The Art of Journaling

On today's episode, Ryan goes in-depth into journaling, describing the benefits of journaling, how to get started, and more.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to a very special episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We're going to do a deep dive here on a singular topic at length, and it's an important one, I think, one of the most essential practices of all of Stoic philosophy, and I think life itself, something I build each one of my own mornings around, talking about journaling. So today's episode, we're titling "The Art of Journaling: How to Start Journaling, the Benefits of Journaling, and So Much More." And this is a timeless art, I would say, and as you'll hopefully see. So journaling is not just a little thing you do to pass the time, to write your memories down, although it can be. It's really a strategy that has helped brilliant and powerful

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  and wise people become better at what they do. Oscar Wilde, Susan Sontag, W. H. Auden, Queen Victoria, John Quincy Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, John Steinbach, Sylvia Plath, Shaun Green, Mary Chestnut, Brian Koppelman, Anise Ninn, Franz Kafka, and Ben Franklin. All of these were journalers, just to name a few. And it was for them, as so many others, what Foucault called "a weapon of spiritual power." Combat, a way to practice their principles to be creative and purge the mind of agitation was part of who they were and it made them who they were. And it can make you better, too. Whether you're brand new to the concept of journaling or you've journaled in the past

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  and have fallen out of practice, today's guide to journaling should give you everything you need to know to help make journaling one of the best things you do this year and beyond. We'll learn not only how to journal, but the benefits of journaling, the famous journalers of the last 2000 years, the best journals to use and more. And let's get right into it. So the benefits of journaling, and it's true, there's a bunch of scientific based benefits to this. According to a study conducted by the Harvard Business School, participants who journaled at the end of each day had a 25% increase in performance when compared to a control group that didn't. As the researchers conclude, "Our results reveal reflection to be a powerful mechanism behind learning," confirming the words of the American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  "We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience." So that's why for me, I try to journal in the morning and then also in the evening. It's this sort of push and pull. Another study by Cambridge University found that journaling helps improve well-being after traumatic and stressful events. Participants were asked to write about events for 15 to 20 minutes and that resulted in improvements in physical and psychological health. Look, one of the ways to get something off your shoulders or off your mind, I think, is to get it out on the page. We've also seen a Stanford University study that found improved communication skills. There's a critical relationship between writing and speaking, and writing reflects clear thinking and in turn improves communication. A study by the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that writing focused on

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  positive outcomes in negative situations decreases emotional stress. I found this myself. Improved sleep. We even see from the Journal of Experimental Psychology that journaling before bed decreases cognitive stimulus, rumination and worry, allowing you to fall asleep faster. And that's why Seneca talks about this evening review. He says he waits for his, his wife to go to bed and he sits down and he sort of reviews the day with a And then finally, research published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that reflective writing reduces intrusive and avoidant thoughts about negative events and improves working memory. These improvements in turn free up our cognitive resources for other mental activities, including our ability to cope more effectively with stress. So let's get into it.

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  I think the first thing you want to do with journaling is you want to bring your problems to your journal. On June 12, 1942, a young girl named Anne Frank made her first entry to her famous "existentially essential journal." "I hope you'll be a great source of comfort and support," she wrote. And 24 days after that first entry, Anne and her Jewish family were forced into hiding in the cramped attic above her father's warehouse in Amsterdam, and they would spend the next two years there. According to her father, Anne didn't write in her journal every day. She wrote when she was upset or dealing with a problem, and she wrote when she was confused. She wrote in her journal as a form of therapy, so as not to unload her troubled thoughts

• 5:21Ryan Holiday?

  on the family and compatriots with whom she shared such difficult conditions. And one of her best and most insightful lines must have come on a particularly difficult day. "Paper," she says, "has more patience than people." And when we were talking about the research, when we're saying that journaling helps improve well-being during trauma and stress, similarly, a University of Arizona study showed that people were better able to recover from divorce and move forward if they journaled on the experience. And so keeping a journal is a common recommendation from psychologists because it helps patients stop obsessing and allows them to make sense of the many inputs, emotional, external, and psychological, that would otherwise overwhelm them. And there's some interesting examples of this, too.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  Shia LaBeouf's court-mandated journaling on his childhood trauma became the screenplay for his critically acclaimed "Honey Boy." "It was part of sussing out my past, a flashlight to your soul, trying to get to know myself like shedding of a skin in a way," he said. "One of the most effective acts of self-care, happily, is one of the cheapest," as Hayley Phelan of the New York Times wrote about her own journaling practice. She said, Started when I was in a place when I would have tried anything to feel better. And so, look, your journaling is not about performing for history. It's about reflecting. It's about working through problems. It's about figuring out things and clearing your head. And so, write about the frustrating people you encountered today. The comment, the tweet, the news headline that made you furious.

