Why keep a diary? Life is a great thing! Journaling Makes You Efficient
Understand yourself, understand yourself own desires Constantly keeping a diary allows you to analyze mistakes. When a lot of thoughts are collected in your head, it is best to throw them out on paper. Recording events that happen during the day in Personal diary, there is a unique opportunity to carefully analyze the mistakes, actions and deeds committed. You can draw a conclusion about how correctly you acted under the circumstances. In general, solid advantages.
10 main points about the importance of a personal diary
So, to understand why you should keep a diary and write down all your thoughts, actions and plans there, you should study the main benefits of this activity.
A personal diary allows you to achieve your goals.
All plans or desires must be written out in detail on paper. An unwritten goal can be forgotten over time, distracted by other activities, or pushed into the background due to circumstances. And the written goal is sure to be firmly fixed in the mind and becomes a guideline for movement in life. The brain begins to search for everything on its own possible ways achievement of planned plans. Some scientists compare this behavior of the brain to the operation of an autopilot on an airplane. If you ask people who were unable to get the desired result, whether their final goal on paper, they will answer no. Conversely, many people who get what they want always record their thoughts in a personal diary. Ask them why to keep a diary, and you will hear a whole string of reasons. Writing down desires on paper in most cases guarantees success.
Helps you lead a conscious life.
By recording their thoughts, comments or observations daily in a diary, people get the opportunity to look at themselves from the outside after some time. This allows you to think about your lifestyle, analyze its correctness and your sense of purpose. We can forget a lot, this is human nature. The diary will tell you. Are you living the way you previously wanted? Are you doing what you planned? Or are you “bogged down” in everyday problems, difficulties at work and are not at all striving for what you really wanted?
A personal diary will save ideas
All people are visited from time to time. But if they are not written down on paper, they are lost and forgotten. To prevent this from happening to you, write down all your brilliant thoughts in a diary. Even those ideas that seem unrealizable today can “shoot” tomorrow. You don’t want to forget about them tomorrow, do you?
A personal diary disciplines
If you write down in a diary all the things you plan to do in the near future, then the likelihood of doing them increases significantly. The point here is not only that you will not forget about them. You can rank the tasks recorded in your diary according to the degree of importance for you, and there you can develop a plan for their implementation.
The diary teaches you to express your thoughts competently and clearly.
If you are disciplined, good with ideas and achieving goals, and still don’t understand why keeping a diary, what exactly this activity will give you, then you should pay attention to this point. Keeping a personal diary is a kind of story about the life of one person. You become a writer who improves your skills every day. This way of expressing thoughts motivates you to make your story better and more interesting.
Allows you to learn from your mistakes
By looking at the events and actions described in the diary, you can look at them from a different perspective. In this sense, a diary is a powerful transformational tool. You should use your experience in the future to prevent similar mistakes.
Strengthens self-confidence
The question of why many people keep diaries is very relevant today. Many of them become more self-confident over time, analyzing the past, changing the future, and understanding themselves. To do this, just open the notes made several years ago and read the recorded thoughts. This effective method understand how much you have grown in a particular area, how much your attitude towards certain issues has changed. And an analysis of a child’s personal diary can not only charge you with energy and positive emotions after reading touching “problems,” but also find an absolutely non-comical solution critical situations adult life.
Increases the efficiency of actions
To understand why other people keep diaries, try writing down on paper all your daily experiences for a month. After reading these posts after a while, you will notice how much wiser and more experienced you have become. Emotions poured out onto paper, ideas written down, and goals written step-by-step in a personal diary help you structure your life and act more effectively.
Relieves negative emotions
It's no secret that all positive thoughts written in a diary acquire special power. Thus, keeping a personal diary allows you to get rid of sadness, envy or anger. If you have accumulated a lot of worries during the day, you should not throw them out on your loved ones. You just need to start a personal diary and write down your thoughts there. Share your experiences with your diary, this will help not only to avoid scandals, but also to understand the problem.
Personal diary - tutorial
Answer all your questions. If you decide to keep a personal diary, then try to concentrate on what really matters to you in life. It's no secret that the beginning of a personal diary rarely coincides with its middle. Your thoughts and goals change and become clearer. You develop, allow yourself to look at your life from the outside. Try to achieve the results you deserve. Teach yourself to live, think and feel correctly.
In conclusion, it is worth noting that any beginning of a personal diary is a modest attempt to write down your actions and plans on paper. But over time, this behavior will become a habit and the notes will become more sensual and meaningful. From banal descriptions of events you will move on to an in-depth analysis of situations. This will help in completely unexpected ways. life situations. Give it a try.
