Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?

Self-reflection increases self-awareness. When I’m anxious, I write. Just a first-person brief on whatever is on my mind.

I like doing it digitally because I tend to cut/paste things around to try and make sense of whatever it is that I’m ruminating on.

As far as tools go, I tend to write inside of Notion these days, as linking between journal articles is super handy when I want to see how my thoughts and feelings around a certain topic have matured over time.

Journals ? No, it’s just a mess of a bunch of unrelated things that only have date in common. I’d definitely consider doing one for travels, could be a nice thing with attached picture but for day to day things I prefer different kind.

Logging and notes? Yes. I am fond of “personal wiki” idea.

Project gets its own page with all relevant info. And links to all the other relevant things. Search makes sure I can actually find it. at worst if I wanted to look at history I could git blame so “when I wrote that” feature of journal is also filled in.

I use QOwnNotes which is absolute overkill feature-wise for me but I use it coz it keeps files in markdown which means I can edit/view it in many other things if required. Then syncthing to sync to other devices.

I’d only want for better integration with todo/calendar tools.

My ideal would be ability to write a calendar event (org-mode style) anywhere I want. And a feature to be able to express “put this event on my to-do list after date X”. So I could, for example, put a maintenance thing year ahead on to-do list but without a concrete data and calendar alerts to bother me

I did use org-mode for a long time and it was great when only using editor but weak integration with anything else made me eventually leave it. Like, I love the featureset but non-emacs implementations always miss something (like spreadsheet-like table handling with formulas) and I grew tired of it.

A few years ago I realized my days all kind of blurred together.

So I started journaling. I eventually built a good habit of doing it once a week. Every week, I read the previous entry and then write a new entry. Around the end of the year, I go back and read the whole year.

I prefer to use a physical journal with nice paper and a decent pen.

It has been very transformative for me. I write about my experiences and I write about what I read. I also write about what changes I want to make, and reflect on how changes I wanted to make are going.

Reviewing my thoughts in this way has led me 1) to be more forgiving of myself, focusing more on growth instead of failure and 2) to make incremental progress on objectives I have.

This is wonderfully inspiring! I think journaling forcing you to write about things that matter. While you could write on what you had for breakfast every morning, often journaling draws attention to the moments that resonated with you.

I hope you won’t mind if I use the term “journaling” in its broadest sense as anything written about events of my life.

1. I write a training journal that consist of .fit files with extensive notes in .txt files – how I felt during and after the training (including things like “I discovered a new road next to a river, it was beautiful” or “I kept thinking about X and I was pissed), what I ate and how I slept that day, that I was observing swallows flying and that it made me feel good for some reason… writing a journal like this forces you to pay attention to little things. You notice patterns, maybe little signs of overtraining, signals that it is going well, connections that you might otherwise miss, like “I have elevated heart rate every time I eat poppy seed cookies”…

2. when I have something on my mind, I write it as an email for “someone close”. This started during a difficult but interesting period in my life when I was actually sending emails to my close friend (we were on different continents and it was before Skype, mobile phones etc. – emails were the only connection we could have at the time). Nowadays I sometimes just write what is happening in my life without sending it to anyone but I usually still think about it as if I am writing to a friend. What is great about it is that this somehow re-frames heavy stuff into a funny story – it works even at the very moment when you are living through something tough; instead of just being depressed or scared you are already formulating in your head how you will write that email later and somehow your perspective changes into something a lot more positive – at least in my case it works like that.

I started journaling a few months ago and it’s been horrible for me. Around the end of February I decided I wanted to lose weight, and decided to use a food and exercise journal. I have a channel on Discord I write in whenever I eat or work out, and I keep a running total of the net calories for the day.

Did it work? Yes, I’ve lost almost 30 pounds.

Was it worth it? A solid no. It’s given me some kind of eating disorder, which came with fatigue, occasional blackouts, and all sorts of problems with my GI tract.

Not a doctor, I’ve had similar experiences in the past, overweight and poor concentration (despite being “gifted”). I tried journaling.

