How to change your life by journaling in 2026

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the channel. This video is all about how you can use journaling to change your life. I have been journaling consistently since 2015, pretty much every day through a combination of physical and digital format. And I found that journaling has been the single habit that has most positively impacted my life because it's led to all of the things that I've done over the last 10 years that have led to my life being completely transformed. And I genuinely think that if you haven't started journaling yet, if you start doing it, it will also drastically change your life for the better. So this video is gonna be split up into three parts. Firstly, we're gonna talk about why journaling is a big deal and why it's important in the first place. Secondly, we're gonna talk about the three levels of journaling. And thirdly, I'm gonna share some actionable tips that you can use to start applying journaling to your life today if you want your life to be changed. And if you're interested in a totally free list of my favorite journaling prompts, they'll be linked in a Google Doc down below. I keep that updated and have done for years with my favorite journaling prompts. So you can just download that and go if that's what you are into. Now, the thing with journaling is that you've probably come across it before. You might even seen some of the videos I've done on the channel about the importance of journaling. But when I speak to people around this, most people know that they kind of should probably maybe be doing some journaling, but they are not doing it consistently. Or if they are doing consistently, they're not like seeing the results that they would really like to get from journaling. So the key thing here is that it's pretty uncontroversial to say that the actions that you take dictate kind of your outcomes in life, right? So you could take positive actions that would lead you on a good trajectory, or you could take actions that take you on a bad trajectory, like, you know, probably scrolling TikTok for eight hours a day is probably not helpful. It'll probably take you on a negative trajectory, but learning some high income skills and choosing to start your business, for example, might take you on a more positive trajectory. All of this is the action that we take. Upstream of the action is a decision. So for example, the decision I made to start this YouTube channel in 2017 directly led to the actions of me making YouTube videos for the last like eight years. And that has had a very positive impact on my life. As a result, I've become financially free and able to do all the fun things. And you know, this gets to be my career, which is amazing. So thank you if you've been following the journey for any length of time. But that all stemmed from a decision to let's start a YouTube channel, right? And so then the question becomes like, how does that decision form? And that decision forms as a result of thoughts and feelings and beliefs. And in many ways, beliefs are just the same thing as thoughts. They're just thoughts that we take more seriously than other thoughts. It basically just comes down to thoughts and feelings. Some combination of thoughts and feelings leads to a particular decision. And then that decision leads to actions that change your life. So for example, let's say you want to become financially free. That is a thought probably accompanied by some kind of feeling. It's like a desire for financial freedom. But loads of people have the desire for financial freedom. Almost no one actually does anything about it and almost no one achieves the result. So then you gotta have the thought of, I want financial freedom. And then you gotta have a sort of feeling of confidence or a feeling of like actually wanting to do the things that it takes to become financially free. And then maybe you watch a video of mine or you've come across some content that says, starting a business is a good route to financial freedom compared to just trying to get ahead in your career or whatever the thing might be. So you're like, all right, cool. Now you have another thought which is, I should start a business. And then when you have the thought of I should start a business, again, loads of people have the thought of I should start a business. And yet when I poll people in my audience, like 78% of you want to start a business but you haven't yet started a business. So there's another blocker that holds you back. And that would be another thought in terms of like, what business idea should I pursue? And then along this way, along the thought of I want financial freedom, I should start a business, the thought of what business idea should I pursue or that question in your mind, this is also accompanied by a lot of different feelings. And feelings are also these other internal things internal bodily sensations that we apply some kind of label to. So the feeling of anxiety, the feeling of fear, the feeling of like cringe at the thought of like outing yourself as a wannabe business owner, the feeling of like, oh, but like, am I gonna have to show my face? Am I gonna have to create content? Am I gonna have to speak to people? And like, what if I get rejected and all this sort of stuff? And all of these are feelings accompanied by thoughts like