Journaling is an important tool for all successful people. How to keep a personal diary

What associations arise in your head when you hear the word “diary”?

I’m sure it’s either something to do with school, or with romantic girls furtively writing poems in a notebook under their pillow. Meanwhile, keeping a personal diary can be useful not only for schoolchildren and writers, but also for you. Moreover, it can really . Below you will find six reasons why you should start journaling your life daily.

In our digital times, when the tools for recording information are undergoing a real revolution, the forms of keeping a diary can be very different and largely depend on your preferences. Someone may want to record video or audio clips for this, others will prefer to use one of the many special programs or, others will remain faithful to a good paper diary and pen.

No matter what tools you use, the main thing is strict adherence to two principles that have remained unchanged since the days of candles and goose feathers. Firstly, the diary must be personal, that is, inaccessible to a wide circle of people, and secondly, you must be extremely honest with yourself, otherwise it all loses all meaning.

So how can you benefit from journaling?

How do you really feel?

A journal can help you recognize and articulate your feelings that are usually hidden deep inside. Modern life often has such a pace that a person rushes like a horse at a race, ignoring his emotions and sensations. As a result, we have constant stress and mental breakdowns. You will now have legitimate time for self-reflection, giving you a deeper and more realistic view of yourself, your life and your work.

Point of view

We are bombarded with a barrage of information from all sides, which contains dozens of very different opinions on various topics. The only trouble is that these are all other people's opinions. What do you personally think? Do you have time to articulate your views on the important topics of the day?

Let off some steam

Sometimes there really are difficult days. You are frustrated, embarrassed, defeated, angry, confused. It may even be that you cannot talk to someone close to you about it. Keeping everything inside will drive you crazy. Get your emotions out on paper. Then read it and smile.

Life is a great thing!

We read and hear many fascinating stories about different people. Why not write a best-selling book called The Story of My Life? Imagine that your diary will be published after... well, sometime later, and try to fill it with such events that future readers cannot tear themselves away. This is a great way to make your life more interesting and deep.

Hello my Name Is…

Yes, do you really know who you are? Are you sure of your desires and goals? Get to know your real self. Many people are so intertwined with job and family obligations that for them submitting an annual report and buying a fur coat for their wife can overshadow their actual dreams. It's time to sit down and think (and be sure to write down) about your actual aspirations. And a lot, a lot, carefully, but strictly, cross out from your life.

Message

Imagine that you were rummaging through the attic and found your father's personal diary. You drop everything and, unable to tear yourself away, flip through page after page until the evening. Here he is meeting your mother... here is your birth... now he is worried about work... complaining about his health... Can you imagine?

So why are you depriving your children of these sensations? They need to know about you and what you really were like.

Do you keep a diary?

Constantly keeping a diary allows you to understand yourself, understand your own desires and analyze your mistakes. When a lot of thoughts are collected in your head, it is best to throw them out on paper. By recording events that occur during the day in a personal diary, a unique opportunity arises to carefully analyze the mistakes, actions and deeds committed. You can draw a conclusion about how correctly you acted under the circumstances. In general, solid advantages.

10 main points about the importance of a personal diary

So, to understand why you should keep a diary and write down all your thoughts, actions and plans there, you should study the main benefits of this activity.

A personal diary allows you to achieve your goals.

All plans or desires must be written out in detail on paper. An unwritten goal can be forgotten over time, distracted by other activities, or pushed into the background due to circumstances. And the written goal is sure to be firmly fixed in the mind and becomes a guideline for movement in life. The brain independently begins to look for all possible ways to achieve its plans. Some scientists compare this behavior of the brain to the operation of an autopilot on an airplane. If you ask people who were unable to achieve the desired result, whether their final goal was written down on paper, they will answer that it did not. Conversely, many people who get what they want always record their thoughts in a personal diary. Ask them why to keep a diary, and you will hear a whole string of reasons. Writing down desires on paper in most cases guarantees success.
Helps you lead a conscious life.

