The Ultimate Guide to Journaling

There is an enormous amount of research on the subject of journaling. A simple practice you can do that may hold significant benefits for your mental and physical well being. It's journaling. A recent study says journaling can ease those mental health challenges. Just a few minutes every day and just easy. Just write down three things you're grateful for. Honestly, it's pretty life changing. From creativity to learning to memory, to reframing the past to, to healing trauma to resolving relationships, to strategizing and solving big problems. In this video, I'm going to share with you a really powerful model about how you can look at journaling. And then I'm going to give you some really basic simple steps so that you can make journaling a more effective part of your life. Because if you're not journaling regularly, then you've kind of got mental and emotional cobwebs.

There's an idea that journaling even in the morning is kind of like spiritual windshield wipers. It just kind of cleans things up. And if you're not regularly getting those things out, then your mind is a lot more mucked up and muddled than you think. But also, if you're not regularly using your journal, you're actually missing out on a lot of creativity and a lot of what would be called subconscious breakthroughs. Also, you're missing out on a amazing tool for what would be called emotional regulation. Where you can heal your past, where you can resolve issues quickly, where you can become essentially a emotionally agile or antifragile. By the way, My name is Dr. Benjamin Hardy. I have a PhD in what's called organizational psychology. I've written many books, including Be youe Future Self now, which is a breakdown of all of the research on future self. I've also written 10x is easier than 2x, my third book with Dan Sullivan, written many other books. But more importantly, honestly, I've been journaling for about 15 years and I've come and I've filled out probably well over a hundred journals. And journaling was one of the most powerful things I did to change my life. I was actually serving a mission for my church, doing missionary and humanitarian service and I started journaling. And it was while journaling that I was able to let go of a lot of the enormous trauma and pain that I'd been through in my teenage years. From my parents divorce to my father experiencing a lot of challenges with addiction to just any and all things. I. I learned how to journal and learned how to do it in such a way that it healed my Past, but also I learned how to journal in such a way that my subconscious, they call it the whole idea of stream of consciousness writing, where I was learning more and more through journaling. And also to the point of Albert Einstein, imagination is more important than knowledge. I learned how to write in my journal such that I could imagine future scenarios and then watch as those scenarios manifested or came to be. Let me start by actually just showing you my screen. I'm going to show you a simplified model of identity and about time, because I want to show you how a psychologist would look at time. And this will help you to think about journaling in really effective ways. And then I'm just going to end with a bunch of just useful tidbits or strategies or just things that you can apply so that you can make journaling a powerful part of your life. Because if you do journal more often, but also if you do it more effectively, you'll heal a lot faster in your past. You'll transform your past. You'll actually do what I call mastering your past a lot more. Where you make your past a lot more user back then. But even, even your habits, your belief systems, and so it's really powerful to one. One very useful tool for mastering your past is simply to recognize and acknowledge and appreciate how different you are from your past self. And so you can do that at different time frames. You can, you can simply say, you know, how am I different from who I was 10 years ago? And then just simply write down all those ways. One very useful, simple technique is just by simply writing bullet points, we all can journal in our own ways. I actually prefer just writing with a pen and a pad. I don't need any frameworks or organizations. You can just kind of use prompts. One great thing is just to look at your past from different time frames and recognize and appreciate all the ways you're different from your past self. That's one thing you can do. And you can even do that on a daily timeframe. And I actually do that pretty regularly where I look back and I say, how am I different from who I was a month ago? How am I different from who I was seven days ago? How am I different from who I was 24 hours ago? What do I now know that I didn't know yesterday? What important progress have I made and what important things have I learned? Even if my whole day didn't go very well in terms of what I planned for, maybe everything seems to, quote, unquote, fall apart. But again, I, in the present, get to determine the meaning of the past. My past doesn't determine who I am in the present. This is an agency approach, but it's also an acknowledgement that you own your past, you own your experience, you own how you frame that experience. And a huge part of therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and honestly just building emotional development, emotional intelligence, is learning how to reframe. Reframing is really about recontextualizing. The context is what determines the meaning of the content. And so when you learn how to reframe or recontextualize your past, even the last 24 hours, and you get really flexible at seeing the same thing from new angles, new frames, and choosing those frames so that you have effective content, your past is either viewed as useful or not useful. It can be an asset or a liability. If it's an asset, then it's something you can use and learn from and that you're better now as a result. This fits with the framework from Nassim Taleb of fragile versus anti fragile. If you believe that time goes this way, that's a very fragile approach because you believe you've got no agency or control over the past. You've got