Name: Change Your Life by Journalling in 2025
Uploaded: 2025-01-16T13:41:15.000Z
Duration: 16 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey friends, welcome back to the channel.

So if there is one single habit that's most changed my life, that habit is journaling.

I've been journaling pretty consistently since like 2015, and I can attribute so many of the good things that have happened in my life as a result of journaling consistently.

Now you might be thinking that you don't have time for journaling.

What good is writing about your thoughts and feelings gonna do anyway?

Maybe you've tried it a couple of times and it hasn't really worked for you.

But something that I put a lot of money on is that if you approach journaling in the right way, then I can basically guarantee that it can change your life for the better.

So in this video, I wanna share the why behind journaling, why it's such a powerful tool for changing your life.

We're gonna talk about how to actually journal and the three levels of journaling.

And along the way, I'm gonna be sharing a bunch of different powerful questions and journaling prompts that I find incredibly useful for driving positive change in my life.

So broadly, there are three main reasons why journaling is incredibly effective.

Firstly, it's a nice way to look back on your memories.

If you write about what you've been up to and how you've been feeling, it's super nice.

I now look back from journal entries for the last like eight years, and I can see what I was doing on this day, a year ago, two years ago, four years ago, five years ago, and it's really cool to see the progression of my life.

But then we've got reason number two, which is even more powerful, which is that journaling helps you take control of your own thoughts and your own mind.

Now, especially if you're prone to stress or worry or anxiety or fear, or you're letting fear of judgment and fear of failure and fear of self doubt, you're letting these things hold you back from doing the things that you really want to do.

The reason for that is that your mind has a thought like, I don't know, I am unworthy, I'm not good enough, I'm unloved, I'm not good enough to do this thing.

And because the mind is so powerful, it can immediately marshal up evidence to support that limiting belief.

Now, the benefit of journaling is that by writing this stuff down, by writing down your thoughts and feelings, you cut through the BS that the mind is very good at generating.

And when you see these thoughts written down on paper, it's easier to not believe them so much because our minds can lie to us.

Our mind is ultimately a survival machine that's just trying to keep us out of danger.

And the more you write about your thoughts and feelings, the more of this sort of detachment you get from it, you stop identifying so much with your thoughts and feelings.

And this really helps for people who are struggling with anxiety or fear or unworthiness or lack of self-love, which to some degree is literally everyone on the planet.

But the third, and I think the most important benefit of journaling is that journaling can completely change the way that you approach your life.

So let's imagine this kind of diagram, and it's pretty uncontroversial to say that our results and the outcomes that we get from life are broadly correlated with what actions we consistently do.

If, for example, you eat well and you exercise regularly, then the result is that you're gonna be fairly healthy and fit.

But what is the thing that leads to the actions?

Well, I would argue that that thing is decisions.

Initially, before taking an action, you decide what decision to take, and then that decision dictates the actions, and then the actions lead to the results.

For example, for me, the decision to start this YouTube channel six and a half years ago dictated the actions, i.e. making videos consistently, which has led to the results of my life being completely transformed.

Whether you decide to take this job or that job, whether you decide to marry this person or that person, whether you decide to move to this city or that city completely changes the direction of your life.

But there's one thing that's upstream of decisions, and that is thoughts and feelings.

Now, within thoughts and feelings, we've got beliefs, which are just thoughts and feelings that we identify with very strongly.

And then we also have the stories that we tell ourselves about our life and about our place in the world.

And then we also have the day-to-day thoughts and feelings that we all experience.

And all of these things combine our beliefs, our stories, and our thoughts and feelings to lead to certain decisions.

For example, for you to make the decision that you're gonna start your own business, you have to have the thought that that would be a cool thing to do.

You've gotta have the feeling of self-confidence.

You have to have the thought of what the concept is, what the business model is gonna be.

You have to have a bunch of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in order to get to the decision, and then that decision dictates your actions, and then those actions completely change your life.

So why are we talking about all this stuff and where does journaling fit in?