By recording their thoughts, comments or observations daily in a diary, people get the opportunity to look at themselves from the outside after some time. This allows you to think about your lifestyle, analyze its correctness and your sense of purpose. We can forget a lot, such is human nature. The diary will tell you. Are you living the way you previously wanted? Are you doing what you planned? Or are you “bogged down” in everyday problems, difficulties at work and are not at all striving for what you really wanted?
A personal diary will save ideas

All people are visited from time to time. But if they are not written down on paper, they are lost and forgotten. To prevent this from happening to you, write down all your brilliant thoughts in a diary. Even those ideas that seem unrealizable today can “shoot” tomorrow. You don’t want to forget about them tomorrow, do you?
A personal diary disciplines

If you write down in a diary all the things you plan to do in the near future, then the likelihood of doing them increases significantly. The point here is not only that you will not forget about them. You can rank the tasks recorded in your diary according to the degree of importance for you, and there you can develop a plan for their implementation.
The diary teaches you to express your thoughts competently and clearly.

If you are disciplined, good with ideas and achieving goals, and still don’t understand why keeping a diary, what exactly this activity will give you, then you should pay attention to this point. Keeping a personal diary is a kind of story about the life of one person. You become a writer who improves your skills every day. This way of expressing thoughts motivates you to make your story better and more interesting.
Allows you to learn from your mistakes

By looking at the events and actions described in the diary, you can look at them from a different perspective. In this sense, a diary is a powerful transformational tool. You should use your experience in the future to prevent similar mistakes.
Strengthens self-confidence

The question of why many people keep diaries is very relevant today. Many of them become more self-confident over time, analyzing the past, changing the future, and understanding themselves. To do this, just open the notes made several years ago and read the recorded thoughts. This is an effective way to understand how much you have grown in a particular area, how much your attitude towards certain issues has changed. And an analysis of a child’s personal diary can not only charge you with energy and positive emotions after reading touching “problems,” but also find an absolutely non-comical solution to critical situations in adult life.
Increases the efficiency of actions

To understand why other people keep diaries, try writing down on paper all your daily experiences for a month. After reading these posts after a while, you will notice how much wiser and more experienced you have become. Emotions poured out onto paper, ideas written down, and goals written step-by-step in a personal diary help you structure your life and act more effectively.
Relieves negative emotions

It's no secret that all positive thoughts written in a diary acquire special power. Thus, keeping a personal diary allows you to get rid of sadness, envy or anger. If you have accumulated a lot of worries during the day, you should not throw them out on your loved ones. You just need to start a personal diary and write down your thoughts there. Share your experiences with your diary, this will help not only to avoid scandals, but also to understand the problem.
Personal diary - tutorial

Answer all your questions. If you decide to keep a personal diary, then try to concentrate on what really matters to you in life. It's no secret that the beginning of a personal diary rarely coincides with its middle. Your thoughts and goals change and become clearer. You develop, allow yourself to look at your life from the outside. Try to achieve the results you deserve. Teach yourself to live, think and feel correctly.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that any beginning of a personal diary is a modest attempt to write down your actions and plans on paper. But over time, this behavior will become a habit and the notes will become more sensual and meaningful. From banal descriptions of events you will move on to an in-depth analysis of situations. This will help in completely unexpected life situations. Give it a try.

Right now, in different parts of the world, a huge number of people are writing something in their personal diaries. Someone may be crying and writing with a trembling hand about an unfulfilled dream, while someone is smiling and with a slight blush on their cheeks talking about a successful first date. Someone tries to remember every second of the past day, every task completed, while someone, tired and sleepy, puts their last strength into a couple of lines about the sweet girl who brought a letter to the office today. But why do they all do this? Why keep a personal diary? What's the point of this?

Secondly, a personal diary is the best psychologist. Even if we cannot write everything, we will definitely think about it. You can find a way out of even the most difficult situations, and a diary helps a lot with this. Having thought about everything that is happening, talking about everything in the diary, in the end we are able to make some kind of decision. We don’t always have the opportunity to speak out, and this is very important. If you keep everything to yourself, in the end, you can lead yourself to a nervous breakdown and acquire several types of psychological disorders at once. Do we need it? We should never forget that “everything we are is the result of our thoughts.”