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  Write about the wounds you carry from childhood. The person who didn't treat you right. The terrible experience, the parent who was too busy or too critical or too tired dealing with their own crap to help you. And the sources of anxiety or worry or frustrations that pop up in the worst times. The reasons you have trouble staying in a relationship. Whatever problems you're dealing with, take them to your journal and you'll be surprised at how you feel after. Let's also talk about leaving destructive thoughts in your journal. Eugene Delacroix, who has called Stoicism his consoling religion, who struggled as we all struggle with occasional, even frequent, internal torment. He said, "My mind is continually occupied in useless scheming. They burn me up and lay my mind to waste. The enemy is within my gates."

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  And so, when he writes later that "I am taking up my journal again after a long break. I think it may be a way of calming this nervous excitement that has been worrying me for so long." That's what we're trying to get you to do. As Tim Ferriss has said, "I don't journal to be productive. I don't journal to find great ideas or put down prose I can publish later. The pages aren't intended for anyone but me. I'm just caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day." And yes, this is what journaling is about. Instead of carrying around the baggage in our heads or our hearts, we put it down on paper. Julia Cameron has called it "spiritual windshield wipers", and that's wonderful. I talk about myself about how when I've been angry, I've journaled and I've prevented, I've caught myself from doing things

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  or saying things I would later regret. Marcus Aurelius says, "Constantly go down the list of those who felt intense anger at something, the most famous, the most hated, the most whatever, and ask, 'Where is that all now?'" Smoke, dust, legend, not even legend. And imagine he's doing this in his journal and it's hopefully preventing him from doing things that he'll regret. And we shouldn't just think of journals as damage control. You can keep Keep a journal for your grandchildren. In Walter Isaacson's wonderful biography of Leonardo da Vinci, he spends a lot of time dissecting and exploring the ideas in da Vinci's notebooks. As Isaacson observed of da Vinci's lifelong habit, "500 years later, Leonardo's notebooks are still around to astonish and inspire us.

• 8:59Ryan Holiday?

  50 years from now, our own notebooks, if we work up the initiative to start them, will be around to astonish and inspire our grandchildren, unlike our tweets and Facebook posts." "Paper," he said, "is the best technology ever invented, and Marcus Aurelius is an example of this." As Bland Branchard writes of Marcus, "Few now care about the marches and counter marches of Roman commanders. What centuries cling to is a notebook of the thoughts of a man whose real life was largely unknown, who put down in the midnight dimness not the events of the day or the plans of tomorrow, but something of far more permanent interest, the ideals and aspirations that he lived by." So stop wasting your time tweeting and chattering and texting. Sit down with a notebook. Create something that if the centuries don't cling to,

• 9:44Ryan Holiday?

  at least your family will. "Your notebooks will be around for 50 years," Isaacson said. Your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren, they'll be around maybe 500 years. That's awesome. So journal for your future self as well. If your grandchildren don't care, produce something that will give you something to look back on. Derek Sivers, who's a great writer and performer, he says, "You know those people whose lives are transformed by meditation or yoga or something like that? For me, it's writing in my diary and journals. It's made all the difference in the world for my learning, reflecting in peace of mind. For over 20 years, every night, he takes a few minutes to jot down a few sentences to recap his day." But what's so transformative about that? He says, "We so often make big decisions in life based on the predictions of how we think we'll feel in the future

• 10:29Ryan Holiday?

  or what we'll want, but your past self is your best indicator of how you actually felt in similar situations." He's talking about journaling for your future self. You'll want to go back and look, and he says this will help you make better decisions. So this is important. Like, how often do you actually consult your past self to make decisions? Could you do so? And if you did this more, you'd get better. That's why journaling is transformational. Journaling, Maria Popova has said, is a practice that teaches us better than any other, the elusive art of solitude, how to be present with our own selves, bear witness to our experience, and fully inhabit our inner lives. I think that's beautifully said. I would also suggest that you forget all the rules about journaling, just do what's right. People go, what's the best way to journal? Which one should I buy? How many pages should I do? How much time?

• 11:14Ryan Holiday?

  Forget that. Who cares? How you journal is much less important than why you are doing it and that you are doing it. So get something off your chest. Have quiet time with your thoughts. Clarify your thoughts. Separate the harmful from the insightful. Prepare for the day. Review the day. There's no right way or wrong way. Just do it. When Charles Darwin started his little diary at the age of 29, he filled the pages with everything he could remember until eventually he was up to date. And then he shifted to daily notable events. Thomas Edison made his objective to record mundane details about his day. He writes things like, went into a drugstore and bought some candy. That might seem unimportant, but for him, it was the process. Mark Twain had a section in his diary for dirty jokes.

