Just Start Journaling

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1:30Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

2:10Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Here on a Sunday, a chapter from Stillness is the Key about journaling and why journaling is such an important habit. It goes to the core of what stoicism is. Of course, we wouldn't have meditations without the practice of journaling. we wouldn't have so many great works of art so many insights so many inventions without the solitary time that people put in to the practice of journaling and it's funny this is a weird a little morbid thing but i was took my kids to the supermarket today and as we were checking out they had these magazines and i guess no one really buys magazines anymore so there's all these like kind of special one-off editions, but there was an Anne Frank magazine, an issue dedicated to Anne Frank, who is a character in Stillness is the Key, who's someone I read a lot about as I was writing the book, and someone who's sort of a profoundly brave and wise beyond their years person.

3:30But what struck me is that this girl whose life was so tragically cut short by one of the worst things that human beings have ever done to each other, a victim of incredible injustice, why is there this magazine to her? I mean, she'd be like in her, she and Martin Luther King were born like almost the same year. So she'd be quite old, but still alive today, quite reasonably, potentially. She very well could be alive today, but she's not. She's been dead for a very long time. And why has she had the impact that she's had? It's not because she was a victim. That was a thing that happened to her.

4:13But what she affected, who she was, what she did, was all in the pages of this little journal. And I tell that story in Stillness is the Key, which this episode is excerpting. So you can listen to that. And it's actually a really moving biography of Anne Frank that we carry in the painted porch. I'll link to that in today's show notes. And of course, you can get Stillness is the Key anywhere books are sold.

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6:14Start journaling. Keep a notebook, travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it, slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Jack London. For her 13th birthday, a precocious German refugee named Anne Frank was given a small red and white autograph book by her parents. Although the pages were designed to collect the signatures and memories of friends, she knew from the moment she first saw it in a store window that she would use it as a journal. As Anne wrote in her first entry on June 12, 1942, I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you'll be a great source of comfort and support.

7:10No one could have anticipated just how much comfort and support she'd need. 24 days after that first entry, Anne and her Jewish family were forced into hiding in the cramped attic annex of her father's warehouse in Amsterdam. It's where they would spend the next two years hoping the Nazis would not discover them. Anne Frank had wanted a diary for understandable reasons. She was a teenager. She had been lonely, scared, and bored before. But now she was cooped up in a set of cramped, suffocating rooms with six other people. It was all so overwhelming, all so unfair and unfamiliar. She needed somewhere to put those feelings.

7:58According to her father, Otto, Anne didn't write every day. But she always wrote when she was upset or dealing with a problem. She also wrote when she was confused, when she was curious. She wrote in that journal as a form of therapy, so as not to unload her troubled thoughts on the family and compatriots with whom she shared such unenviable conditions. One of her best and most insightful lines must have come on a particularly difficult day. Paper, she said, has more patience than people. Anne used her journal to reflect how noble and good everyone could be, she wrote, if at the end of the day they were to review their own behavior and weigh up the rights and wrongs.

8:45They would automatically try to do better at the start of each new day and after a while would certainly accomplish a great deal. She observed that writing allowed her to watch herself as if she were a stranger. At a time when hormones usually make teenagers more selfish, she regularly reviewed her writings to challenge and improve her own thinking. Even with death lurking outside the doors, she worked to make herself a better person. The list of people, ancient and modern, who practiced the art of journaling is almost comically long and fascinatingly diverse. Among them, Oscar Wilde, Susan Sontag, Marcus Aurelius, Queen Victoria, John Quincy Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Sean Green, Mary Chestnut, Brian Koppelman, Anais Nin, Franz Kafka, Martina Navratilova, and Ben Franklin.

9:50All journalers. Some did it in the morning. Some did it sporadically. Some, like Leonardo da Vinci, kept their notebooks on their person at all times. John F. Kennedy kept a diary during his travels before World War II, and then, as president, was more of a note-taker and a doodler, which is shown in studies to improve memory, on White House stationery, both to clarify his thinking and keep a record of it. Obviously, this is an intimidating list of individuals. But Anne Frank was 13, 14, 15 years old. If she can do it, what excuse do we have? Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, seems to have done his writing and reflection in the evenings, much along the lines of Anne Frank's practice.

10:40When darkness had fallen and his wife had gone to sleep, he explained to a friend, I examine my entire day and go back over what I've done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by. Then he would go to bed finding that the sleep which follows this self-examination was particularly sweet. Anyone who reads him today can feel him reaching for stillness in these nightly writings.

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12:29To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from the Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org, code the Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it.

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13:31Michel Foucault talked of the ancient genre of hupam namada, notes to oneself. He called the journal a weapon for spiritual combat, a way to practice philosophy and purge the mind of agitation and foolishness and to overcome difficulty, to silence the barking dogs in your head, to prepare for the day ahead, to reflect on the day that has passed. Take note of the insights you've heard. Take the time to feel wisdom flow through your fingertips and onto the page. This is what the best journals look like. They aren't for the reader. They are for the writer to slow the mind down, to wage peace with oneself.

14:19Journaling is a way to ask tough questions. Where am I standing in my own way? What's the smallest step I can take toward a big thing today? Why am I so worked up about this? What blessings can I count right now? Why do I care so much about impressing people? What is the harder choice I'm avoiding? Do I rule my fears or do they rule me? How will today's difficulties reveal my character? And by the way, if you want a journal with prompts, you can check out the Daily Stoic Journal, which is written by me and published by Portfolio. While there are plenty of people who will anecdotally swear to the benefits of journaling, The research is compelling too.

15:04According to one study, journaling helps improve well-being after traumatic and stressful events. Similarly, a University of Arizona study showed that people were able to better recover from divorce and move forward if they journaled on the experience. Keeping a journal is a common recommendation from psychologists as well because it helps patience stop obsessing and allows them to make sense of the many inputs, emotional, external, psychological, that would otherwise overwhelm them. That's really the idea. Instead of carrying that baggage around in our head or our hearts, we put it down on paper.

15:46Instead of letting racing thoughts run unchecked or leaving half-baked assumptions unquestioned, we force ourselves to write and examine them. Putting your own thinking down on paper lets you see it from a distance. It gives you objectivity that is so often missing when anxiety and fears and frustrations flood your mind. What's the best way to start journaling? Is there an ideal time of day? How long should it take? Who cares? How you journal is much less important than why you are doing it. to get something off your chest, to have quiet time with your thoughts, to clarify those thoughts, to separate the harmful from the insightful.

16:30There's no right way or wrong way. The point is just to do it. If you've started before and stopped, start again. Getting out of the rhythm happens. The key is to carve out the space again today. The French painter Eugene Delacroix, who called stoicism his consoling religion, struggled as we struggled. I am taking up my journal again after a long break, he said. I think it may be a way of calming this nervous excitement that has been worrying me for so long. Yes, that is what journaling is about. It's spiritual windshield wipers, as the writer Julia Cameron once put it. It's a few minutes of reflection that both demands and creates stillness.

17:20It's a break from the world, a framework for the day ahead, a coping mechanism for troubles of the hours just passed, a revving up of your creative juices for relaxing and clearing. Once, twice, three times a day, whatever, find what works for you. Just know that it may turn out to be the most important thing you do all day.

17:51Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The obstacle is the way. Ego is the enemy. Stillness is the key. The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.

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