The accountability etc is almost magic in its effect but I had found it really hard to do. Then 12 weeks ago I started on Ozempic, almost no effort required – 30lbs lost. 3 years earlier I started taking 54mg methylphenidate and on the days I take it, concentration is not a problem.

Losing weight especially with that much scrutiny where you track everything can definitely make you neurotic about what you eat, and mess with how you perceive yourself (i.e. someone looks perfectly fine but their eyes just laser focus on a tiny bit of fat on their belly and they think they’re obese because of how critical they were).

With stuff like that it helps a lot to journal but in a way where it’s not hypercritical / nit picky / focused on every little detail but just slightly broader strokes in my experience to keep it healthy & sustainable (not messing up how you perceive yourself)

Yes and no.

For the first three months of the year I was religiously journaling. Pretty much every single day, with weekly and monthly reviews. Then towards the end of the quarter when it became apparent that I wasn’t going to get my project finished on time and that I was miserable I completely burnt out and stopped journaling and haven’t gone back to it yet. Journaling felt like work and it also felt like it was making my mental head space worse – it was constant, hyper focused reinforcement of negative energy and would just remind me of everything I was failing at or failing to do. I was succeeding at many things at the same time and writing those down but the journal was something of a relentless OODA loop for self improvement which meant I was constantly dissatisfied because my life was fixated on achieving the next goal rather than trying to enjoy the process. It didn’t help that the main problem I was working on was a frustrating nightmare.

I do want to start journaling again because it can lead to insights but I might have to experiment with it to find something healthier but I’m not sure what that would look like. All that being said I’m not sure my biggest insights come from journaling so who knows if it is that valuable. They probably come when I respond to questions like this on the internet or interact with people.

Thinking about it, in a way maybe it has helped. After burning out I kind of came to the realisation that I really am sick of being where I am and doing what I am doing which has lead to me selling up everything I own in order to go travelling. So maybe the journaling served its purpose of hammering home to me how dissatisfied I was with life and how I needed to make a radical change. The insight didn’t come whilst I was journaling but the journaling indirectly lead me to the insight. Maybe I’ll take it up again when I finally get out of the country in a few months.

Short answer: Yes.

I’m an avid pen and paper user, and use it in different modes. Two modes related to journaling are “short bursts” and “diary writing”.

First kind happens whenever I need to put something I feel on to paper and reflect. They’re haphazard, short to medium length writings which allows me to understand what I’m feeling.

Second kind is rarer, but allows me spend quality time with my thoughts, make bigger event in my life permanent and reflect on them at the same time.

Journaling allows me clear my mind about the things I go through, and see things with a wider perspective, also it allows me to compact the events to feelings or wisdom, by offloading the details to my diary, and carry only the gist of the event with me. It’s also soothing and relaxing for me.

I have been writing a journal for about 6 years now. I usually write 3 entries a week spanning from a few sentences to hundreds of words.

Personally, I feel there are many benefits to it, mainly:

1. It gives me time to think, to process my thoughts, explore ideas, and handle emotions. I often learn a lot about myself, what I did well, and how I can improve.

2. It is a great way to preserve memories. Only after I started writing my journal did I realize how much I forget about my past. I’ve always taken photos throughout my life, but those only capture a very small part of my life. My worries, the music I listened to, the TV-series I raved about, my dreams, my thoughts on the books I’ve read, the deep talks with my friends, are all preserved in my journal. It is easy to remember your vacations to exotic locations, but do you remember your everyday life from years back?

3. It can be meditative. It feels great to be able to sit for up to an hour and write without any barriers. I don’t have to stress about my writing style, the words I use, embarrassing stuff about myself. I truly feel I can express myself to the fullest.

I’m really happy that I decided to write my journal in Markdown. This format can be opened pretty much everywhere, even on my phone or my moms computer. Furthermore, it enables me to do some crude formatting for code, create headings, and even attach images. And since it is digital, I can search in it pretty easily.