no ability to frame or reframe or gather new information, new meaning from it. Instead, you're just simply the byproduct of it. That's a very fragile approach. Whereas an antifragile approach is, is that no matter what happened, you're now better. Things that are anti fragile always get better, even if things are volatile or challenging. That fits with post traumatic growth. And so you get to choose all the ways in which you've learned and then what I would recommend you do. As an example, if you're just writing down what are the most important things I learned today? Or how am I different from who I was yesterday? You can simply look at your past and just say, these are, this is what I now know, this is what I've learned, this is how I'm better. And that then turns your past into something useful. It turns today and how you frame it into something valuable, something you can use, something you're grateful for, something you see as valuable. And now you're taking ownership of your experiences rather than believing that your experiences simply have ownership of you. This puts you in the driver's seat of your experiences rather than in the passenger seat of your experiences. This is also how you can become psychologically flexible, where you don't become so rigid and dogmatic about how things are or how things have to be. You can frame, reframe, and learn new things and constantly turn your past into an increasing asset that's happening for you, not to you. But also if your past is an asset, then it's continuing to pay you and improve your present and your future. And so you're really grateful for it. So with this insight in mind, I'll share with you a few principles for journaling, and then I will go to the future and how you can use journaling to get really connected to your future self, to get your future self vivid. And there's a lot of research about future self. And then ultimately how you can use your future self to filter and help you make really powerful decisions in the present so that you can raise your standards, achieve your goals a lot faster, but just a little bit more on the past. So a few key insights are this. First off, it's useful to not need to journal for very long. I like the book essentialism by Greg McEwen and how he, he started out just journaling for like no more than five minutes. I think that that's a really good place to start, is just journal, maybe with one question. I actually think it's great to journal at the end of every day. There's a lot of research that shows that rather than inputting at the end of the day, and also this connects with inputting at the beginning of the day, rather than inputting, which is what happens when you're watching content or scrolling or like watching social media, if you're staring at your phone and you're putting information into your head, that's inputting. So rather than inputting at the end of the day, it's actually better to output. And so at the end of every day, just take five minutes, no more than five minutes, to just simply frame your day, because you get to choose if your past is framed in a positive or a negative way. But how you frame your past, even today, is going to shape what you expect and what you'll create for tomorrow. And this is a really important point, is that how you frame your past is going to shape what you expect for your future. And so if you believe that your past is a problem or it's negative or that it shouldn't be this way because the past led you to being here and it wasn't the past you should have had. If you feel that way, then how can you expect anything to be different in the future? So at the end of the day, you want to ultimately take ownership about how you frame the past. And you do want to frame it in a positive way in a Useful way. And even with gratitude, there's a lot of research that shows that simply by writing down three things you're grateful for at the end of the day, for that day, not only will you actually be happier as a person, but you will literally sleep better. There's a lot of research on this. You will be happier and sleep better by simply writing down three things you're grateful for from that day. Now, I think you could go a little deeper than gratitude, although gratitude, trust me, there's. Gratitude's about one of the most powerful things in the world. But you can go a little deeper where in that five minute journaling session, you can reflect on not only what you're grateful for, but genuinely how are you different from who you were 24 hours ago? What do you now know that you didn't know before? What important things did you learn? And just give yourself five minutes, no more than five minutes. And by writing those things down, something really powerful is going to happen. First off, you're framing your past in a specific and in an intentional and in a way of you. You actually are the one shaping this thing, rather than you just forget about it, move on, and you're the byproduct of your past. No, you actually are shaping what today means, what its uses were. And you're writing those down. You're making it explicit. By explicit, I mean you're literally writing them down, but you're also choosing the frame. It's kind of like a telescope or even a kaleidoscope. Like you get to choose how you twist and shape and kind of the framing and the nuances and the angles and the nuggets that you choose to pull from the day. And then you write those down. And then something really powerful happens while you're asleep. When you're asleep and you go through the different stages of sleep, not only does your brain synthesize and put together and gather all of what you learned during that day, but also as you go deeper into the REM stages, your brain actually lets go of neural connections. Neurons that fire together, wire together, right? So as you learn new things and make new connections, your brain is, is ultimately learning and building that schema, building your view of the world. But also as you're learning and as you frame the past in a certain way and make it explicit, your brain also experiences unlearning, where you let go of connections you once held, assumptions or views or beliefs or just even views