It would seem that it’s so difficult to keep a personal diary? Sit down and write all your thoughts in a notebook. But I want this “collection” to have some kind of zest of its own. To make your diary inspire you, it is enough to know some small tricks for filling it out.
How to keep a personal diary - the beginning
To begin, select a notepad or notebook for your notes. Give preference to paper media with a hard cover. After all, the diary will travel with you for a long time and can get pretty shabby. Think about it, why are you keeping a diary? Start from this when choosing the design of a notepad or notebook. Some people turn on electronic diaries. There are special programs for keeping records on a computer. You can use regular text editors.
How to keep a personal diary - tools
Be sure to choose beautiful pens different colors. Choose stickers, markers, bookmarks and other little things to highlight your thoughts, quotes, and interesting phrases. You can choose a cover for your diary and make it yourself. Start enriching your little world with such little things.
How to keep a personal diary - ideas
No one forbids you to spy on ideas for keeping diaries on the Internet and copy them for yourself.
To make your diary interesting, use:
- magazine clippings, candy wrappers;
- commemorative photographs;
- drawings on unusual materials(napkins, live leaves);
- dried flowers and herbs;
- textile;
- old postcards and calendars.
How to keep a personal diary - systematize it
The diary can be divided into parts using special markers. For example: “Love”, “Travel and Adventure”, “Thoughts out loud”, “Quotes from books”, etc. Write relevant information in each section. This will make it easier for you to find required material in future.
How to keep a personal diary - sketchbook
Nowadays it has become very popular to keep a sketchbook. Here much attention is paid to drawings. A sketchbook is perfect for creative “souls” who are involved in the world of handicrafts and design and like to constantly sketch out their ideas, signing them with a few phrases. Thus, a sketchbook can be turned into a collection of recipes with original drawings, into a collection of comics. With a sketchbook you can do doodling. To understand the meaning of this word, remember your long telephone conversations. You pick up a pen and start scribbling meaninglessly on a piece of paper. This is doodling. “Turn off” your brain and just draw.
Journaling is an exciting journey. Thanks to it, you can speak out, generate new ideas, become a writer or even an artist. Psychologists recommend keeping diaries regularly. Do not deny yourself the pleasure and start keeping a diary!
It's amazing that such simple thing, like a personal diary, can simultaneously be a creative laboratory, a caring psychotherapist, a source of memories, a tool for self-development, and most importantly, a reliable shelter behind which you can be absolutely honest with others and with yourself. Even more surprising is that all these qualities are often not realized even by those who once tried to keep regular notes in their notebooks, notepads and diaries.
Keeping a diary is not fruitless soul-searching. This is not an activity intended exclusively for young girls and teenagers who need to sort out their feelings and sentimental experiences. And this is not just a prosecutorial, businesslike recording of the events that happened to you over the past day.
It is also wrong to think that keeping a diary is only for outstanding people who “have something to say.” It is true that among famous writers, scientists or artists it is difficult to find anyone who does not keep notes intended only for themselves. But even if you do not claim to be a genius, this is not at all a reason to abandon this useful practice. In addition, there is always the possibility that you are still a genius, and many years after your death, your heirs will receive substantial fees for the publication of your diary.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Nausea
For the most banal incident to turn into an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient to tell it.<...>Every person is always a storyteller, he lives surrounded by stories, his own and others, and sees everything that happens to him through their prism. So he tries to fit his life into the story about her.
Diaries are written to be written, read and re-read. Here are some answers to the reasonable question “what is this for?”:
- to pour out on paper and realize those feelings that cannot be trusted to others;
- to figure out what you want from life;
- to understand how well your plans correspond to reality and whether you are moving towards their implementation correctly;
- to better understand other people and learn to take their point of view into account;
- to practice expressing your thoughts and learn to reason;
- to recognize and change harmful thinking habits and behavioral patterns;
- to develop intuitive thinking and creativity.
What to write about
Who am I?
A sheet of paper that will “endure anything” - almost the only place in this world where you can be yourself. This may be said too categorically: in the end, each personality is multifaceted and needs different contexts for its realization. But the honesty and openness achievable in a diary are very rarely available to us in other areas of life.
In your diary you can reflect on your past and make plans for the future. This is a well-known exercise: try to imagine what kind of life you would like to lead in 5/10/15 years? Then relate what you are doing now to your long-term intentions. If the pictures don't add up, maybe it's time to change something. In this practice, it is the recording procedure that is useful.