Could you elaborate on where exactly you save or store your entries to make them universally accessible? For instance, do you use a specific application or cloud storage service?

I’ve been keeping a journal for about 12 years. It’s in simple text files, one per day, one directory per year. It mostly contains health-related information: what I ate, any reactions to what I ate (I have various food allergies and such), any exercise I did, how much I weighed. It also contains mention of significant events, like when I finish a book, any movies I might have watched, friends I met up with, things like that.

It has mostly been useful for occasional reference. It is useful to notice long-term health trends and patterns. It is also useful to be able to confirm suspicions like whether I might have got an idea from a book I read – did I read it before or after some idea I had say six years ago.

Things I have found useful in writing the journal are to make sure things are spelled correctly, so I can easily grep through it without worrying about whether I made a typo. Ditto regarding synonyms: I strive to use the most common word to describe something and not get fancy. I use conventions for recording things, so for example my weight is on its own line in the format “Weight: xxx”, so it is easy to write scripts that scrape such information to build tables and graphs.

There is very little beyond strict factual information, and I write it in prose, not bullet-form.

Started journal-ling in 10th class, ended after graduating college.

I think it depends on how and why you journal. I used to write a page in a notebook whenever I felt like writing. In my case don’t think it has improved my life in a very tangible way, however it is interesting to look into a journal entry 5 years ago and see how different I was. So while it was not tangible self-improvement, it was very emotional and revelatory, both good and bad. However, I barely read that journal anymore, I will probably read it once a year maybe.

Perhaps if you are more specific with your goals it could help. These days I just use a daily habit tracker where I tick if I performed an action towards my goal for the day. Other than that, I write my thoughts on an online blog just to release the cognitive load. But that’s intermittent. There are so many things that fall under “good habits” but we need to choose carefully what we want to spend our time on based on the reward/effort ratio. I have 2-3 max habits that I focus on completing daily at any given phase in my life. I may pick up journal-ling maybe when rest of my higher priority habits are more deeply ingrained / their goals achieved.

It has not improved my life. I tried it and found that it was a good way to process my thoughts and feelings. But exercise and therapy/coaching were better for that. Journaling in addition to the other efforts would be a very ineffective use of time. Journaling instead of them would be detrimental.

N=1.

I realized just over the weekend that the side project I’m working on is in fact a kind of journaling language. It has passed through a number of iterations, started out as a timeline maker (and still does that best), but at the end of the day is a spec for writing what happened when. Or indeed what you hope will happen in the future – I find it’s a good planning tool too.

I find myself actually journaling now that I don’t have to think about where I’m going to do it, or in the case of most note-taking apps, which note I should put my current thought in. Journal it first, and if it deserves to be somewhere else, move it later.

The project is https://markwhen.com

I journal daily, morning and end-of-(work)day. It’s interwoven with my daily planning so it looks more like a TODO list with personal comments than a plain journal.

For the benefits:
– Writing: I’m faster and clearer than before, and I continue to progress.
– Memory: When I feel unproductive at the end of the week, I look back at my entries. Most of the times, I have to recognize that I did more than I remembered at the moment.
– Structure: In the morning, it signals “work starts now”. At 4:30 PM, it means “put an end to the current tasks, and setup tomorrow for success”.
– Personal: It helps to process emotions and internal grumblings.

It took me a while to stop caring about journaling and actually start using my journal for /anything/. At first, I felt obligated to make an entry each day, fill all the fields, tick all the boxes, and be happy with the result. You don’t have to. It’s your journal, you can do whatever so make it work for you.

I’d say overall mostly yes. I had a few main goals when I started journaling late last year:

1. Help me better understand my feelings and where they come from

2. Help me plan things in my life at a higher level, so I’m not just living day to day. I find that writing generally helps me think more logically.

3. Make it possible for me to reflect back to almost any given day and understand what happened that day. Prior to journaling I’d get the feeling that days, weeks and even months and years could sometimes be a huge blur.