thought feeling combinations that block loads of people in the world who have the thought of I should start a business or I want financial freedom. The thoughts and the feelings block them from actually ever taking action on doing the thing. Now, what the hell does all of this have to do with journaling? Well, what it has to do with journaling is journaling is literally the process of writing down your thoughts and your feelings and to an extent your beliefs. And the thing about thoughts and feelings in particular thoughts, like when they are in your mind and they are not on paper, they have way more power over us. The thought of if I start my business, then my colleagues will laugh at me is a thought that I hear a lot from students in our Lifestyle Business Academy, which is kind of like my online business school. It tends to be like professionals who are successful in their day jobs and in their lives who really want to start a business to get to financial freedom, but they're really worried that their colleagues will laugh at them if they start posting on LinkedIn, for example. Now, saying that out loud, it seems dumb, right? Like, why would you let the thought of what Jane from HR thinks about your business because you worked with her 10 years ago, why would you let that stop you from achieving financial freedom? But when that thought is in the mind and it's just like in our heads and it's just sort of bouncing around, the thought of like, Jane from HR is gonna laugh at me, therefore everyone else will laugh at me, therefore my manager will laugh at me, therefore I'm gonna lose my professional reputation and my social status and therefore I'm gonna end up broken, homeless and alone. And these are not like conscious thought processes, but it tends to be what the mind does because the mind is a survival machine and it's geared towards protecting us from bad things. It is not at all geared towards helping us live the life of our dreams. The mind is totally happy if we stay completely miserable, but in our comfort zone, in our comfort zone of safety, the mind is optimising for safety, not for growth. And in general, if you want to take actions that optimise your life and take you in a direction that you feel your life has changed for the better, we wanna be optimising for growth rather than for safety and so the mind is just not the right tool to do this. One example that I quite like is like, imagine you're trying to do something complicated like designing a bridge, would you try and do that in your head? Probably not, right? Like bridges are very, very complicated devices that require loads of like engineering and like mathematics and like architectural stuff and material science and all that stuff goes together with loads of people to make a bridge. They don't do it in their heads, they put it down on paper, right? And so if you're trying to calculate a complex mathematical equation, of course you would put it down on paper and yet loads of us just never put our thoughts and feelings on paper. We have them in our heads at all times and then what happens is that those thoughts and feelings run rampant and start running, going down rabbit holes and stuff. We end up making decisions as a result of those, but because we're doing them subconsciously, we don't realize that like anxiety and fear and cringe and like the fear of rejection and like what are people gonna say and all that kind of stuff. We just don't realize that that stuff is holding us back from achieving our dreams. And so when you start journaling, going back to journaling, when you start journaling, which is literally the process of writing down your thoughts and your feelings, when you write them down, I am not starting my business because I am worried that Sarah from accounting will laugh at me. You write that down and suddenly that particular thought loses like 95% of its power. And you're like, Sarah, really? Am I really gonna let what Sarah from accounting thinks like stop me from achieving financial freedom? That's just ******* dumb. And then you can kind of see your thoughts for what they are. Most of us, unless we have a journaling practice or a meditation practice, which is sort of somewhat similar in that it has somewhat similar effects to an extent, unless you have a strong journaling or meditation practice, you probably take your thoughts way too seriously. And so when you have thoughts and you get into these rabbit holes, you are allowing those thoughts which are really just, you know, thoughts are not real. It's kind of like cloud in the sky, right? Like, I mean, yeah, there's a cloud. I currently have the thought of like, oh, lunchtime's in an hour. It's like, who cares? There's a cloud going there. There's a car going there. Like, it's all just stuff, right? And unless you journal or meditate or both, ideally, you will take those very seriously and you will allow your thoughts, which are simply patterns of energy in the neurons in your mind, you will allow those to dictate your actions and your decisions. And therefore you end up on a trajectory where you're living with regret because you never pursued your dreams because you allowed fear to get in your way and stuff. So basically, that's a long roundabout way of saying that journaling, i.e. writing down thoughts and feelings is really, really important if you wanna change your