If you think about the future, the gaps between dreams and reality smooth out. In the recording they appear clearly.
If you don't know what you want to do in this world, a journal will help you get closer to understanding your strengths and deep intentions. Record in your diary what brings you joy and causes sincere interest. A person immersed in business may suddenly realize that under the business mask there has always been the soul of a poet. The diary will provide him with the opportunity to develop this particular side of his personality, without forgetting about the others.
If you have been keeping a diary for several years, rereading it will reveal your personality in dynamics. How have your priorities and values changed? What was important to you then and what remains now? This is how keeping a diary helps you see your life as a holistic, albeit incomplete, picture. The diary brings unity and length to a series of broken moments, in it “each moment carries the burden of everything that preceded and the germ of everything that follows” (Lydia Ginzburg).
Lev Tolstoy
Resurrection
I didn’t write a diary for two years and thought that I would never return to this childhood. And this was not childishness, but a conversation with oneself, with that true, divine self that lives in every person. All the time this I was sleeping, and I had no one to talk to.
With the “true self”, perhaps Lev Nikolaevich went a little too far. The diary does not remove all social masks, because this is impossible. But it helps you understand which one fits you better. Perhaps this understanding will lead to a change of masks, a change of personality. As Susan Sontag wrote in her diary, “By disguising my behavior, I am not protecting my personality - I am overcoming it”. The surest way to change something is to understand how it works. The diary does not just record what is happening around; it changes its owner. Usually for the better.
If you suffer from low self-esteem, lack of self-confidence and see only the negative in everything, journaling can help you overcome these bad thinking habits and look at the world more realistically. This is exactly how a diary is used, for example, in cognitive behavioral psychotherapy. This is not only useful, but also absolutely free (unlike visits to an analyst and antidepressants).
There has been recent scientific evidence of the benefits of journaling. Psychologists from Duke University (USA) discovered that writing down exciting events and one’s own experiences not only improves memory and well-being, but also reduces the frequency of visits to doctors.
Timothy Wilson, one of the authors of the study, writes about it this way: “Writing interventions like this can really help people start thinking positively and believing in themselves.” own strength"; “Writing makes people understand everything that bothers them and find new meaning in it.”
People prone to self-flagellation usually ignore praise, but react extremely sharply to any critical remarks. If you keep track of times when you were praised, either explicitly or implicitly, you may be surprised to learn that others don't treat you as badly as you thought. When you are depressed after another failure, re-read the notes about joyful events and situations when you showed your best side.
After this, it will become much easier to believe that the world is not so bad and hopeless, and all difficulties are surmountable.
As one of the Buddhist thinkers said, the “I” given in reflection is not the true “I”, it is constructed by the mind. But it is a mistake to think that this “I” can be found somewhere else. To believe that a real person does not reflect, but commits actions, is at least naive and unfair: you need to do both.
How do I treat other people?
The constant heroes of the diary are not only ourselves, but also our loved ones. Some people keep a diary solely to vent their resentment, anger, feelings of loneliness, abandonment and misunderstanding that haunt them in their relationships with others. And here you can figure out how this relationship works: why do you repeat the same mistakes? What do you expect from your loved ones and how justified are these expectations?
You can take notes in the format of an “unsent letter”, expressing fully what you cannot say in real communication. You can try to take the position of another person and write a monologue on his behalf: how does he see the current situation? maybe you are missing something and from his point of view everything looks completely different? Such exercises help develop empathy and the ability to see the world as a multidimensional space of choice and assessment, in which everyone is right in their own way.
A diary will not replace live communication and real relationships. As Theodor Adorno wrote, “we do not become free people because we ourselves, as the terrible saying goes, let's implement each alone, but due to the fact that we go beyond our own limits, we enter into relationships with other people and, in a sense, abandon ourselves in them.” For self-development, it is not enough to create a safe platform for yourself where you can “water and grow yourself like flowers” - this requires other people and real actions. But a journal will help you understand what you want from them, what is really important to you.
If you can give yourself an honest answer to these questions, then building relationships with other people will become much easier.
An example of using a diary to solve personal dilemmas can be found in the biography of Charles Darwin. When it comes to marriage, he, with the meticulousness of a naturalist, writes out the disadvantages (“an endless variety of troubles and expenses ... disputes due to lack of society - morning visits - a daily waste of time”) and the advantages of this enterprise (“it is impossible to lead a life alone, without participation, without children... Don't be discouraged, trust in chance - look around closely - there are many happy slaves"). And in the end he makes a decision: he definitely needs to get married.