of yourself. You let those go and your brain literally disconnects things. Neural connections that no Longer fit. And so your model, when you wake up, you have this deep new model. So to basically summarize mastery of your past, firstly, you get to choose the different timeframes that you view your current versus your past self. And that even in a year from now, because your future self will be a different person than you, your future self will look at past events differently than you do now. Because they're a different person, they've got a different perspective, and the past is always reconstructed in the present. And so because your future self will be a different person in a different situation, as they think back on different scenarios or even just the meaning of things, they'll have a different meaning. But also you're not the same person as your past self. This is a super crucial insight. And that who you are now is different from who you were 10 years ago. And it's really useful to define those differences. And you can do that, you know, for the last 10 years, you can say, how am I different from who I was a year ago, three months ago, a month ago, last week? How am I different from who I was yesterday? And by recognizing and appreciating those, you get to actually clearly define the ways in which you're growing and learning as a person, which is going to only solidify that learning even more. Also, taking no matter what happened and turning it into learning lessons, turning your past into an asset so that everything happens for you rather than happening to you, that then gives you agency of your past, and it turns your past into an asset, something that helps you be antifragile so that no matter what happens, you are actually getting better as a result, and that your present and future have lots more potential because of what happened, no matter what happened. That's a lot more powerful approach to learning and to experience. All right, so let's quickly jump to the future. And I'm going to give you some really cool insights, some research ideas, but also some tangible strategies you can use in applying your journal to imagining your future self. Getting connected to your future self. Psychologists call it vividness. You want to have a vividness towards your future, but it's also very important to realize that, that your views of your future are directly impacting your experience in the present. You can't disconnect your experience in the present from your future. This was one of the big insights that Dr. Viktor Frankl talked about in the book Man's Search for Meaning. Viktor Frankl was one of the people who was a Jewish psychiatrist actually in the concentration camps during World War II. The Nazi concentration camps. And his whole book, Man Search for Meaning, which is one of the most important books of the last 100 years, talks all about how in the concentration camps if people lost a connection to their future, if they lost hope and a sense of purpose for their future, then the present became too bleak and unbearable. There was no hope, there was no light at the end of the tunnel, and as a result there became no meaning. And this is a really crazy insight that you can't have meaning in the present without hope and purpose in the future. That's a really crazy insight. But one of the things that Frankl did so he, he knew that and he would see and he could even predict with extreme accuracy when people were about to die because they did lose that sense of hope towards their future, they stopped having a goal towards their future, they stopped believing in their future. And so because of that, then the present, like going through all the, the terrible stuff they were going through, it, it had no purpose, There was no reason for it. It's kind of like going to school, but knowing that you get nothing out of it. Like, why would you do it? It would, it would make it intolerable. There's a great quote that basically says that vision without work is daydreaming, but work without vision is drudgery. And so if you are working but there's no purpose, there's no vision, then that work, it has no meaning and there's no use in it. And so it becomes toxic and painful and you're not actually probably doing the right work, but also you're not turning that work into a vision. And there's a lot of research on deliberate practice in psychology, which is that you can't really grow and improve something systematically to the point of becoming an expert at it without having a specific goal. You have to have a goal not only to be in a flow state, because that gives you framework for focusing, but you can't also be effective with what you're doing without having a goal to work towards. And also to Victor Frankl's point, you can't have meaning in the purpose, nor can you have resilience, or you can't be anti fragile without having a goal to work towards. This is why Viktor Frankl always quoted over and over and over from Nietzsche, when the why is strong enough, you can bear almost any how. And so what he meant is that when you have a goal or a purpose to fulfill in your future, then you can bear almost anything and even find joy and meaning in the present. And so I'm saying all of this to simply say that how you view your future is going to directly impact not only what you focus on in the present, but how you feel in the present. And whether you can be resilient or antifragile, or whether or not you have no meaning and whether everything is just drudgery and whether everything's painful. You've got to have a future. There's actually a lot written about this in Dr. Gilbert's book, stumbling Upon Happiness. Human beings are very unique to other animals and plants and other species because we can imagine infinite futures and that those futures, ultimately we can have hope, deep hope and commitment towards the, towards those futures. And we can also make choices about which futures we choose. There's a lot of research on this. It's actually called prospection. And it's really one of the most unique aspects of what makes human beings intelligent is that we're intelligent in that we can be intentional and we can use goals to, to ultimately make