life. Now, in other exciting news, as you might've heard, my team and I are currently building an online business school called the Lifestyle Business Academy. And we're iterating on things at a pretty fast pace. Now, one of the big perks of having so many students going through our programme is that we now have a tonne of data points and moving parts to manage, including content and feedback and workflows and automations. And all of that gets way easier when you understand how to use AI properly. And something that has really helped me and the team with this is Brilliant, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. They have these fantastic interactive courses on the fundamentals of AI, things like how the AI large language models works, how to think about algorithms, how to break problems down. And all of this has been very interesting to learn about, but it's also had a tangible impact on how we are using AI to run our business more effectively. The thing I love about Brilliant is that they don't just teach you theory, it's actually a hands-on approach to problem solving that genuinely changes how you approach your work. And so as you're going through the content, like you're watching the stuff and the explanations, and then you're actually applying them in practice. And that gives you these little aha moments, which is great for building the kind of intuition that research shows is way more effective than just traditional kind of lecture-based learning. The platform also adapts to you at the right level. So it gives you personalized practice and it nudges you forward at exactly the pace you need. So if you would like to become a better thinker and also reach some serious learning goals along the way, head over to brilliant.org slash aliafzal or scan the QR code on screen or click the link in the description. And that will also get you 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much Brilliant for sponsoring the video and let's get back to it. Okay, so now we get to how do you actually do this? And I think of this as the three levels of journaling. Level one is great for complete beginners to journaling and it's super, super easy. You just write down what you did today. So either in the morning, you can write down what you did yesterday or in the evening, you can write down what you did today. And there is a fantastic book by a lovely chap called Matthew Dix called Storyworthy. And there is a strategy in that book called Homework for Life. And it's basically a book about like how to tell better stories, but it's more than about that. It's just, it's one of my favorite books of all time. Anyway, the idea behind Homework for Life is at the end of every day, you just ask yourself, what was the most storyworthy moment that happened today? And then you just sort of write down what it might be. And if you can't think of anything that was storyworthy, it doesn't matter, you've got to come up with something. Like what was just one thing that happened in your day that was at least slightly interesting or at least slightly more interesting than everything else. Even if you have a really boring life, you have to come up with something. And that is a great journaling practice because A, it's amazing for being able to actually relive your own memories because our memories are in many ways what we retire on. And so when you go back through your journals, like I've got journals over here from like years, I've been journaling regularly since 2015. So now I have like 10 years worth of journal entries where if I do them on an app, I can see the sort of on this day in 2015, on this day in 2014, this is what I was thinking, this is what happened. And reliving those memories is generally quite nice because it's quite nostalgic because it's been a while. And it's also nice because it lets you see how far you've come. So at the very basic level, this doesn't require you to open up about your feelings or about your childhood trauma or anything like that. You literally just write out what you did today. Then you have the next level of journaling, which is you write out what you are thinking. Now there is a technique from Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, called morning pages, which is amazing, loads of people swear by it. And the idea behind morning pages is that every morning you just write out three pages. You can do less than three, three is too many. You're just literally writing down whatever is coming to your mind. So I like to start out my morning pages when I do it with, today is gonna be a great day because, and then I just keep writing. And then the idea is you just keep writing. You don't judge what you're writing. No one else has to read what you're writing. You're not writing for publication. You are merely just writing out stuff that comes to your mind. And you generally find that in the process of doing this, as you build the connection between the thoughts that are happening in your brain and what your pen is saying, or if you're typing it out, technically she says you should write it out by hand, but sometimes that's annoying. So I do type it out, sorry, Julia, apologies. As you develop that connection between actually being able to type out or write out what you're thinking, you actually get a lot of insight into your thought processes. You start to realize that, wait