Change Your Life by Journalling in 2025

Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. So, if there is one single habit that's most changed my life, that habit is journaling. I've been journaling pretty consistently since like 2015, and I can attribute so many of the good things that have happened in my life as a result of journaling consistently. Now, you might be thinking that you don't have time for journaling, what good is writing about your thoughts and feelings gonna do anyway? Maybe you've tried it a couple of times and it hasn't really worked for you. But something that I put a lot of money on is that if you approach journaling in the right way, then I can basically guarantee that it can change your life for the better. So in this video, I wanna share the why behind journaling, why it's such a powerful tool for changing your life. We're gonna talk about how to actually journal and the three levels of journaling. And along the way, I'm gonna be sharing a bunch of different powerful questions and journaling prompts that I find incredibly useful for driving positive change in my life. So broadly, there are three main reasons why journaling is incredibly effective. Firstly, it's a nice way to look back on your memories. If you write about what you've been up to and how you've been feeling, it's super nice. I now look back from journal entries for the last like eight years, and I can see what I was doing on this day, a year ago, two years ago, four years ago, five years ago, and it's really cool to see the progression of my life. But then we've got reason number two, which is even more powerful, which is that journaling helps you take control of your own thoughts and your own mind. Now, especially if you're prone to stress or worry or anxiety or fear, or you're letting fear of judgment and fear of failure and fear of self doubt, you're letting these things hold you back from doing the things that you really want to do. The reason for that is that your mind has a thought like, I don't know, I am unworthy, I'm not good enough, I'm unloved, I'm not good enough to do this thing. And because the mind is so powerful, it can immediately marshal up evidence to support that limiting belief. Now, the benefit of journaling is that by writing this stuff down, by writing down your thoughts and feelings, you cut through the BS that the mind is very good at generating. And when you see these thoughts written down on paper, it's easier to not believe them so much because our minds can lie to us. Our mind is ultimately a survival machine that's just trying to keep us out of danger. And the more you write about your thoughts and feelings, the more of this sort of detachment you get from it, you stop identifying so much with your thoughts and feelings. And this really helps for people who are struggling with anxiety or fear or unworthiness or lack of self-love, which to some degree is literally everyone on the planet. But the third, and I think the most important benefit of journaling is that journaling can completely change the way that you approach your life. So how does this work? So let's imagine this kind of diagram, and it's pretty uncontroversial to say that our results and the outcomes that we get from life are broadly correlated with what actions we consistently do. So in a way, actions lead to results. If for example, you eat well and you exercise regularly, then the result is that you're gonna be fairly healthy and fit. But what is the thing that leads to the actions? Well, I would argue that that thing is decisions. Initially, before taking an action, you decide what decision to take, and then that decision dictates the actions, and then the actions lead to the results. For example, for me, the decision to start this YouTube channel six and a half years ago dictated the actions, i.e. making videos consistently, which has led to the results of my life being completely transformed. Whether you decide to take this job or that job, whether you decide to marry this person or that person, whether you decide to move to this city or that city, completely changes the direction of your life. But there's one thing that's upstream of decisions, and that is thoughts and feelings. Now within thoughts and feelings, we've got beliefs, which are just thoughts and feelings that we identify with very strongly. And then we also have the stories that we tell ourselves about our life and about our place in the world. And then we also have the day-to-day thoughts and feelings that we all experience. And all of these things combine our beliefs, our stories, and our thoughts and feelings to lead to certain decisions. For example, for you to make the decision that you're gonna start your own business, you have to have the thought that that would be a cool thing to do. You've gotta have the feeling of self-confidence. You have to have the thought of what the concept is, what the business model is gonna be. You have to have a bunch of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in order to get to the decision, and then that decision dictates your actions, and then those actions completely change your life. So why are we talking about all this stuff and where does journaling fit in? Well, journaling is how we understand our thoughts and feelings, because journaling is literally the process of writing down our thoughts and feelings so that we can interrogate them, so that we can ask questions of ourselves, and so that we can get clarity on what are the stories and beliefs and thoughts and feelings that we actually have. Now, other than journaling, there's another really cool tool that I use to help me figure out what I've actually been doing with my time, and that is Rise, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Now, I've been using Rise every single day since November of 2021, so it's been almost two years since I started using Rise, and it's a fantastic cross-platform apps that tracks your time across any website or any app that you're using. And so without having to think about it, you can see how productive and intentional you're being when spending your time. Like I can show you how much time you spent on Zoom calls, how much time you spend on Notion writing stuff, how much time you spend on Google Docs, how much time you spend on YouTube and Netflix and Disney Plus and all this other stuff, and it helps you track how many hours you've worked across the whole week. It gives you reminders if you've been working for more than 50 minutes of when you need to take a break. And I really like it as a way of helping me understand what I've actually done with my time, and sometimes I'll even screenshot the Rise window and chuck it into my journaling app of choice, which is day one. And actually I liked the app so much that I reached out to the founders and asked if I could invest in it. And so we as a company are now angel investors in Rise because we believe in it so much and because it's just great. So if any of that sounds up your street and you would like a really effective and low friction way to track your time and figure out how you're spending your time and whether you're spending it intentionally, then head over to rise.io forward slash Ali Abdaal. And if you use that link or you use the code Ali Abdaal, then you can get 25% your first three months. So thank you so much Rise for sponsoring this video and let's get back to journaling. Let's now talk about how to journal and the three levels of journaling. So level one is the most basic form of journaling. And this is where you just write down what are the things you have done today? Now, one of my favourite ways of doing this is from this book, Storyworthy by Matthew Dix, which I read in 2020 and was the best book that I read that year, hands down. Now, Matthew Dix is a world champion storyteller. He's won competitions, like world competitions for the thing, which are apparently a thing. And one of the exercises that he uses to tell better stories is called homework for life. And the idea behind this is that at the end of every day, you ask yourself, what was the most story worthy thing that happened to me today? And you just write this down as a maximum of two sentences and you're kind of imagining, if I had to tell a five minute story about something that happened today, what would that be? Now, Matthew writes, not every day contains a story worthy moment for me, but I found that the longer I did my homework, the more days did contain one. And my friend Plato has said that I can turn the act of picking up a pebble from the ground into a great story. Neither of these statements is true. The truth is this, I simply see more story worthy moments in the day than most people. They don't go unnoticed as they once did. I discovered that there is beauty and import in my life that I never would have imagined before doing my homework and that the small unexpected moments of beauty are oftentimes some of my most compelling stories. And what I love about the homework for life strategy, which admittedly I've been fairly on and off doing since 2020 since reading the book, but in the months where I've actually been sticking to this consistently, I have found that it's actually increased my appreciation for life because now I remember the small details. If I think back to what I did last week, I have to look at my calendar. I'm like, I have no idea what I did last week. I have no idea what I did last month. But when I look back through my journal, I can see, oh, that was the day that this happened. That was the day that happened. That's fun. That was a cool thing that happened here and there and there and there. And you could take this a step further. You could talk about what you've learned that day. You could talk about any new people that you've met. You could talk about something that surprised you, but this is a fairly straightforward way of getting started with journaling. You just open up a journal. It can be physical. It can be digital. You can use an app. I like the app of day one. I also like pen and paper journaling. And you just start writing about a few things that happened that day. All right, next we have a strategy from this book, The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, a spiritual path to higher creativity. It sounds a bit weird, but this is like such a fantastic book and like almost every creative person that I've ever met has read this book and swears by the methods that Julia Cameron talks about. But in this book, there's a technique called morning pages, which you might've come across before. Basically the idea is that every morning, you just write out three pages by hand, ideally, of just whatever is on your mind. Now, when I do my morning pages, I get out my notebook and I start with the phrase, today is going to be a great day. If I don't know what else to write, I'll say it's 1038 on a Monday morning and I'm sitting on the dining table in the house. The sun is streaming in and dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And I'll just start writing. And I find that on the days that I do this, A, my mind feels less scattered because I've taken the time to kind of offload some of my thoughts onto the page. And I also come up with really interesting ideas for videos or for writing or for work. And it's just taking that 20 minutes in the morning, sometimes 15 minutes, sometimes less, to just write down some thoughts. And morning pages is another fantastic way of getting started with journaling. You don't have to start with three pages, it might be a bit much. You could even start with three lines. You can start with half a page. You can start with a whole page. But the point is that there's all these different ways of journaling, but the objective of all of it is to just get thoughts and feelings down on the page. And it doesn't really matter what format that takes. So that was level one. Level two of journaling is where you are writing about how you're feeling. And there's actually quite a lot of scientific evidence around these forms of journaling. And there's two that I wanna talk about in particular. So firstly, have a look at this study from 2015 that was published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. And in this study, the researchers were looking at the effects of expressive writing, which is a form of journaling. So they recruited 70 students and they randomly chose 35 of them to write expressively about a past painful event. And they got the other 35 to write about a neutral topic. And the really cool thing was that four months later, they followed the students up and they found that the students who were in the expressive writing category, they seemed to have better mental health and were less stressed than the students in the other category who just wrote about a neutral event. And the theory behind expressive writing is that if you spend some time just writing about any kind of painful or negative or traumatic event, it helps you understand your own thoughts and feelings about it. And once you understand your own thoughts and feelings about it, those thoughts and feelings are less prone to cause you stress, worry, and anxiety. Now, for the second form of journaling about feelings, have a look at this 2017 study that was published in the Journal of Happiness Studies. And this was a really simple study where they recruited 91 participants and they split them into a few different groups. Now, the first group was the gratitude journaling group and they were writing about events or people that they were grateful for. And then there was a control group and they were just asked to write about what they did today, which is basically level one of journaling. And they were just asked to do this four times in total across a two week period. This is not very much time at all. But then when the researchers followed up a month later, they found that the people who did just gratitude journaling, they seem to have higher happiness ratings and also rated their relationships with their friends as being stronger than the people in the control group. And the theory here is that by journaling about the things that you're grateful for and writing them down, this gratitude journaling helps focus your attention and appreciation of the good things that are happening in your life. And because our subjective experience of life is so massively colored by the things that we pay attention to, it means that you just end up becoming happier and just have way better mental health, which is fantastic. And there was one study that I even read that showed that five minutes of gratitude journaling in the morning every day has the same effect as doubling your salary if we're looking at the impact on happiness. Now, there's a few different ways that you can prompt yourself to do this exercise. So a really simple one would be to just pause this video right now and just imagine what are three things that you're grateful for? It can be literally anything you want. And if you're looking for something a little bit more in depth, I really like John Gottman's approach to this. John Gottman, I interviewed him on a podcast. He's a world famous researcher in the world of relationships. And he's got this I appreciate exercise that apparently really helps for building closer relationships. Firstly, you think of someone in your life that you wanna express gratitude towards. Then you pick three qualities that characterize this person. And in the worksheet, he's got a long list of different qualities just to make it easier to choose because sometimes it can be hard to come up with the right words. And then you write down the three qualities that this person displays and write about a time in which they displayed that quality. And so we'll put on screen an example of what this could look like. Then the final thing is to be brave and to actually share what you've written with the person in question. And this is where this becomes really powerful because now it's not just gratitude that you're doing for your own sake, but you're also sharing with someone else. And as you're watching this, you're probably thinking, oh my God, that feels cringe. Like I couldn't possibly do that. It feels a bit too much. But imagine if one of your best friends were to say to you, hey, look, whatever your name is, I was just doing some journaling and I just wanted to say, I really appreciate these three qualities about you. You're thoughtful, you're caring, and you're very generous. And here are the ways in which you show those qualities. And I just wanted to share that with you because I really appreciate you in my life. That would feel freaking phenomenal, wouldn't it? And then finally, we come to level three of journaling, which is I think the most powerful. And that is where you journal about what you should do, what direction you wanna go, what decisions you wanna make and what actions you should take in the here and now. Now there's a few different ways of doing this. And this is where prompts are particularly powerful. And one thing I like to do is collect the most powerful questions and the most powerful journaling prompts that I can find across different places. And I actually put all of these into a single Google Doc that I always keep up to date. So if you'd like access to that, you can click the link down below. I'll send it to you completely for free. And then it'll be updated whenever I come across new powerful questions. So you can check that out if you like. Okay, so one prompt that you can do is called the Odyssey Plan. That's one of my favorite prompts. I love this. This is from the book, Designing Your Life. And basically the idea is that you write down, what does my life look like five years from now if I continue down the same path? And then you journal about that for a bit. Then you ask yourself, okay, what does my life look like five years from now if I take a completely different path? And you journal about that for a bit. And then you ask yourself, what does my life look like five years from now if I take a completely different path, but if I'm not worried about money and I'm not worried about what other people will think of me? And then you journal about that. It takes a while. It's a bit intense. A lot of people are like, oh, I don't wanna do this because it feels hard. I don't have time. But genuinely doing this exercise