For me I’ve been able to mostly accomplish these goals.

I’m still having trouble with consistency, but I’m working on it. I like building things so to keep me motivated, I built my own app (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-journal-a-day/id1659288235). Doing so has somewhat helped me stay motivated and write.

I do a daily journal entry using Day One and it helps me think through whatever is on my mind. More often than not I’ll actually dictate my journals rather than write it. Maybe this is just an excuse for me to talk to myself lol.

Something I’ve been trying recently which seems quite useful is on Sunday nights I’ll reflect on the week that just passed and what I want to do for the week to come. At the end of it I put a list of action items, so I can look back at it thought out the week.

I started journaling in November 2019 using the Day One app on Mac. I haven’t missed a day. That’s 1273 days of consecutive journaling.

Has it changed me? Not really. It’s nice to look back and see what I wrote or pictures I took but that by itself isn’t life changing.

Why do I still continue to do it then? Mostly as I developed the habit and it’s automatic now. Every morning I make a new entry for the day when I get on the computer then I finish every day writing in it, adding pictures etc.

It’s a nice way to clear out my brain at the end of the day. I guess in some way maybe it helps me organise my thoughts at the end of the day. Also planning the next day (or few days) is quite helpful to do in the evening vs in the morning for the day ahead.

Having said all that I started journaling at an amazing time. I captured the few months building up to the pandemic and reading back on my entries in the first half of 2020 is pretty wild. For a while I captured headlines and data on cases and deaths which are quite shocking to read with hindsight.

The lockdowns are quite interesting too. I can see when I started to struggle with different aspects of the pandemic and how I managed those depressive episodes.

So while it hasn’t changed my life I would probably say it does give me something to look at and learn from to hopefully be better in the future. I guess you could argue that is a change although not quite what people generally mean when talking about life changing habits.

My guess is you’re asking if I feel journalling is worth it as you’re interested in doing it? I would say yes. Don’t do it expecting to change your life but it something I would suggest pretty much everyone do.

Looking back on happier or sadder times can be quite powerful in helping deal with any struggles of today. I have had a few health issues the past few years and being able to look back gives me a lot of positive mental energy when dealing with the next thing to come along. I can read and feel again how I felt during the harder times and track my progress even when things got harder for a while. This gives me the hope I often need when struggling in the present.

Hey there, fellow journaler! The way you describe it, you could be me. I also use DayOne. I started about a month after you and am on day 1,236. TBH, I think the streak feature is very motivating.

I say the same exact things to others about my experience. I love that it captures a snapshot of my life a truly unique period in US history. It captures my adventures jogging through the center of NYC busy streets during the lockdown, and all sorts of other adventures. I can tell you in reasonable detail every single notable thing about my last holiday trip, or any other place I’ve been.

I’ve also become the de-facto historian in my household. When my wife remembers something and wants to know a detail about it, I’m usually able to give at least a general summary of the experience.

In order to get over any resistance, I made a deal with myself that I could put as little or as much in as I want, and that I wouldn’t be too personal. I guess you could say it’s somewhat of an everyday travelog. It’s the first time in my life that I actually carried through with journalling.

I’ve also been able to pick out trends when I compare the data on my Whoop vs activities and meals on a certain day. I don’t always capture my meals, but I do often enough that it provides help when I’m trying to find a trend.

Here’s a really strange random trend I discovered: On nights where I eat burrito bowls from Chipotle, I get measurably more deep and REM sleep.

I could go on all day about the ways my journal has been useful. I’ll leave it there.

Edit: Just for fun, I send a link to this thread to my wife. She mistook your post as being from me at first. LOL

Hello! I can relate and agree to everything you said. Especially the “Family historian”. When my family all got together last summer for the first time since 2019 I lost track of the times I looked up things in my journal when the conversation went to “do you remember when … happened?”. I am originally from the UK so I also captured a lot of the Brexit stuff that happened from the start of 2020. Honestly it is crazy how much happened and that I captured so much of it.