a minute, the thoughts that I keep thinking are actually kind of negative. Huh, it's interesting. Why am I talking to myself like that? You also, if you have any kind of creative practice, any kind of, like if you're creating content or trying to write a book or trying to do any art or anything that involves creating and putting anything out there into the world, often the process of like getting your thoughts out on paper can really help with your creativity as well. Then as a sort of addition to that, instead of just writing what you're thinking, you also write what you are feeling and trying to put your feelings into words. Again, this is just super, super helpful. It gives us a lot of self-awareness about the feelings that we all have. We are all experiencing different feelings at different times of the day. It is remarkable just how much our feelings subconsciously dictate our decisions and our actions. And so being, again, being able to write it out, huh, I'm currently feeling a little anxious. Why am I feeling a little anxious? I feel a sense of like franticness that's sort of just coming into my life. I feel like I'm maybe running out of time and that's leading to a feeling of like agitation and franticness that if I don't do all the things, then I don't know, something bad will happen. Now that thought process or that feeling process in our brains and in our bodies will run rampant and we'll just be like a little stressed, a little on edge, at risk of burnout without realizing it. But as soon as you start journaling and you write it out and put it on paper, you can be like, huh, that's interesting. Why do I act as if I'm running out of time? Am I running out of time? Well, no, not really. I wonder where that thought comes from. And then what happens is that you start like approaching your thoughts and your feelings kind of like a detective or like an investigator. You're like, huh, it's interesting that I have the thought this video sucks right now because I don't have any scientific data in it. I wonder where that thought comes from. Maybe that comes from thinking that like the only value I have to add as a YouTuber is in like whether I add scientific data to my videos. Huh, that's interesting. Is that true? In the process of journaling, you're sort of like having this sort of conversation with yourself, but you're not having a conversation with yourself in your head where it's very easy for it to derail into like negativity and stuff. You're having a conversation with yourself on paper or copy paste into ChatGPT and then get an analysis from ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. All of this just gives you way more insight into your own thought patterns and your own feeling patterns. Oh, by the way, if you're watching this before the 3rd of January, 2026, I'm hosting a completely free two day series of workshops called Spark on Saturday the 3rd and Sunday the 4th of January, 2026. For the idea that it'll be me and my wife and a few guest speakers that you might've heard of. And we're gonna be taking you through a bunch of different exercises to help you reflect on 2025 and set goals for 2026 so that we can hopefully help you make 2026 the best year of your life. It is completely free. There'll be a link down below to register if you would like. And then level three, I think, is that once you're able to do that kind of stuff, which is not that hard, you then start journaling about your goals and your plans. Now this is where I really like journaling, right? Like there's a lot of value in journaling and just being able to write out what you're feeling. But for me, as a productivity bro, who cares about like goal achievement and like getting places, like becoming financially free or whatever, you then start writing about your goals and plans. You then start writing like, okay, cool. I've written out what I've done today. I've done my morning pages, whatever the thing, thinking and feeling. And then at some point, you'll start writing about the future. You might see a journaling prompt that says something like, you know, what would you like people to say at your funeral? And you're like, huh, that's an interesting question. What would I like people to say at my funeral? Well, at my funeral, most people don't, won't really care about like my sort of achievements. They're not really gonna care how much money I have. But at my funeral, you know, people generally talk about service and they talk about character. So, hmm, what's the kind of service that I would like to offer to people or to the world? What's the kind of character I'd like to develop? And now you are in the mode of processing where you're actually able to make sensible decisions about what you wanna do with your life. You might come across a journaling prompt. What does your ideal end state look like? Like, imagine you've achieved everything you want. What does your day-to-day look like? You're like, huh, I've never thought about that. Okay, let's imagine I have achieved everything I want. Let's imagine I have started that business or got that promotion or gotten married, had the kids, et cetera, et cetera. What then? What would I actually be spending my time doing? You're like, well, maybe. You know, I just, I'd really like to do stand-up comedy. You're like, oh, interesting. Where did that thought come from? Like, yeah, I'd