And finally, fourthly, a personal diary – our tears. It is not for nothing that I singled out this reason for the existence of personal diaries separately from the psychological diary. How much suffering, how many emotions we sometimes experience while writing a personal diary. All our tears remain on the pages of a notebook or small notebook, they remain in absolutely all words, in every letter, in every comma or period. These are tears of joy, sadness, fear, resentment, happiness, anger and many other feelings. There is no need to be afraid of anything, because if a person is honest with himself, he can be honest and open with other people. And this is my last answer to the question of why keep a personal diary.

Thus, I came to the conclusion that a personal diary can be different, its content and type depend only on its owner. I said a lot, so, for sure, someone perceived it as reality, someone as naive stupidity, someone even considered it empty nonsense. And all conclusions will be partly correct. After all, we are different, everyone has their own thoughts and their own worldview. This means that keeping a personal diary will not be interesting or important for everyone.

Keeping a diary can significantly improve your well-being: sleep and blood pressure normalize, the immune system begins to function better, even wounds heal faster.

Surprisingly, improving your well-being by keeping a diary is not just psychosomatic. This activity truly improves the health of those who engage in it. According to Dr. James Pennebaker, a psychologist and leading expert on expressive writing, journaling helps strengthen immune cells called T cells. Thanks to this, mood improves and social activity increases. It also has a beneficial effect on the quality of close relationships.

So what is journaling?

This is the combination of personal reporting based on facts with the exploration of one's inner experiences, sometimes irrational, but always important.

The point of keeping a diary is not only to organize your thoughts - after all, you can simply think about them carefully, and this will also bring certain benefits. When keeping a diary, it is the act of writing down thoughts that brings the greatest results.

When you take notes, the left, rational hemisphere of your brain is working. While it is busy, the right hemisphere can do what it does best: create, anticipate and feel. Keeping a diary removes all psychological blocks and allows you to use all the capabilities of our brain to better understand ourselves and the world around us.

Already intrigued? Then the following 8 tips will help you master it in no time.

1. Use pen and paper

The modern world is all about keyboards and touch screens. But when it comes to journaling, regular pen and paper have more advantages.

Writing stimulates the reticular activating system, the area of the brain that filters and brings to the forefront the information we focus on.

Writing by hand has additional benefits. This keeps us from editing our own thoughts. Although many people in their 20s and 30s have lost the muscle memory of handwriting and may find it slow and awkward, it won't be long before you feel comfortable writing by hand again.

2. If you don't like writing by hand, find a suitable tool.

Perhaps, after trying to write by hand, you will realize that this option is not suitable for you. There's nothing wrong with that.

Luckily, there are a huge variety of options available today. Turn to technological analogues. Both standard editors (Word from Microsoft or Pages from Apple) and more minimalistic solutions like Ommwriter are suitable. Perhaps you prefer touch screens. In general, look for the most convenient solution for yourself.

3. Set a limit

Previously, people set themselves a limit on the amount of writing, for example, 3 pages every day. But experts agree that a more effective solution when keeping a diary is to set a time limit.

Rationally consider how much time per day you can allocate to this activity in your busy schedule. Even if it's only 5 minutes at first.

Time limits help people focus on a specific goal when they start journaling. Seeing 3 blank pages in front of you can be difficult, and the matter will end before it even begins. And the time limit will not seem like an ordeal.

4. You don't have to be Shakespeare

Most aspiring writers (whether they're writing a journal entry, an article for a popular magazine, or a lengthy novel) tend to be misled into thinking that everything they write must be deep and sensual. And when you start keeping a diary with such a delusion, you can be sure that it will lead to failure.

Such activities are directed outward, at others, but you should keep a diary for yourself. True depth appears naturally, spontaneously, even by accident. Pretentiousness occurs when people deliberately try to appear smarter.

