It Helps To Write It Down | How To Journal Like The Stoics

Journaling is one of the most essential exercises in Stoic philosophy. You find your own way. You find your own style. You get your own benefits. But only if you do it.📓 Looking to start a journaling practice or get back into one? The Daily Stoic Journal is more than 50% off right now on Amazon! You can also grab a signed copy of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  It helps to write it down. It was Seneca opening up his journals after his wife went to sleep, or sitting down to write a letter to Lucilius from his country estate. It was Marcus Aurelius in his army tent in the mornings, jotting down the words that would become meditations. It was Anne Frank clutching the little autograph book her parents had given her for her 13th birthday, losing herself in the pages, even as the terrible danger lurked outside. The types of journals they used differed. So did their writing styles, so did their circumstances, their ages and feelings. But what they shared, what they agreed on, was what the process of reflection did for them, what the practice

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  brought out of them: clarity, peace, insight. There are passages in meditations that contradict each other. If Anne Frank had lived, and it's worth noting that she'd only be 94 this year, she might cringe at some of the things she wrote as a teenager. "It helps to write it down," goes the song lyric, "even when you then cross it out." That's the thing about journaling. Done properly, it's a safe space. It's a place to work stuff out, to vent, to be wrong, to call yourself out, to just think out loud. It's the doing it, whatever it is, that matters. It's making time for it that matters. Being vulnerable enough to do it is what matters. You find your own way, you find your own style, you

• 1:52Ryan Holiday?

  get your own benefits. But only if you do it.

• 2:03Ryan Holiday?

  I wake up, I don't touch my phone, I spend some time outside with my kids, and then the next thing I do is I sit down with my journals.

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  So I've been journaling off and on for most of my life. You know, I started when I was a kid, I would stop, I would get started, like a lot of people. It was a habit that I knew was important, but it just never really stuck. I remember I was visiting my friend Casey Neistat, and he had all these amazing journals, like years and years of his creative thinking on this shelf in his office. And I was like, "That's so cool." I was like, "I wish I'd done that." And he said, "Why don't you just start now?" And I remember I bought this moleskine. This is when journaling really stuck for me. And it's become part of my morning routine. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written now 11 or 12 books. I didn't even know about Stoic philosophy. I've been lucky enough to speak all over the world to the NBA, the NFL, special forces, and sitting senators.

• 3:00Ryan Holiday?

  But I've been on this philosophical journey, this journey through Stoicism, for a decade and a half now. And a huge part of that journey has been journaling. In fact, you could really argue that Stoicism and journaling are inseparable from each other. And actually, in two or three days, I will be starting my fourth go-around of the Daily Stoic Journal. I know it's a little weird to do your own journal, but it's basically just a prompt each day. Like, how am I preparing in the off-season for what is to come? And you reflect on that in the morning and the evening. How can I see these difficulties as a lesson and a test? So each day, there's a question, and you explore that question.

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  And I use usually a blank journal, too. I have a gratitude journal. I have this one-line-a-day journal. I have a bunch of different journals I do. But I've been doing this now for a long time. And I've been studying some of the great journaling practices of creative people, and leaders, and thinkers, and philosophers, of course. So in today's episode, I want to give you a bunch of secrets to being a great journaler, to getting the most out of your journaling practice. Here we go.

• 4:16Ryan 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.

• 5:01Ryan 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.

• 5:38Ryan 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.

• 6:22Ryan 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 to all time.

• 6:45Ryan 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, an 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.

• 7:24Ryan Holiday?

  And actually, in Coridion, that's what survives to us from Epictetus, 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.

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  I'm sure many of you read Anne Frank's diary when you were in school. 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 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. Doesn't care. 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.

• 8:54Ryan Holiday?

  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 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.

• 9:23Ryan 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, it's 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 is that we have Kennedy's doodles

• 10:08Ryan Holiday?

  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. He would 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 pictures of sailboats. You can imagine the entire world is about to blow itself.

• 10:51Ryan Holiday?

  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. 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 is a really important part of it. If you want to learn more about Stoic philosophy, totally for free, you can sign up for our Daily Stoic email. It's one free email every morning. The best of Stoic wisdom, dailystoic.com/email.