• 11:56Ryan Holiday?

  General Patton had a section for daily affirmations like, do your damnedest always. Always do more than what is required of you, and you can be what you will be. Thomas Jefferson's morning journaling routine began by taking weather measurements such as temperature and wind speed and precipitation. Beethoven liked to use his journal to whatever he wished he'd said in previous conversations. Hemingway brought his journal everywhere, recording expenses and even tracking his wife's menstrual cycles. Benjamin Franklin used his to chart his progress, to chart his moral progress. George Marshall kept not a diary, but a little book of names of people whose careers he wanted to advance. The point is, there's lots of ways to do it. There are no rules. The pages are for your eyes only. Be your weirdest self.

• 12:41Ryan Holiday?

  Be your most curious self. Be your most prolific horrible idea-having self. Dump out everything that's in your mind. There's no right way. There's only your way. So just do it. Remember what Delacroix said. He said, "I am taking up my journal again after a long break. I think it may be a way of calming this nervous excitement that has been troubling me for so long." Yes, that is what journaling is about. It's a few minutes of reflection that both demands and creates stillness to break from the world of framework for the day ahead. Just find what works for you and then do it because it may well be the most important thing you do all day. So let's talk a little bit about how to journal. I recommend starting small. The writer James Clear talks a lot about the idea of atomic

• 13:23Ryan Holiday?

  habits, small act that makes an enormous difference in your life. And this started with something he learned from Leo Babuda. His advice for people who want to start flossing, start by flossing just one tooth. If you want to start exercising, start with a minute or two a day. If you want to eat healthy, eat one vegetable. So start exceedingly small. And that's why my journaling routine starts with a one line a day journal. Tim Ferriss recommends the five minute journal. The point is just start something really small, really simple. Don't try to overreach and fail. Start with something you definitely can do. Doesn't have to be Nobel Prize winning prose. Just get a word down on paper every day. Another way you can do this is to track something in your journal. Most people drop

• 14:07Ryan Holiday?

  the journaling habit or never begin out of intimidation. The blank page is scary. Where do I start? I don't have anything to say. As the one line of journal does for me, it's, I'm just writing one sentence about the day that just happened. That gets me going. But you could also track your workouts. You could track your diet. You could track, as Hemingway did, your wife's menstrual cycle. It doesn't matter. James Clear records his pushups. Daniel Kahneman, the economist, talks about keeping track of decisions you've made. Just list what you're grateful for. Austin Kleon keeps a logbook, writing simple things that have occurred. It doesn't matter. Track something. This is a way to get started. You can use your journal to prepare in the morning. This is what Marcus Aurelius did. He opens Book

• 14:49Ryan Holiday?

  Two of Meditations with sort of a preparation and meditation on the day ahead. We built the Daily Stoic Journal about this. It gives you a prompt, a meditation, an intention for the day. Begin with that. And when I start with it in the morning, it's What am I going to work on today? How am I going to get better today? Conversely, you can use the journal to review your day in the evening. This is what Seneca said. He wrote, "When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that's now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I've done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by." Churchill said he would interrogate himself each day. "I try myself by court martial," he said, "to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don't just mean pawing at the ground

• 15:32Ryan Holiday?

  or going through the motions, but something really effective." So a journal is a way to practice this self-awareness, this review, and we can't get better unless we're focusing on where we can get better and what we can do better. Another thing you can do is copy down important quotes in your journal. This is what meditation is. Multiple times in meditations, Marcus quotes some of his favorite playwrights. He quotes poets. He quotes Epicurus, Democritus, Plato, Epictetus. Over and over again, he's drawing on things. Another word for this kind of journal is a commonplace book. All sorts of famous people, as one said of H.L. Mencken, "methodically filled notebooks with incidents, recording scraps of dialogue and slang."

• 16:15Ryan Holiday?

  Record what you like. This is a way to get better. It's also a way to prime the pump. In his book Old School, Thomas Wolfe's semi-autobiographical character takes the time to type out quotes and passages from great books so he can feel these words flowing through his fingers. You can even go to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and see the note cards, his version of a journal, which he kept in these scraps of anecdotes and words and stories and quotes are what made his famous speeches. There's even a book called The Note Cards, which is The Note Cards of Ronald Reagan. You can brainstorm ideas in your journal. Beethoven was rarely seen without his notebook, even when out for drinks. As one of his biographers wrote, "When Beethoven was enjoying a beer, he might suddenly pull out his notebook and write something in it."

• 17:00Ryan Holiday?