Diary as an intellectual and creative laboratory
A diary can become a place where vague thoughts and experiences are melted into precise formulations and artistic images. You don't have to be a professional writer or artist to think and imagine. Creative abilities are not class privileges. They are accessible to anyone, but not everyone uses the entrance. A personal diary is exactly the place where you can think and fantasize as much as you like and not be afraid that someone will judge you for your naivety and graphomania.
Write down in your journal thoughts and ideas from books you read that resonated with you. Make reference lists. Create verbal portraits of people and thinkers close to you. Make sketches. Make up. Paste in photographs and magazine clippings. Make collages. Write down your dreams (the list goes on and on).
Pablo Picasso
Spanish artist, sculptor and designer, founder of Cubism
Painting is just another way of journaling.
The diary assumes complete freedom of expression: here you can do whatever you want. But over time, you will realize that certain forms of expression come easier to you than others.
The personal diary as a form of writing appears to have first appeared in Japan. The diaries of Japanese court ladies and poets, recorded in the 10th-11th centuries, have reached us, where prose easily flows into poetry. Some fragments from these diaries may also touch the modern reader:
“If only my thoughts were the same as others... I could find more joy, I would feel less old and I would observe this transitory life with peace.<...>When dawn broke, I looked outside and saw ducks swimming serenely in the lake.
Ducks in the lake -
Can I look at them?
Indifferent?
Crossing the stormy waters
Sad world and me.
The birds looked so serene, but they, too, must often suffer, I thought” (Murasaki-shikibu. Diary. XXIII. 13th day of the 10th moon).
As writer Tristina Rainer points out in her book The New Diary, the diary form corresponds to all four basic mechanisms of human perception, which include emotion, sensation, intuition and intellect. Try to develop each of these qualities, avoid monotony. And then, quite possibly, the diary will become fertile ground for you to develop ideas that will go beyond its boundaries and find embodiment in real creative projects.
Five rules for keeping a diary
1. Write honestly.
As honest as possible. Even in entries that no one except you will see, you will be embarrassed or ashamed to write about some things. It is worth taking a closer look at where this awkwardness arises, where you yourself are hiding the truth from yourself. No one deceives a person as often and successfully as he himself. But it is much easier to recognize the sources and causes of self-deception in a diary than in mental reasoning.
2. Contain your inner censor and critic.
We not only hide the truth from ourselves, but also strive to present our sincere experiences in an unattractive way. This role is played by the internal censor - the embodiment of the Freudian “super-ego”, that is, internalized social attitudes and ideas about “how it should be.” He is accompanied by an inner critic, for whom subtle artistic taste and depth of reasoning are more important than sincerity. To get rid of these annoying creatures, try writing in stream-of-consciousness mode. Write down everything that comes to your mind: images, experiences, vague sensations and memories.
Reflection is useful, but it is far from the only way to understand what is happening to you and your life.
3. Write for yourself.
We are accustomed to the fact that any message is intended for some addressee. But a personal diary should not be aimed at the public (this, by the way, is one of the many differences between a diary and a blog). If you write for an audience, no matter how narrow, your inner censor and critic will mercilessly edit your message. Better try to write for yourself. Perhaps a good recipient would be your future self reading the diary in a few years.
4. Pay attention to detail.
So that you can then recall past events in your memory, try to record the details and shades of what is happening. If you simply write “it was bad,” it will tell you much less than “I’m lying here on the sofa, thrown out of the world with one kick, lying in wait for a dream that doesn’t want to come, and if it comes, it will only touch me, my joints hurt from fatigue, my thin body is exhausted by a trembling of excitement, the meaning of which it does not dare to clearly understand, pounding in my temples” (quote from the diary of Franz Kafka).
5. Use paper and ink.
This is a recommendation here not because of inertia and retrogradeness. When you take notes by hand, your handwriting can say as much about your feelings as the words themselves. In addition, you can carry a paper notebook with you everywhere, unlike a laptop (and taking notes on a smartphone is not very convenient). Sometimes just feeling the rough surface of the paper notebook in which you write in your hands is enough to feel a sense of confidence and security. It is better, by the way, to use notebooks with clean sheets, not lined diaries. The main thing is to choose writing accessories so that keeping a diary gives you pleasure.
Some people believe that journal entries should be written daily. It seems to me that this is not at all necessary.
It is better to write when there is a desire or need to understand something, so that keeping a diary does not turn into another boring “must”. But at first, before a habit has formed, you will have to force yourself to open a notebook and write at least something. But if the first words are found, the rest will be found.
