Anna Maria Richards
Because it Stimulates Creativity.
Creativity – Life Hacker also recommends journaling because research shows that it also stimulates creativity in humans. This is especially true for written creativity, so it helps a lot, e.g., me. Who knows how lame I would write if I did not practice for a few minutes every night how to describe (for me) crucial as precisely and (for me) as experience.
However, research shows that journaling also helps memory and inspires people to develop new ideas, even when nothing shaky has happened. Suppose one records a day that seems gray at first. In that case, it is easier to notice those tiny yet exciting, beautiful, or instructive moments during the description that is ultimately worth capturing.
Keeping a Diary Helps for Self-Knowledge.
Success – Harvard Business School students have observed that those who write diaries regularly perform 22% better than others. Of course, there is nothing here to prove that success is caused explicitly by journaling. Still, the explanation may be that whoever can keep a diary with constant diligence will carry more in the school with the same diligence.
Self-knowledge – And now comes an argument that is more important to me than the above three. The hardest lesson for me from 23 years of diary writing was how unreliable a person’s memory is. In our heads, the past is transcribed slowly – even if we remember what happened in the world differently and what we were like.
An eclectic personal example: three years ago, because of my partner’s work, it occurred to us that we could move to Sweden for two years. We were delighted, we went out, we came home enriched with incredible experiences, and overall it was a lottery five all the way. I also miss Sweden hard these days, so last time I thought I was nostalgic for one, I read the part of my diary when we first heard about the opportunity and excitedly prepared to move out.
It was quite a shock for me to face the post in which, as soon as the opportunity first arises, I write that I hope we do not get it because who wants to go up north in solitude and cold darkness. In retrospect, I did not remember that although I did not tell anyone about it, I was initially opposed to moving to Sweden. Luckily, I kept that to myself because I would have deprived ourselves of two beautiful years. In addition, of course, as the move approached and I learned the details, I was already in the mood.
So journaling helps to avoid rewriting history unnoticed in your head. I simply cannot imagine anything more instructive than when one reads the story of an old love or breakup from one’s diary. When writing and reading back a journal, one can get to know oneself like nothing else. I often remember what it would be like to break into an apartment and take my valuables. Taking away the TV, the wi-fi or the laptop would undoubtedly hurt. The costs would indeed be very severely affected, but there is only one irreplaceable value in my apartment: the 23 volumes of the 23-year-old diary. I hope that once they break in, they will not take it exactly.
Diary is also Suitable for Self-Discipline.
Self-Discipline – If you want to lose weight or improve your life or performance in any other area, it is a good idea to describe which day you have progressed (or just backward) in the matter. This part of the thing may have been ridiculed forever because of Bridget Jones, who keeps recording pounds, but experts still recommend it.
If we use a self-made diary to see how much we have lost/progressed over time, this experience of success will help us discipline ourselves in the future and inspire us to continue the work we have started. But mistakes are also worth noting, and they can help us not to make them again.
Expressing Yourself Feels Like Freedom.
Freedom – Maybe it is not that important to anyone else, but it feels perfect for me to come back to the diary every day to express myself in absolute freedom. Of course, I will open just as honestly at other times, e.g., in a conversation with a good friend, but the meditation-like space of diary writing is still different.
Nowadays, blogging is the most popular form of diary keeping. I am blogging it like an online diary where you can share your opinions about everything, even on some Online Slots at Admiral. Besides, even Facebook can be understood as a kind of diary writing, but I can assure everyone, it is an entirely different thing to write in such a way that one knows: no one will ever see this but the future myself. We involuntarily count on a public blog or a social site for someone else to read, see, so that is exactly what I think is worth writing a diary out of.
You can never, anywhere, feel as free as when you can scratch your feelings on a white sheet of paper without restriction with a cat scratch that is unreadable to others. Of course, I also tried blogging, but whoever listens to me keeps an offline diary, something he writes on paper with his hand, a pen.
Keeping up with the memories.
Traceability – And by the end, an insignificant but still funny advantage of logging: many disputes can be resolved with its help. Because there are questions that cannot be answered with any amount of giggling, and they can be easily debated at family gatherings, for example. Why did we come earlier in ’95 from Uncle’s wedding? Where did the class go on a trip to the third school? In what year were we first at the Szigeti Festival? You can easily see much of such discussions by flipping through old journal entries. This means that a diary is one of those items that can preserve memories. In addition, of course, it is no less attractive than I can always look at what I did on the same day one, five, ten, or even twenty years ago.