Just like you this was the first time I stuck with journalling and to be honest I am not sure why it worked this time but not others. Perhaps maturity? 😀 Or perhaps it is the streak feature which is motivating like you said. I also went easy on myself not setting any hard-to-achieve goal of N words per day. While most days I write quite a detailed entry there are a few days where I only wrote two or three sentences as I wasn’t feeling it for whatever reason.

You make an excellent point regarding trends that I totally forgot to mention when posting earlier. I too have found quite a few trends, almost all health (or wellbeing) related. Things like how much better I felt on the days I did intermittent fasting. Or that having my coffee black first thing was much easier on my stomach than with milk (although I’m not lactose intolerant it certainly upsets my stomach if I have it in the first hour or two after waking up for reasons unknown).

These trends have led me to making changes that one could argue have been life changing as they have given me more energy, mental clarity or resolved long standing annoyances that I couldn’t pin point the origin of.

Sitting here thinking about journalling now I feel perhaps my initial call that it isn’t really life changing is perhaps not quite true. At least not totally. There are certainly a few small changes I have made that have improved my quality of life quite a bit and this has prompted me to add a todo for tomorrow morning to do a bit of analysis to see if there are any other trends I may have missed.

A nice thing about Day One is the tags/hashtags support. I started adding a bunch to entries almost every day to track things so sorting my entries is reasonably efficient.

One last thing I wanted to mention is didn’t bother with the template feature to begin with but I set some up a while back to prompt me to capture things like when I ate, how much exercise I did, how I felt that day, how well I slept, etc. It is amusing to look back and know exactly what I ate on some random day and especially helpful when you identify otherwise random things like your burrito bowl and quality of sleep!

Journaling has fundamentally changed my life in almost every measurable facet. It is the single habit I can point to that helped me accomplish things like in my personal life – stop biting fingernails, run a marathon, run the Boston marathon, be a more engaged Dad. It has also helped diagnose lots of professional patterns – good bosses, bad bosses, understanding that everyone has value and has flaws.

My approach is to read journal entries written on this date from previous years. For example, this morning, I read what I wrote on 5/16/20, 5/16/21, 5/16/22.

I wrote down my methodology here: https://mcook.fun/journaling

I use Telegram’s Saved Messages feature, put there anything I need to remember or anything noteworthy, and that’s it. That’s journaling for me. It helps me remember things. Is that journaling? Is there a need for me to do journaling other than what I am already currently doing?

Yes, I think journaling has improved my life.

What originally started as blog/newsletter fuel has become a way to offload thoughts. As I work through a new sense of identity being a father, it has helped lighten my mindset. By getting the bad/sad/unfortunate things “on paper” I feel like I am more equipped to take on the work day.

My technique is as simple as possible. I open a new Notion doc, start a 10 minute timer, and write until I hear the ding. If I could disable the backspace/delete key I would. The goal is just to write with no priority given to quality.

I have at least three different kinds of journals:

1. Workout journal – I write down want I did and what was the effect. Often trends physical trends emerge after weeks, months, or years.

2. Summary of the day journal – Whenever I can, I write a short summary of the day/week. I look back to help my memory.

3. Problem journal – If I have a specific, important problem, I dump everything into a single spot. It reduces rumination, slows down my thought process, provides perspective by seeing it externally, and often solutions organically emerge.

Not sure if journaling means writing down the events of the day in a specific manner or what.

But just to comment

I write a lot, I have many little apps… My short term memory seems to be shot so writing helps retain further. I gotta get better at joining all these things together and doing some inference/reminders… Just analyzing. And long term storage so I don’t lose the info. I remember writing as early as 2010s on OneNote but I also cringe at my past self, don’t really want to relive that. I was uninformed/closed off in my own bubble/delusional.

I also have for several years now been doing this “positives” thing and this idk if it helps. I don’t take it too seriously/just write something into it.

Writing does help me focus/prioritize/brain dump.

I’ve been using 5 minute journal for about 8? years.

