it on an ongoing basis.

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  Walter Isaacson, when he was writing his epic biography of Steve Jobs, talked about how they went and they tried to find a bunch of old documents and journals that Steve Jobs had done on one of the early Macintoshes. And even Steve Jobs, with all his computing genius and access to the best programmers and designers and engineers in the world, couldn't manage to get these files off this old Mac. And Walter Isaacson was joking about how absurd that was. You couldn't access these files that were just a decade, a couple decades old at most. And yet, he could spend hours poring over the journals of Leonardo da Vinci. Don't think of journaling as this epic thing, but it also is important.

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  And there's something important about doing it on physical paper. I think it's good to be free of devices anyway to have something that's not digital. But I just love the idea that, you know, 600, 700 years later, or whatever, da Vinci's journals are still legible and usable. But things that you did two iPhones ago are lost the whole time.

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus says, "Every night, keep thoughts like these at hand. Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them." I think this is an important part. Stoicism isn't this thing that you just absorb one time, that's just in your brain and you have it forever. It's actually an ongoing process and engagement with the ideas over and over again. One of the criticisms of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations by academics who don't get this is that it's kind of repetitive. It's repetitive, sure, but he was doing it over a long period of time. He might have wrote one entry and then another one seven years later. It could have been seven days apart. But this is what he needed. This is what he was struggling with. He wasn't writing the journal for you. He was writing them for himself. And actually, in Coridion, that's what survives to us from Epictetus.

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  It's this idea of "at hand." It's there for you. It's almost like a weapon. So when you think of journaling, don't think of it as putting down your thoughts necessarily for history, performing for history, although that could be cool, depending on what you're experiencing. But think about it also as a process that you are engaging in. Even though I know about and write about Stoicism, I also explore it privately in my journal every day because I need reminders of the ideas and spending time with them, writing them down, reminding myself of them. Keeping them at hand, as Epictetus says, is a hugely beneficial exercise for me.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  It's sort of snuck up on me that I'm like a small business owner, or not so small business owner at this point. I have a bookstore, The Painted Porch. I have, obviously, all my books, which are a sort of a form of intellectual property. I have some investments here in Bastrop, and then I have Daily Stoic, of course. And the reality of all these businesses is that I have to mail a lot of stuff. And that's where today's sponsor comes in, Stamps.com. With Stamps.com, you can skip the trip, focus on how to take your business to the next level. Stamps.com saves you time, money, and stress. And for more than 20 years, Stamps.com has been indispensable for more than a million businesses, gives you access to the post office and UPS shipping service right from

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  your computer, plus discounts you can't find anywhere else, like 40% off USPS rates and 76% off UPS. Stop overpaying for shipping with Stamps.com. Sign up with promo code STOIC for a special offer that includes a four-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page, and enter code STOIC. I'm sure many of you read Anne Frank's diary when you were in school, or you've heard of it. You think about how insanely stressful and scary that would be. It'd be insanely stressful and scary to be a 13-year-old girl, let alone locked in an attic with your parents and another family, worried about what's happening in the world. But she has this great line in her diary that I

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  think about. She says, "Paper is more patient than people." Instead of vomiting your thoughts on your employees, on your friends, on your coworkers, on the driver in front of you who's taking forever, put it on the page. The page is forgiving and patient. It keeps secrets. It doesn't care. It doesn't care if you're contradicting yourself. It doesn't care if you're being a baby. It doesn't care if you're whining. Just put it down on the page. The page will help, right? And I love the idea of having distance between you and your thoughts. Part of the reasons we're worked up and anxious and stressed is that we're trapped in our heads with all this stuff, right? And you get it out, and you see it from a distance, and you go, "I don't even agree with

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  my own thoughts here, right? I don't even like this. I'm not going to choose to carry this around." So putting it down on the page is just really important.

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  What's really interesting about philosophy is that that's what Marcus Aurelius's Meditations was. It's one of the few philosophical books that we have that wasn't published as a book. He wasn't the most powerful man in the world, wasn't writing what he thought. He was writing what he felt he needed to know for himself. And it's only a complete accident that this work survives to us. He'd probably be mortified that we're reading his diary or journal, but he's dead, so it doesn't matter. The point is, philosophy is not just this thing you read about one time and understand. It's an active practice. It's something you're doing with yourself. It's a dialogue with oneself. I talked about the missile crisis a little bit. What I think is so fascinating about the missile crisis

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  is that we have Kennedy's doodles and notes from the missile crisis on legal pads. He would write these things to himself, sort of reminders. He would write missile, missile, missile, or he'd write consensus, consensus, consensus. He was journaling out, working out what he was thinking as he was thinking it. Journaling's not the only way to do this. I know people that doodle in the morning or sketch, but the point is to have kind of a creative practice where there are very low stakes and it's just sort of getting the juices flowing. Julia Cameron calls morning pages a sort of a form of spiritual windshield wipers, and I really like that analogy. Kennedy really liked boating, and so he drew these

• 10:12Ryan Holiday?

  pictures of sailboats. You can imagine, the entire world is about to blow itself up, and if he's not careful, he's going to contribute to that. The idea of just getting out of that, zooming out, sort of calming his mind, you can see how valuable and important that would be. Think about the stresses of the missile crisis. It makes sense why he's writing on. He wants to dump out his anger and his frustration and his fears and the ideas that he's workshopping where there are low stakes, so he can perform better where there's really high stakes. So I think journaling's a really important part of it.

• 10:50Ryan Holiday?

  I actually do this journal every single day, The Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out The Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com.