Transcript & Summary: Change Your Life by Journalling in 2026

[00:00] 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 going to do anyway maybe you've tried it a couple of times and it hasn't really worked for you but something that I put [00:21] 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 want to share the why behind journaling why it's such a powerful tool for changing your life we're going to talk about how to actually journal and the three levels of journaling and along the way I'm going to be sharing a bunch of different powerful questions and journaling prompts that I find incredibly useful for driving positive change in my life [00:40] 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're right 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 date 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 [01:00] which is that journaling helps you take control of your own thoughts and your own mind 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 [01:22] immediately Marshall 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 you know keep us out of danger and the more you write about your thoughts and feelings the more of this [01:43] 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 [02:03] 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 going to 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 [02:26] for me the decision to start this YouTube channel six and a half years ago dictated the action by 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 [02:48] 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 and feelings to lead to certain decisions for example for you to make the decision that you're going to start your own business you have to have the thought that that would be a cool [03:07] thing to do you've got to have the feeling of self-confidence you have to have the thought of like what the concept is what the business model is going to be you have to have a bunch of thoughts feelings and beliefs in order to get to the decision and then that decision to take 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 [03:26] 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 [03:45] 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 your being with 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 spent on YouTube and Netflix and Disney plus and all this other stuff and it helps you [04:05] 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'd even screenshot the rise window and Chuck it into my journaling app of choice which is day one and actually I like 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 rice because we [04:25] believe in it so much and because it's just great so if any of that stands 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 abdall and if you use that link or you use the code alibdal then you can get 25 your first three months so thank you so much rice for sponsoring this video and let's get back to journaling let's now talk about [04:44] how to journal in 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 favorite ways of doing this is from this book story worthy by Matthew Dix which I read in 2020 and was the best book that I read that year hands down 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 [05:07] 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 it did contain [05:29] 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 these small unexpected moments of beauty are oftentimes some of my most compelling stories and what I love about the [05:53] 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'm not anybody last week I have no idea what it I did last month but when I look back through my journal I can see ah that was the day that this happened that was the [06:14] day that happened that's fine 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 a day one I also like pen and paper [06:31] 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 have come across before basically [06:54] the idea is that every morning you just write out three pages by hand ideally of just whatever 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 10 38 on a Monday morning and I'm sitting on the dining table in the house the sun is streaming in 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 [07:20] offload some of my thoughts onto the page and I also come up with really interesting ideas for videos 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 the whole page but the point [07:39] 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 want to talk about in particular so firstly have a look at this study from 2015 that was published in the Journal of Social [07:59] and clinical 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 seem to have better mental health and were less [08:21] 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 dramatic 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 [08:42] published in the Journal of Happiness studies now 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 [09:03] 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 [09:24] 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 you can prompt yourself to do this exercise so a really simple one would be to just pause this [09:44] 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 on my podcast he's a world famous researcher in the world of relationships and he's got this I appreciate exercise that apparently really helps inclusive relationships firstly you think of someone in your life that you want to Express gratitude towards then you pick three qualities [10:05] 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 [10:25] 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 as you're watching this you're probably thinking oh my God that feels cringe like I can 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 um 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 [10:47] generous and you know 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 want to go what decisions you want to 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 [11:07] 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 [11:27] that's one of my favorite prompts I love this this is from the book of 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 generally 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 [11:48] worried about money and I'm not worried about what other people will think of me in the new Journal about that it takes a while it's a bit it's a bit intense a lot of people are like oh I don't want to do this because it feels feels hard I don't know I don't have time but genuinely doing this exercise in 20 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 ten different [12:09] 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 the different categories and you just rate out of ten how like 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 [12:28] 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 3 out of ten 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 generally becomes very effective because now the journey that you're doing is not just about understanding your thoughts and feelings although although that's important it also then helps you figure out what [12:48] 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 The 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 can check it out link down below feel good productivity.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 [13:08] 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 yourselves these questions it helps inform what actions you would like to take in the here and now now one of my favorite [13:28] exercises when it comes to journaling is Tim ferriss's Fear setting exercise again all of these problems are in the Google Doc link down below if you want to 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'm 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 [13:47] 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 [14:10] 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 I'm not being like clickbaity about it that's not the objective it 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 hallmosi and he calls it the Solomon conversation or something like that and [14:32] basically the story is about the biblical figure I think was King Solomon who is like incredible at giving advice to other people but his own life wasn't 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 it's about themselves if you only just filed your own advice it'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 [14:54] 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 asked him for advice on what I should do now and that's been really helpful for helping helping me realize that actually you know 29 now but the things that I'm thinking about I'm 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 [15:17] 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 [15:39] taken away from this video that you're going to start doing in your own life because fundamentally watching a video like this is kind of pointless if you're not going to take action on it so I would love for you to share something in the comments and commit to making some sort of action and if you enjoyed this video and you want to 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 [15:57] 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