Do not forget that each diary is a reflection of the personality of its owner (even if incomplete and distorted). Therefore, these recommendations are somewhat general in nature. But even they should not be taken too literally. What works for the conventional Leo Tolstoy may be completely useless for you. The individual style of keeping a diary develops over the years and changes over time. But to understand how a diary can benefit you, you first need to start one.
Personal diaries. To write or not to write? To store or not to store? Have you ever asked yourself these questions?
I have been keeping a diary since I was 10 years old until now. How did I get this idea? It's hard to say... I don't remember anymore. But it completely fit into my life at that time.
The love for beautiful notebooks, notepads, pens..., the desire to achieve something, to make yourself and your life better - all this already existed in 1996. It still exists now.
I remember how my friend and I scribbled thick notebooks where everything was about healthy lifestyle. How I enjoyed creating my own profiles and filling out others’. How I wrote poetry. How I wrote down the lyrics of my favorite songs.
It also contains a description of the first relationship with a young man. Relationships similar to adults. Experiences, joys, difficulties, happy moments together - all this remained there... in that diary, which now does not exist and will never exist. And he still stands before my eyes.
Student diaries
3. It also contains a lot of pleasant memories and meeting new people. Including Lesha, whom I already wrote about on Alimero (“Love at First Sight”).
And even though I myself made the decision to break up with him and quite quickly, I really like this story of how we met, it’s nice to remember it. And in general, I have the best human feelings for Lyosha, despite the fact that I refused further communication.
I also wanted to burn another diary, for 2007 - the year that was for me the happiest and most painful at the same time. I decided to re-read it first and then... they turned off the lights for the whole night. I decided that this was a sign. Now, a month later, I am incredibly glad that I left him!
To store or not? Psychological aspects
If you use diaries only as a way of psychological relief, then it is not necessary to keep them. And if those memories are dear to your heart, if these notes mean a lot, you need to leave them! Now, after burning most of my notes, I am 100% sure of this!
I write a diary exclusively for myself. Therefore, there is no show, everything is extremely sincere. And when I write, I don’t expect anyone else to read them.
However, the thought that I would have children and they would want to read my writings came more than once. Would I be happy about this? I don’t know... Probably, first I would look through them myself, and then I would decide whether to give them or not. Although, who should read them then (if read at all), except the closest people who are an extension of you?
There is one more aspect. By reading your thoughts from the past, you can understand a lot. Understand the circumstances of life, the actions of people around you... In the end, understand yourself! After all, this can sometimes be very difficult! Understand what you were like and how you have changed...
I’ll finish again with lines from my poem:
There is no person who can
So listen to me.
Ah, my diary, you helped me
Don't lose yourself!..
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Right now, in different parts of the world, a huge number of people are writing something in their personal diaries. Someone may be crying and writing with a trembling hand about an unfulfilled dream, while someone is smiling and with a slight blush on their cheeks talking about a successful first date. Someone tries to remember every second of the past day, every task completed, while someone, tired and sleepy, puts their last strength into a couple of lines about the sweet girl who brought a letter to the office today. But why do they all do this? Why keep a personal diary? What's the point of this?
Secondly, a personal diary is the best psychologist. Even if we cannot write everything, we will definitely think about it. You can find a way out of even the most difficult situations, and a diary helps a lot with this. Having thought about everything that is happening, talking about everything in the diary, in the end we are able to make some kind of decision. We don’t always have the opportunity to speak out, and this is very important. If you keep everything to yourself, in the end, you can lead yourself to a nervous breakdown and acquire several types of psychological disorders at once. Do we need it? We should never forget that “everything we are is the result of our thoughts.”
And finally, fourthly, a personal diary – our tears. It is not for nothing that I singled out this reason for the existence of personal diaries separately from the psychological diary. How much suffering, how many emotions we sometimes experience while writing a personal diary. All our tears remain on the pages of a notebook or small notebook, they remain in absolutely all words, in every letter, in every comma or period. These are tears of joy, sadness, fear, resentment, happiness, anger and many other feelings. There is no need to be afraid of anything, because if a person is honest with himself, he can be honest and open with other people. And this is my last answer to the question of why keep a personal diary.
Thus, I came to the conclusion that a personal diary can be different, its content and type depend only on its owner. I said a lot, so, for sure, someone perceived it as reality, someone as naive stupidity, someone even considered it empty nonsense. And all conclusions will be partly correct. After all, we are different, everyone has their own thoughts and their own worldview. This means that keeping a personal diary will not be interesting or important for everyone.