I think the gratitude journaling has helped a lot. I started while working as a VC and basically needing to send rejections to about 800 companies a year. I noticed that I started to look for errors automatically, including when I got home from work. Gratitude in the morning and things that went well before bed seems to have helped my brain optimize for looking for good, instead of finding mistakes.

I recently started using penzu to actually journal. I mostly use it when I’m upset. It does help me calm down and also organize my thoughts before an argument (usually with my wife).

I’ve also been using the 5 minute journal on and off for 8? years. Its my tool to get on track if I ever feel emotionally vulnerable / unstable.

The act of sitting down and ruminating on what went well during the day, as well as planning each day for simple achievable goals has had a very calming effect on me.

Unfortunately I don’t seem to get much of it if I’m already happy and fulfilled – so I mostly stop journaling when I’m OK but resume if something is amiss.

I see most people here use apps for that. I think the crucial part of it is doing it with pen and paper. For me the biggest perks come from slowing down and taking a break from technology. Your computer or your phone are distraction machines.

I just use journaling as a way to converse with my brain, complain about what’s difficult and remind myself what’s important to me. Sometimes I analyze things that happened or will happen.

Helps when I’m overwhelmed.

Took up journaling a few years ago, because I was miserable.

Struggled to do it regularly, frequency dropped off. Less frequent entries meant longer entries, because I tried to keep up with what was happening. Later on I just journaled at important (read: unhappy, difficult) events. Even that dropped off. During all this, journaling just made me more miserable, because I couldn’t even do that minor unimportant thing properly.

So from my experience, don’t. Just another thing to worry and despair about.

YMMV, of course.

The human mind is the product of a brutal optimization function over a billion years old. That process of optimization has extended into the operation of the human mind itself. The human mind itself is an optimization machine. It can always imagine a better way to do things. Don’t let the fact that there is a better way to do a thing stop you from doing the thing. There is always a better way.

I’ve been journaling for more than 15 years. I don’t know if it changed me, probably not. I use it mostly in a braindump kinda way. I almost never read old entries. Sometimes, I search for stuff though and it’s interesting to read about it (for example, about milestones of my kids, but also themes that interest me).

If you want to get into the habit, here are a few tips:

– Remove friction as much as possible. I use Day One for Mac and iPhone, but started with a text editor. Don’t use templates, don’t setup anything complicated. Forget tagging or any kind of structure. You can optimize note-taking and journaling for two things: fast input, slow retrieval or slow input and fast retrieval. You certainly want the former, not the latter.

– Don’t beat yourself up about frequency. I have weeks where I journal more and months with zero entries.

– Write in a braindump-kinda way, just to get it off your chest. This is for you, not for an audience. It’s not even for you, because you probably won’t read it anyways. I mostly write staccato-style. Sometimes I use lists with one bullet point per sentence, because it helps to me braindump misc thoughts without a coherent structure.

– I don’t focus on “big thoughts” or “big insights”. Surprisingly, stuff I did that day, what I ate, people I know right now or hang out with, a movie I watched or a game I played is much more interesting later than having life-changing insights through journaling. So, if I read that my weight was 70kg in 2015 and now it’s 67kg, I find this a lot more interesting than some presumably philosophical big thought I think I might care about later. Big thoughts will stick to your mind anyways.

– I usually search for stuff like what year I have been on a particular vacation or when I was sick the last time or sometimes, when one of my kids said this or that for the first time.

– But: Sometimes, you find patterns. I sometimes are surprised that the idea of “start a blog” goes back for more than 10 years and I never did it. Make what you will with that information, but for me at least, it puts my own thoughts into perspective: I carry stuff a lot longer around than I’d think if you just asked me.

– As a small test: Do you ever read your old HN comments? Probably not. Journaling is similar. Writing stuff down helps, but can you really tell if participating in HN changes who you are?

it hasn’t. but i think that has to do with how little i tend to read em. the couple times i have read some journals it has provided some useful insight. but that’s it.

i journal in vim and push to git, 5y this year.