big plans. You can't, for example, fly to the moon without the goal to do so, but that goal shapes a lot of innovation and process. You can't build a house on accident. You don't just randomly stumble upon a house. You have the goal and the blueprint, which is more of the mental creation that precedes the physical creation. So now back to this model and then I'll just give you a couple powerful insights on how to get connected to your future self, how to make it vivid, how to make it powerful, and how to journal on a daily basis in such a way that you can transform your life and ultimately shift to the identity of your future selves and have much more powerful and effective days. So check this out. This is again back to the sequential way of looking at time, where the past drives the present and the present drives the future. This is a non effective way or an ineffective way to look at time. From a psychology standpoint, it's also an ineffective way for making decisions. Rather than letting the present determine the meaning of the future, you ultimately want the future to determine the meaning and the direction of the present. So if you really look at it this way, this is really powerful. Rather than time flowing forward, a powerful approach is actually that time can operate backwards. Rather than having the past drive the present and the present to drive the future, which is the typical approach, which is the sequential approach, a nonlinear and more powerful and more useful approach is to first off, imagine your future self. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Dr. Gilbert and others say that we don't know our future selves simply because we don't think about it. You ultimately want to go from thinking to feeling to knowing. Thinking is about imagining your future self, getting it vivid, using what Hal Hirschfeld talks about in his book. And Hal Hirschfeld wrote this great book called your future self. A lot of great research there about getting connected to your future self emotionally, having empathy towards your future self. Just like you'd have empathy towards your past self. There's no reason to be mad at your past self, but you want to have empathy towards your future self and think about who they are and what they care about. And you also want to take creative control over your future self and then have your future self be the driver of your decisions in the present. Rather than doing what current version of you want to wants to do, you actually do what future version of you wants to do. And that's ultimately going to lead you to making the most powerful decisions and having the most powerful priorities. Because most of what we're doing right now, most of how you spend your day today, probably at least 80%, using the 8020 principle, is irrelevant to your future self. Almost everything you're doing today has no connection to your future self because you're not connected to your future self. And so the key point here is, is that you want to get really imaginative about your future self. You want to, you want to think about your future self, and ultimately you want to have empathy and compassion and friendship towards your future self and get emotionally connected to your future self. And ultimately you want to define who your future self is and what, and, and really what matters to them. But also get advice from your future self. What advice would they give to you? And the main thing here is, is that you want your future to be the driver of what you do in the present. And you do want your future to continuously get bigger and bigger. There's a great quote from one of my friends and colleagues, Dan Sullivan, who we wrote the books with. He said that the only way to make your present better is by making your future bigger. And there's a lot of research on this, I've got many videos on this, about how if your goals are much bigger, you're going to actually have a lot simpler of a life. Because bigger goals force you to be a lot more honest about everything you're doing. They force you to find the few things that really work and let go of the 80% of things that don't. So now, just to give you a few bullet points on how you can apply this Idea to getting really connected to your future self and getting vivid. One is, is just giving yourself the time. So as an example, your brain is really creative first thing in the morning. And so rather than inputting in the morning, just like you don't want to input at night when you wake up, get yourself hydrated, drink a bunch of water, put yourself into a new environment. There's a lot of research that shows by changing your environment, you actually become a lot more alert and mindful. I like having a quiet, sacred space. For me, it's actually my car, just going out to my car and then without, you know, to the idea of pre input. This comes from Josh Waitzkin, who wrote the book the Art of Learning pre input, meaning before you start opening and scanning your phone output, dump your thoughts. This is to the idea of the spiritual windshield wipers, which I think Julia Cameron, who wrote the Artist's Way, and she even talks about the idea of morning pages, which is just simply get in your journal and just start writing things down. And you don't have to overly make it complicated. You can honestly start anywhere. The challenge that most people have is just the jumping off point. So just simply start writing. Write about, hey, here's the day, here's what I'm up to, here's what I'm focused on today. And just give yourself some space to write. If you want some prompts, you could just say, who's my future self three years from now, or one year from now, or ten years from now? But ultimately you do want to give yourself a time frame. I actually prefer to. I mean, I have a future self that is 10, 20 years out. But mostly I'm focusing on a future self that's five years or less out, even three years or less out. And I'm thinking about, who is that future self? Who do I want to be? What matters to them? What do I want my future self to look like? What is the context of my future self? This goes to vividness. You want to really make it situational. You want to view your future