Well, journaling is how we understand our thoughts and feelings, because journaling is literally the process of writing down our thoughts and feelings so that we can interrogate them, so that we can ask questions of ourselves, and so that we can get clarity on what are the stories and beliefs and thoughts and feelings that we actually have.

Now, other than journaling, there's another really cool tool that I use to help me figure out what I've actually been doing with my time, and that is Rise, who are very kindly sponsoring this video.

Now, I've been using Rise every single day since November of 2021, so it's been almost two years since I started using Rise, and it's a fantastic cross-platform apps that tracks your time across any website or any app that you're using.

And so without having to think about it, you can see how productive and intentional you're being when spending your time.

Like I can show you how much time you spent on Zoom calls, how much time you spend on Notion writing stuff, how much time you spend on Google Docs, how much time you spend on YouTube and Netflix and Disney Plus and all this other stuff, and it helps you track how many hours you've worked across the whole week.

It gives you reminders if you've been working for more than 50 minutes of when you need to take a break.

And I really like it as a way of helping me understand what I've actually done with my time, and sometimes I'll even screenshot the Rise window and chuck it into my journaling app of choice, which is day one.

And actually I liked the app so much that I reached out to the founders and asked if I could invest in it.

And so we as a company are now angel investors in Rise because we believe in it so much and because it's just great.

So if any of that sounds up your street and you would like a really effective and low friction way to track your time and figure out how you're spending your time and whether you're spending it intentionally, then head over to rise.io forward slash Ali Abdaal.

And if you use that link or you use the code Ali Abdaal, then you can get 25% your first three months.

So thank you so much Rise for sponsoring this video and let's get back to journaling.

Let's now talk about how to journal and the three levels of journaling.

So level one is the most basic form of journaling.

And this is where you just write down what are the things you have done today?

Now, one of my favourite ways of doing this is from this book, Storyworthy by Matthew Dix, which I read in 2020 and was the best book that I read that year, hands down.

Now, Matthew Dix is a world champion storyteller.

He's won competitions, like world competitions for the thing, which are apparently a thing.

And one of the exercises that he uses to tell better stories is called homework for life.

And the idea behind this is that at the end of every day, you ask yourself, what was the most story worthy thing that happened to me today?

And you just write this down as a maximum of two sentences and you're kind of imagining, if I had to tell a five minute story about something that happened today, what would that be?

Now, Matthew writes, not every day contains a story worthy moment for me, but I found that the longer I did my homework, the more days did contain one.

And my friend Plato has said that I can turn the act of picking up a pebble from the ground into a great story.

The truth is this, I simply see more story worthy moments in the day than most people.

They don't go unnoticed as they once did.

I discovered that there is beauty and import in my life that I never would have imagined before doing my homework and that the small unexpected moments of beauty are oftentimes some of my most compelling stories.

And what I love about the homework for life strategy, which admittedly I've been fairly on and off doing since 2020, since reading the book, but in the months where I've actually been sticking to this consistently, I have found that it's actually increased my appreciation for life because now I remember the small details.

If I think back to what I did last week, I have to look at my calendar.

I'm like, I have no idea what I did last week.

But when I look back through my journal, I can see, oh, that was the day that this happened.

That was a cool thing that happened here and there and there and there.

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.

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 woo, but this is like such a fantastic book and like almost every creative person that I've ever met has read this book and swears by the methods that Julia Cameron talks about.

But in this book, there's a technique called morning pages, which you might've come across before.

Basically the idea is that every morning you just write out three pages by hand, ideally, of just whatever is on your mind.

Now, when I do my morning pages, I get out my notebook and I start with the phrase, today is going to be a great day.

If I don't know what else to write, I'll say it's 1038 on a Monday morning and I'm sitting on the dining table in the house.

The sun is streaming in and dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

And I find that on the days that I do this, A, my mind feels less scattered because I've taken the time to kind of offload some of my thoughts onto the page.

And I also come up with really interesting ideas for videos or for writing or for work.

And it's just taking that 20 minutes in the morning, sometimes 15 minutes, sometimes less, to just write down some thoughts.

And morning pages is another fantastic way of getting started with journaling.