Writing a diary is an old activity that has been mainly practiced by teenagers. However, writing a diary can have multip purposes besides remembering your hottest gossips. Writing down your thoughts can bring focus to your life and help you remember stuff that’s really important. Also, it can develop certain skills like creativity, self-knowledge, and even self-knowledge.
Creativity
We recommend journaling firstly 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 much lamer I would write if I didn’t practice for a few minutes every night how to describe things that are important as precisely and as experience. But research shows that journaling also helps memory and inspires people to come up with new ideas, even when nothing shaky has happened. If one records a day that seems gray at first, it is easier to notice those tiny, yet exciting, beautiful, or instructive moments during the description that is ultimately worth capturing.
Success
Harvard Business School students have observed that those who write diaries regularly perform 22% better than those who don’t Of course, there is nothing here to prove that success is specifically caused by journaling, but the explanation may be that whoever is able to keep a diary with constant acticity 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 a bunch of years of diary writing was how unreliable a person’s memory is. In our heads, the past is transcribed pretty slowly – even if we remember what happened in the world differently, but also what we ourselves were like.
So journaling helps to avoid rewriting history unnoticed in your head. I simply can’t imagine anything more instructive than when one reads from one’s own diary the story of an old love or breakup. When writing and reading back a diary, one can get to know oneself like nothing else. Many times I remember what it would be like to break into an apartment and take my valuables. Taking away the TV, the hi-fi or the laptop would certainly hurt, the costs would certainly be very badly affected, but there is only one really irreplaceable value in my apartment: the diaries from each and every year. I really hope that once they are break-in, they won’t take it exactly.
Also, it can help you how different feelings can have an impact on you. If you have any hobbies or free time activities you can write that down and find a pattern between your work or results and your feelings. For example, if you have a happy day you can have a tendency to paint happy landscapes with suns and birds. Or if you had positive input you may tend to be confident when playing blackjack.
Self-Discipline
If you want to lose weight or improve your life or performance in any other area, it’s 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. This is because if we use a self-made diary to see how much we have lost/progressed over time, this experience of success will help us to discipline ourselves in the future and inspire us to continue the work we have started. But mistakes are also worth noting, it can help us not to make them again.
Traceability
An insignificant but still funny advantage of logging: a lot of disputes can be clearly resolved with its help. Because there are questions that can’t be answered with any amount of googling, 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 a Maroon 5 concert? You can easily see much of such discussions by flipping through old journal entries. And of course, it’s no less interesting that I can always look at what I did on the exact same day one, five, ten, or even twenty years ago.
Freedom
Maybe it’s not that important to anyone else, but it feels awfully good for me to come back to the diary every day where I can really express myself in absolute freedom. Of course, I will open just as honestly at other times, e.g. in a conversation with a really good friend, but the meditation-like freedom of diary writing is still different. Nowadays, blogging is the most popular form of diary keeping, and even Facebook can be understood as a kind of diary writing, but I can assure everyone, it is a completely 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’s 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 own hand, a pen.
Interesting Related Article: “Why Blogging Has Become So Popular?”