Shakespeare was a great writer because of his natural talent and careful study of human nature. But what's good for him doesn't have to be good for you. You don't have to show off your literary talent. You just need to write.

Keeping a diary will help bring to the fore information that is stored just deeper than consciousness. Let it pour out.

5. Don't edit

One of the purposes of journaling is to explore areas of your mind that you may not want to explore. Diary entries are not articles. No one will check your spelling, grammar, punctuation or content structure. When you edit, you become thoughtful and focus on your writing rather than your thoughts.

The essence of journaling is to write without thinking. By thinking, we interfere with our intuition, and therefore the whole meaning of the diary is lost. Journaling can help us explore ways we may not consciously discover. We can find extremely interesting topics if we stop thinking for a while.

6. Journal in the same place every day.

You don't have to lock yourself in a secluded ivory tower to write down your thoughts. However, having a specific place where you write your personal journal will encourage you to take better introspective notes.

Let it be an attractive place, where it is cozy, where there are things that inspire you, where you can see, touch or smell them: flowers, sentimental photographs, memorabilia or pleasant drinks - your choice.

7. Leave room for content.

Before you start your journal, skip the first two or three pages.

As you re-read, highlight notes or thoughts that you consider important, mark the page numbers or the date of writing, and then put them at the very beginning of the diary. This is how the content gradually develops, thanks to which you can easily find important records. This helps a lot when you encounter difficulties. You can look at how you have faced problems in the past that seemed insurmountable, but which you were eventually able to overcome.

8. Keep your diary away from prying eyes

Find a safe and secure place for your journal. For this activity to be truly effective, you must feel as free as possible and write down things that you cannot tell even your best friend.

A personal diary is not a letter to another person. This is not a document by which others should judge you. Want to write a book? Fine. Write a book. The diary is just for you alone. If what you write may hurt the feelings of others or harm your reputation, destroy the diary or hide it in a safe place.

Remember that you are writing only for yourself.

Michael Grothaus

Writer, independent journalist. Founder and CEO of SITU Scale.

I have been running a personal account for many years. Twelve to be exact. When I tell people that I keep a diary, some begin to think that these are some kind of work-related notes. Others imagine a teenage version in the spirit of: “Dear diary! Now I feel...” And that’s all.

When I first started journaling, the first page was a real pain. But today, journaling is one of my favorite parts of my day: writing down my thoughts makes me feel better both physically and mentally.

Surprisingly, improving your well-being by keeping a diary is not just psychosomatic. This is really a matter for those who deal with it. According to Dr. James Pennebaker, a psychologist and leading expert on expressive writing, journaling helps strengthen immune cells called T cells. Thanks to this, mood improves and social activity increases. It also has a beneficial effect on the quality of close relationships.

Most studies of expressive writing involve measures of physical health to track changes. As a result of numerous scientific experiments, it became known that thanks to keeping a diary, the immune system begins to function better, blood pressure normalizes, stress improves, and stress decreases. After several months of keeping a diary, people begin to see doctors less often. Other studies have found that this activity promotes faster wound healing and greater mobility among people with arthritis. And the list goes on.

So what is journaling? This is the combination of personal reporting, based on facts, with the study of one’s own, sometimes irrational, but always important.

giphy.com

There are weeks when I write every day, and sometimes I go a whole month without writing a single word. The point of keeping a diary is not only to organize your thoughts - after all, you can simply think about them carefully, and this will also bring certain benefits. When keeping a diary, it is the act of writing down thoughts that brings the greatest results.

When you take notes, the left, rational hemisphere of your brain is working. While it is busy, the right hemisphere can do what it does best: create, anticipate and feel. Keeping a diary removes all psychological blocks and allows you to use all the capabilities of our brain to better understand ourselves and the world around us.
Maud Purcell, psychotherapist, writing expert

Already intrigued? I think yes. But maybe you're like me 12 years ago, when I didn't know where to start. Therefore, I offer the following 8 tips that will help you master the art of journaling in no time.