  "Something just occurred to me," he would say, sticking it back into his pocket. The ideas that he tossed off separately with only a few lines and points and without bar lines are hieroglyphics that no one can decipher. Thus, in these tiny notebooks, he concealed a treasure of ideas. Again, Kleine the Elder talks about being out hunting and grabbing his notebook and writing down ideas that would become some of his writing. Thomas Edison kept a notebook titled Private Idea Book, again, where he did the same thing. Entrepreneur and author James Altucher carries with him a waiter's pad that he uses as a journal. So again, forget the rules, do what works. You can also check out the Bulletproof Journal Method, which is an interesting way to take down notes. Ryder Carroll, who created the Bullet Journal Method, is an interesting guy.

• 17:44Ryan Holiday?

  I have a bullet journal and it's where I do some of my more free-form journaling each day. You should check that out. It's a good way to review your day, review what's going on. It's a great place for keeping ideas, so check that one out. And then I thought we could conclude here by reviewing some famous journalers throughout history and their methodology. So let's talk about Marcus Aurelius. This is a great quote from him. "The recognition that I needed to train and discipline my character not to be sidetracked by my interest in rhetoric, not to write treatises or abstract questions, or deliver moralizing little sermons, or compose imaginary descriptions of the simple life of the man who lives only for others, to steer clear of oratory poetry and letters, not to dress up, not just to stroll around the house, or things like that, to write straightforward."

• 18:29Ryan Holiday?

  And what's so beautiful about his meditations is that he is writing straightforwardly, bluntly, authentically, directly to himself. Of course, Anne Frank, as we've talked about, as she said, "For someone like me, it was a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only have I never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I nor anyone else will care for the outpouring of a 13-year-old schoolgirl." How wrong she was and what an incredible legacy that journal turned out to be. Let's look at Henry David Thoreau. "Is the poet bound to write his own biography?" He said, "Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day." And that's what Thoreau's journals are.

• 19:14Ryan Holiday?

  He has a 2 million-word journal that he started keeping at age 20 and that he kept until six months before his death. Almost 25 years of journaling there, 2 million words, an incredible output. Mark Twain, "Keeping a journal is the various pastime in the world and the pleasantest. Only those rare natures that are made of pluck, endurance, devotion, and duty-for-duty stake, and invincible determination, may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as keeping a journal." When Mark Twain was 21, a teacher told him, "My boy, you must get a little memorandum book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away." And that's what he did, and that's what produced his brilliant writings. Anise Nan, she said, "I believe I can never exhaust the supply of material lying within

• 19:58Ryan Holiday?

  me. The deeper I plunge, the more I discover. There is no bottom to my heart and no limit to the acrobatic feats of my imagination." That's what her journal was. Marcus Aurelius talks about how people look for retreats in the country and by the coaster in the hills, but actually, your soul is the best place to look. That's what journaling allows us to do. I do have some recommendations on journaling. The Daily Stoic Journal, obviously, Five Minute Journal is great. One Line a Day Journal, as I've talked about. The Artist Way Morning Pages Journal by Julia Cameron is great. The Bullet Journal Method. James Clear has the Clear Habit Journal. Austin Kleon has the Steal Like an Artist Journal. There's Becoming a Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice, which is also great.

• 20:42Ryan Holiday?

  And of course, the Bullet Journal is also great. So, look, this is a special episode. We haven't done a lot of these, but I just wanted to dive into a subject that's sort of near and dear to my heart. Before I recorded this to you this morning, I sat down with the three journals that I used. Took me about five minutes, maybe 10 minutes. It centered me, then I went for a long walk. Some of those thoughts that I put down on the page were still bouncing around. It's just a way of getting started. And I know, probably seems like because I'm a writer, that's why I'm recommending a journal. No, I think everyone should do it. It doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter if you're the smartest person or the dumbest person, if you have the most interesting life or the most boring life. You will be better for sitting down with the pages of a journal. I promise you, it will be the best habit you start.

• 21:25Ryan Holiday?

  And honestly, I don't think there's really a separation between journaling and Stoicism. It's honestly, it's- Hard to know where one begins and the other ends. You could say that Stoicism is journaling and journaling is a form of Stoicism. So I hope you get started. Again, there are no rules, no expectations, just do it. Obviously, I'm a little biased. I recommend the Daily Stoic Journal, which starts you with a prompt you review in the morning. And then with a prompt that gets you set for the day. You're supposed to meditate on how you're going to live up to this prompt. And then in the evening, you do the review that Seneca talked about, where you reflect on how you did per that thing. And then each week, there's a set of Stoic quotes and some exercises and little meditations for me. It's about 20,000 words of writing in there from me.

• 22:10Ryan Holiday?

  So it's basically a book you can read as you are journaling. So thanks for listening. Check it out. Please start journaling. It'll be the best habit you start this year. If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.