really like to do stand-up comedy. That would be really interesting. Or I'd really like to write songs or release my own album or whatever that thing might be. Often, we don't give ourselves permission to think in those sorts of ways because we are so fixated on what's the next thing that I have to do. A lot of us are running through life, ticking things off a to-do list, acting as if our time is running out. And we're so focused on just getting through the day and just getting the stuff ticked off and removing these sources of stress from our lives, like, oh, I've got to pay the electricity bill, got to pay the water bill. Oh, ----, the radiator next door is broken, so I've got to call a plumber about that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that when you journal, even for five minutes or 10 minutes, and you do it consistently, you get distance from the day-to-day, and you can start thinking about the future, and you can start asking yourself, what do I actually want? That is one of the key things that I have personally gotten through journaling over the years, just a better sense of what do I actually want. Because if you really figure out what you want, and then, you know, not in terms of like, I want a Lamborghini or I want a yacht or whatever, but like what you intrinsically want, what you intrinsically want or value, you can then start to make decisions that take your life closer in alignment to what you want and what you value. And so you might think that you want a lot of money, but in the process of journaling, you might realise that like, okay, well, what would I do with the money if I had it? You might realise that what you would do is that you just want freedom. You want freedom to be able to spend your time however you want. And then you're like, all right, cool. So it's not really money I want, it's more like freedom that I want. And then you're like, okay, but like, why do I want the freedom, right? Like, what would I do if assuming I had all the money and all the freedom, how would I spend my time? And you might land on something like I did that like, you know what? I would really just focus on teaching. I just really like teaching. It's like, oh, interesting. Teaching is the thing that I wanna do. Like that kind of thought process was what helped me realise that, you know, my career as a doctor wasn't really for me. And I realised that like the most enjoyment I ever had as a doctor was when either I was learning something new or I was teaching something. So I'm like, huh, that's interesting. Like learning and teaching are the things that I seem to want. Is that true? And then do some journaling, figure that out. It's been like, yeah. Actually, a lot of the past experiences of fulfilment in my life have been involved either when I've been learning something new or I've been teaching something. So I don't really care about the money for the sake of the money. I care about the money because the money gets me freedom and the freedom lets me teach. Oh, okay. So maybe that's what I want. I want the freedom to learn and teach on my own terms. And so that kind of insight can come through journaling. It can come through like having a life coach. It can come through talking about your thoughts and feelings to like an AI model. And, you know, hopefully it's guiding you, somewhat guiding you in the right direction. All of it requires externalising your own thoughts and your own feelings because when they are internal, there's not much we can do with them. And we end up going in all these sorts of different places, but externalising them in any way, be it through journaling or through talking to an AI, which is kind of basically journaling or talking to a life coach, which is basically just like journaling out loud and they're just asking you questions. All of that is getting at the question of what do I actually want? And then once you figure out what you want, then you turn it into a goal, you turn it into a plan, you turn it into a system to follow the plan. This is sort of like my GPS method for a goal setting, which will be linked up there and down there if you're interested in learning more about it. And it's all based on what do you actually want? I have people who come up to me at my events a lot being like, hey, how do I figure out what to do with my life? Or questions like that. And my first question is often, have you tried journaling about it? And often the answer is no, not really. Or like, oh yeah, I've been meaning to, but I haven't really got around to it. It is remarkable how much clarity you can get by just setting a 10 minute timer and just asking yourself a question and then just typing out whatever comes to mind or speaking out whatever comes to mind as a response. If you're interested in an app to help you with that, my team and I have built a tool called VoicePal, which is kind of like voice-based journaling or note-taking. You just go for a walk. It's got a few journaling prompts within it as well. And you can just like pick a prompt and you can just like speak out whatever you want. That'll be linked down below. It's on the App Store, it's on Android. People are loving it. It's great. You should check it out if you would like. Okay, so that was a lot of theory. Let's now talk about the actionable tips. What are the things you can tangibly, actionably