in 2019 was what fundamentally prompted me to leave medicine. Option number two, there is something called the wheel of life, which is basically where you split up life into like eight, nine, 10 different components. And you just rate how happy you are, how satisfied you are with your life across these different domains. And the idea is you've got your wheel, you split up your circle into a bunch of these different categories and you just rate out of 10. If you had to pick a number, how satisfied are you? How aligned do you feel with that particular domain of your life? And again, this is helpful because the numbers don't lie. And secondly, you can do this exercise multiple times throughout the year and you can see how your numbers change over time. And generally when you see the numbers, you're like, oh crap, I've only got a three out of 10 for like my friends category. It's probably because I haven't seen my friends enough. Cool, what can I do to make this go from a three to a five? And then you take some actions. And this is where journaling becomes very effective because now the journaling that you're doing is not just about understanding your thoughts and feelings, although that's important. It also then helps you figure out what actions you can take in the here and now to make a change. Another good prompt is what I call the 12 month celebration. By the way, I talk about a bunch of these in my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity. It's in the final chapter. This is a book about how to do more of what matters to you. So if you're interested, you can check it out, link down below, feelgoodproductivity.com, available in all bookstores. But another prompt that I really like is the 12 month celebration, which is 12 months from now, in the different components of life, what would I like to be celebrating with a friend? For example, I'd like to be celebrating that for the last 12 months, I've been hitting the gym consistently three times a week. I might like to celebrate that I've gotten engaged. I might like to celebrate that I started my first business. I might like to celebrate that I decided to ask for that raise at work. And again, by projecting yourself forward, by asking yourself these questions, it helps inform what actions you would like to take in the here and now. Now, one of my favourite exercises when it comes to journaling is Tim Ferriss' fear setting exercise. Again, all of these prompts are in the Google Doc link down below if you wanna check it out. But I really like the fear setting exercise because this is fantastic if I'm worried about doing something. And so you're asking, what is the worst thing that will happen if I do the thing that I fear doing? What can I do to prevent each of the worst things from happening? If the worst case scenario happened, what can I do to repair it? What are the benefits of an attempt or partial success? If I don't do the thing that scares me, what will my life look like in six months, one year and three years? Asking yourself these questions for just 10 minutes can genuinely be 10 minutes that completely changes your life. Because if you decide to do the thing, to quit the job, to go on that holiday, to ask that person out, to propose to that person, to start that business, whatever the thing might be, if you decide to do it, the decision then dictates your actions, your actions dictate your results, and then you'll look back and you'll think, damn, that decision completely changed my life. And so when I say that journaling can change your life, I'm not being clickbaity about it. That's not the objective. Like literally, the right decision can genuinely change the entire course of your life. There's another strategy that I've been experimenting with recently, and that comes from Alex Hormozy, and he calls it the Solomon conversation or something like that. And basically the story is about the biblical figure, I think it was King Solomon, who was like incredible at giving advice to other people, but his own life was a mess and he was terrible at taking that advice for himself. People give significantly better advice about their own scenarios if they don't know what's about themselves. If you only just followed your own advice, you'd be way better than you currently are. And so the idea behind Alex's kind of journaling method is that he has a conversation with his 85-year-old self in the form of like a Google Doc. A practice that I started doing, which is I have a coaching session with myself, weird. I have a conversation with my future self, who's 85, and I ask him for advice on what I should do now. And that's been really helpful for helping me realize that actually, you know, I'm 29 now, but the things that I'm thinking about and worried about just completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things. And my 85-year-old self is generally telling me to chill the F out and like enjoy life a little bit more because, you know, nothing is as serious as I actually make it out to be in my mind. And the mind tricks us into believing our own BS, into thinking that the thing that we are doing has huge importance and it's very serious. But actually getting that old dude's perspective helps us realize, hang on, it's all about enjoying the journey as we go along. Now, if you enjoyed this video, then I'd love for you to leave a comment down below. What is your favorite journaling prompt? Or what is a journaling prompt that you've maybe taken away from this video that you're gonna start doing in your own life? Because fundamentally, watching a video like this is kind of pointless if you're not gonna take action on it. So I would love for you to share something in the comments and commit to making a journaling prompt. And if you wanna see the results of my own 90 days in a row experiment with journaling, then check out that video over here where I share my personal experience with journaling in case you need some more inspiration. But honestly, the main thing is to actually try it out for yourself and let me know how it goes. So thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video. Bye bye.