self in. In situations and context. What are they up to? What matters to them? And just simply write it down. I think a really useful frame as well comes from Jim Collins, who wrote the book Good to Great. And he said, if you have more than three priorities, you have zero. So one thing that's super helpful for me is simply writing down the three priorities that matter most to my future self. What are the three things in three years from now that are absolutely crucial? And if those are the three Things that are absolutely crucial, how can I take those to their highest level, really elevate those priorities then from there, once you get connected to your future self, once you define your future self and your core priorities and what those look like to your future self, you can then use that frame to make decisions here in the present, to set goals in the present. For example, three month goals of here's what I'm going to focus on. Here's how I'm going to strip out most of the things that don't matter and focus on what's important, not on what's urgent. I can focus on my own game and my future selves game, not my past selves games or not my friends games. There's one more really important thing I will say, and that's this, that the past is simply a draft and so is the future. And that you don't have to be dogmatic or rigid about those. Even tomorrow, when you're looking at your past and looking at the last 30 days or the last 10 years, you'll look at it from a different perspective because it's the present, the shapes, the meaning of the past. And so don't be overly dogmatic about how you view these things. You actually can just continuously redraft, draft, redraft the past and continuously draft and redraft the future. And as you get clear and more connected to your future self, you'll operate a lot better and more powerfully in the present. So I hope that helps. Definitely don't overcomplicate it. Start small. Start with just five minutes. End of the day, focus on framing your day as a positive, as a win. Choose three things that you're grateful for or three things you learned. Or focus on ways in which you're different from your past self. And then rather than inputting at night, you want to just output. Just do it for a few minutes in the morning. Pre input. Rather than jumping straight into your smartphone and being reactive, actually get yourself into a quiet, private space and just write maybe for 10, 15 minutes. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten insights or inspiration or ideas by just simply giving myself the space. And back to Josh Waitzkin. He talks about subconscious breakthroughs. Like your subconscious has been doing a lot of work while you were going to sleep. Even Thomas Edison said, never go to bed without a request to your subconscious. And so your brain has been doing a lot of learning. It's been making new connections and solidifying some of the things you've learned. It's Also let go of things and disconnected dots that used to really matter to your former self. And so by simply writing those things down, you can make the unconscious a lot more conscious. Also, if you're getting more and more connected to your future self, there's an idea in psychology called selective attention, which is that you can only see what your brain is looking for. And so by identifying and clarifying and connecting to your future self, you're a lot more likely to see ways of getting there. You're a lot more. A lot more likely of finding pathways of getting there and moving towards those goals. I think a really, really key point of all of this, and this is my last thought, is, is that, and this fits with what Dr. Daniel Gilbert said in his TED talk, the psychology of your future self. He basically said that the person you are right now is as present and fleeting as the present moment. And so what this means is that you are not your present self and you're definitely not your past self. And so what that means to me is, is that you're actually more your future self than anything else. You're definitely not your present self. If you have a fixed mindset, then you think you are your present and your past self. But if you have a growth mindset, then you actually are a lot more identified as your future self. And you know that your present self is a temporary, fleeting snapshot. And that tomorrow you'll be different. Tomorrow you'll be more informed. Tomorrow you'll be less ignorant. And so using Brene Brown's language, you'll be less focused on trying to be right, and you'll be more interested in trying to get it right. And if you're trying to get it right, then you're a lot more open to learning, a lot more open to new experiences, and you are a lot more flexible. So I hope this was helpful. This is one of those things that just the more you do it, the better you get at it. And there is no right or wrong way to journal. It's just simply a practice that you get better and better at. I've gone through so many journals. In other videos, I'll share five questions that I always ask myself at the beginning of every journal. But I think it's just a place where you can ask yourself questions, continue to draft and redraft your goals. For example, lately I'm pursuing impossible goals. And so I've thought about what are my impossible goals over the next three months or even for the next week. And it's just a fun place for you to think, to strategize, to again frame and reframe and and just to clarify you, you want to approach it from a play doh perspective, like where you're like, you can shape and like sculpt it and you know it's, it's just something your past and your future are tools, put it that way. Your past is a tool that's either helping or hindering you and your future is a tool that's either helping or hindering you. It's not about right or wrong. It's about helpful or unhelpful. So I'm Dr. Benjamin Hardy. I hope you enjoyed this. If you haven't yet done it yet, please grab 10x is easier than 2x, my third book with Dan Sullivan or even be your future self now, my solo book that I published in 2022, all about the research on future self. Please like and subscribe to the channel. Have a beautiful day. See you.