do to start incorporating journaling into your life so that you can change your life? Number one, I would say get a physical journal. These are just some of the physical journals that I have had over the years. I got a new one recently. Basically, I just love getting Harry Potter-themed journals. So this is like a Ravenclaw. I got it so I can't have a Ravenclaw-sculpted journal. I got this from South Africa. Oh, I got this one. This is one that I got. I think this was from London. Expecto Patronum, another Harry Potter Moleskine-like journal. It's just nice having a nice journal. I think a lot of people would do more journaling. Where's the other one? Ah, here we go. We've got some more here. More journals. Like, you know, when you've been journaling for a while, then you just end up collecting like journals and stuff. And it's just super cool. Like this was my experiment with like bullet journaling where it's like, whoa, there's so much stuff in here. It's really cool. Basically, get a physical journal that you feel good about using. The whole concept behind my book, Feel Good Productivity, is that we are far more likely to do things and to do things better if we feel good about doing them. And so when I bust out my cute blue Expecto Patronum-type journal, then I feel good and I'm much more likely to actually journal as a result. So I would say, just go on Amazon, go to your local shop and get a nice, cute physical journal that you feel good about writing in. Actionable tip number two is I would recommend also having a digital journal of some description. And so you can use some kind of journaling app for that. Apple has a built-in free journaling app. The one I've been using for literally years is called Day One. I've been using that basically every week since like 2014-ish. And so when you use an app, it's also nice because I tend to photograph and scan in pictures of my physical journal. So I sort of do a physical and digital hybrid here. And it's really cool because then you can look back on stuff super easily rather than having to bust out the journals and then like find stuff. So yeah, having an app, generally quite helpful. Actionable tip number three is to get a list of prompts. If you're a beginner to journaling, actually just having some good prompts is a very good way of getting started. And I have linked my own favorite journaling prompts for free down below if you wanna check them out. It's in Google Doc that I keep updated with my favorite journaling prompts. Actionable tip number four, and maybe this should have been number one, is that these days it's never been easier to start because you can always just talk to an AI. My favorite AI for this is Claude because I freaking love Claude, but you can use Claude, you can use ChattyPT, you can use Grok, you can use DeepSeek, you can use Poe, you can use freaking Gemini, you can use whatever you want. You can literally talk to any AI tool and you can say, I am interested in getting started with journaling. Can you give me some interesting prompts? And it will give you some interesting prompts. And then you can just talk to the AI and you can do your journaling in that way if you are just getting started with it. Final thing I wanna talk about is journaling as a daily habit versus journaling as a deep dive. So the daily habit form of journaling, when I personally do it, is like somewhere between two and five minutes per day. I don't do it every day, I just do it most days where I'll get the notification from day one, the app, or I'll go down to the local coffee shop with my little Harry Potter journal thing. And while drinking a coffee, just do some journaling. That's like a nice daily type thing. And I can kind of go as shallow or as deep on that as I would like. I think that's quite nice. It's quite a nice way of building the habit and maintaining the habit. But what's really cool about journaling, and if you really, really wanna make specific, tangible changes to your life, is setting out time, like half a day or even a couple of hours, go to a new location, take some journaling prompts with you, and without getting distracted by your phone, actually just taking two hours to almost do a mini retreat with yourself, like a mini personal discovery or self-discovery type retreat, where in the process of going to a new location outside of your normal experience and taking some journaling prompts with you with a notebook and not getting distracted with your phone, you're able to genuinely have insights into your life that help you make decisions, that help you set goals, and those goals ultimately lead to plans and systems, and then you take the actions that ultimately changes your life. And if you're interested in the specific approach of how to do journaling on this deep dive method, I have a video over here that talks about the think day approach to journaling, and it's a video where I take you through my own process for journaling across a period of like four hours. Don't worry, the video's not four hours long, but I take you through my own process of journaling as I go to like a new place here in Hong Kong where I live, and I share with you my top 10 journaling prompts that I really in particular love for like the think day approach to journaling. So that'll be linked right over there. Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye.