How to Start Writing Diaries to Increase Your Success in Life?

19 سبتمبر 2024

Writing diaries is the best way to relieve stress, gain clarity, and improve life. The value of this practice is not recognized despite how simple it is, which is not surprising, given that people are surprised that something so simple can have such significant advantages. Instead, they search for other enchanted solutions to solve all their problems and enhance their quality of life.

But in reality, the secret lies in journaling. Writing diaries may not solve all your problems, but it certainly takes your focus to the level where you find the answers inside your mind. So, if you haven't practiced writing diaries before and are wondering how it's done, you've found the article that will tell you how to write your journal and its benefits.

What is writing diaries?

Writing diaries is a very personal activity, represented in very different forms, but all of them are consistent in that their main benefits are to relieve stress and improve self-awareness.

The question is: What exactly are you writing about? It is entirely up to you. The great thing about writing diaries is that there is no right or wrong way; you can write about events during your day, feelings, dreams, or desires.

Freedom to practice writing diaries is also one of its strengths. You must allocate this practice to what benefits you and inspires you more. Of course, you do not have to start from scratch. There are many common techniques in writing diaries that you can try, and you can also invent your own technique.

Common writing diaries techniques

1. A gratitude diary

is a practice in which you write about things you are grateful for in your life, such as having clean drinking water and food on your table.

2. Meditation diary

is the practice in which you write about a particular event to better understand it, and its usefulness is that the feelings are not in the same strength as when the event occurs. This type of writing provides you with a different perspective.

3. Future Ambition Diary

is a writing practice that aims to express the person you dream of being in the future or what you want to achieve. This method helps you imagine the outcome you want and is an excellent strategy for positively changing your life.

4. A fundamental Values Diary

is a writing in which you define some basic values during a specific period, seek to develop them, and then write down your diary, such as recording your progress toward establishing those values.

There are two other forms of writing diaries, but as we said earlier, you don't have to follow one strict journaling method. You can come up with your own ideas or combine many forms, and that's what makes writing diaries so much fun.

You can try different forms of writing diaries until you find the one that works best for you, but the most important thing in writing diaries for beginners is to find a way to keep up with the practice.

Benefits of keeping a journal

There are many benefits to writing a diary, and these benefits are diverse and fall into topics, such as:

Relieve anxiety.
Improving self-awareness.
Improved self-esteem.
Achieve your goals faster.

The list goes on for much longer, but we'll cover the top 6 benefits of writing diaries, so keep in mind that you may enjoy many or few of these benefits, depending on the topic you choose to write about.

For example, if you only write about the past, you may not find writing diaries helpful in achieving your goals, but if you only write about your goals, you may not see that writing diaries improve your self-awareness.

However, if you write in your journal about a variety of topics, you may get all of the following benefits:

1. Calm the Mind

You may have experienced how the mind continues to generate new ideas, even when you don't want to, and sometimes these ideas aren't desirable or valuable.

Our minds are often chaotic and turbulent, and it can be difficult to control yourself during difficult times, but writing can help you calm your troubled mind, and you'll notice how your mind calms down when you start writing.

The reason for this is clear. Writing requires your brain to organize and focus, and while your brain tries to produce ideas quickly, writing is often slower, as the brain is forced to slow down to keep up with your speed, which makes writing diaries so calming and even therapeutic.

Although writing requires some effort at the beginning when you are in the learning stage, it is a great activity to calm the mind, and this benefit is significant and forms the basis for other benefits.

2. Relieve Anxiety and Stress

When you are stressed, your body convulses, your mind begins to exert strenuous efforts in thinking, and your nervous system releases many hormones in a state of stress, such as adrenaline and cortisol. As a result, you feel upset, your heart races, and your brain is in a state of hyper-focus. Although stress is useful in some situations, chronic stress is not, and anxiety and depression may cause a variety of problems.

Writing diaries helps you calm yourself, making it an excellent practice for overcoming chronic anxiety and stress, and it also reduces stress by expelling negative thoughts. Journaling is the liberation of emotions, and it works great against chronic psychological problems.

3. Clarify Your Vision

Many people often make great efforts to figure out the right choice to make or in situations where they are in front of a critical decision.

Writing a diary helps them in these cases. Writing things that occupy your mind organizes your thoughts differently from abstract thinking and makes you feel that your mind is moving in wide horizons, which expands your imagination and increases the clarity of your ideas.

Moreover, when you write what you think, you are forced to organize your thoughts, and this mechanism has a magical effect in making your ideas clearer. Although what we have mentioned is not scientific, journaling has benefits everyone can test. Because writing organizes your thoughts and makes them clearer, it helps you discover your goal.

4. Develop Self-awareness

Regardless of the topic you write about in your diary, it will improve your self-awareness. When you learn how to write your diary as a beginner, you will be forced to slow down and modify your thinking, which helps you see things differently. It also gives you wonderful perceptions of your feelings and thoughts. Writing also gives you a more comprehensive perspective and helps you discover patterns you did not notice before.

Also, one of the benefits of writing is that when you write about a feeling or event, your feelings are not as intense as they are at the event. For example, you may be angry with someone, and your anger may seem justified at that moment, but when you think about it later, you realize that your anger may have been exaggerated.

These insights are very effective, and from them, personal change begins, especially when you have these insights about your behavior and thoughts. In addition, discovering the secrets of yourself and your awareness is fun.

5. Enhance Enthusiasm

You will get the maximum benefits when you practice writing diaries, which focus on your future, and your journal may be about big goals or small daily goals. The benefit of this type of writing diary is that you focus on your ambitions, and we know that what you think most of the time turns into reality.

As a reminder, it is difficult to feel positive when you always think negatively. Also, if you always think about the negative things that happened to you in the past, it is difficult to make a better future for yourself, so focus in your diary on the future you want to achieve. You will be able to set the pace of your thinking for the rest of the day.

6. Improve Communication With Others

This benefit may be surprising, but writing diaries is the only practice of its kind that improves your communication with others, and to communicate more effectively, you need two main things:

The ability to listen and understand the other person's perspective.
The ability to present your point of view clearly.

While it may seem easy to possess these two elements, it is one of the most challenging skills in the world, and few people have it, but these two elements can be mastered through writing diaries.

When you practice the meditative type of diary writing through which you review past events, you see things from a different perspective. You emerge from imagining what happened to a state of understanding, absorbing, and taking lessons. Although writing here focuses on events from the past, it helps you learn many lessons when you meditate by writing diaries.

And so, when you are exposed to the same situation in the future, you will be more able to control yourself and influence others, which is important to improve the quality of your life.

5 Tips for Starting a Diary

Writing diaries is a great way to increase your self-awareness and gain a deep understanding of the facts in reality, and with these five tips, you'll be able to start writing your diaries.

1. Use a diary

You may be wondering: What is the importance of writing in a diary ? What is the difference between a diary and writing in a notebook? Of course, nothing in principle prevents you from using a notebook to write your diary, but a diary has a specificity and impact that a notebook does not have.

The reason for this is that when you write in a journal, it seems more special than a regular notebook. This helps you stay motivated to write a diary. Here are some options for a diary:

The diary is white pages. It is used for free writing, and it is free of any regulation.
A structured diary contains goal divisions, calendars, and some psychological and emotional reviews.
Habits diary is used to be able to organize its structure yourself.
A five-minute diary is used to write down things you're grateful for.
A dedicated productivity diary is recommended for people who care about their goals.

2. Choose a topic to write about

Writing diaries comes in many forms, styles, and patterns to the point you may feel exhausted at first. You may wonder: Where to start? When is the best time to write a diary? What topics should I write about? The only way to know these answers is through practice.

Some people like to write for 20 minutes continuously without restrictions or preconceptions of what to write. Others like to write briefly and select specific topics to write about. You may prefer weekly writing, while some prefer daily writing. You may see that mixing weekly and daily writing is useful.

So, as we mentioned earlier, there's no right or wrong way to do this, and the best way to find what you prefer is to experiment. Here are some topics you can write about, with some hints to help you as a beginner:

Goals: What are the three goals you want to achieve today?
Gratitude: What three things are you grateful for?
Self-reflection: What was the last situation that happened to you that you didn't like the way you handled it? How could you have behaved differently? Will the result be different too?
Emotions: What feelings did you feel today? What triggered these feelings?
Happiness: What made you happy today?
Self-development: What have you learned today?
Energy: What can you do today to energize yourself?
A task you want to accomplish: If there was one thing in the world you wanted to change, what would that be?

You may want to tweak these details a bit depending on whether you intend to write your diary in the morning or evening, so try two of these topics, but keep in mind the following rule:

3. Commit to writing diaries for at least 30 days

At the beginning of learning to write a diary, you may feel that it does not help you in anything and that nothing is changing. It is like any other practice. For example, you did not decide that push-ups are useful if you did not try them long enough for the results to appear.

30 days is the perfect time to find out if the topics you write about in your diary are producing the desired results, or if you need to change them.

4. Combine several topics

When the 30-day deadline has passed, you'll have a better idea of what topics you'd like to continue writing about and so on, and it will be helpful to merge the topics and make some adjustments.

Perhaps, you will decide to change everything and try a different topic. The more you repeat the experience, the more you will get a good idea of the topic that suits you, so it is advisable in this context to try the topics that you think are not useful to you. They are often the best and most useful topics.

From time to time, you may feel a desire to change the topics and methods you prefer, and if you are the type who likes to change, the combination of several topics may become essential to you.

5. Adjust your practice

There's no perfect way to practice writing diaries for a beginner, so you should know that what works for one person may not work for another.

So, there is no perfect way to write a journal; the reason is that we evolve and improve ourselves over time, and as our priorities change, so may our writing diaries practice.

The bottom line is not to cling to your current way of writing your diary; instead, seek to improve it. Look at it as an art you want to develop based on your goals, desires, and priorities. In general, think about what suits your lifestyle and adopt it, and as a tip summarizing everything we have said: Try to find a writing style that will please you and make writing always fun.

Quick tips for beginners in writing diaries

Writing diaries is a personal practice; there is no wrong way to practice it. Although you may feel that you are doing this wrong at first, the experience is the best way to make you know how to write your diary in the way that suits you. So, try different topics and find out what suits you the most. Here are 8 quick tips to help you get started:

1. Choose the time that suits you

Most people think that writing diaries should be written at a specific time, but in fact, you can do this at any time you want. You can write it daily, weekly, or once a month.

Needless to say, the rate at which you practice writing diaries affects when the benefits start to appear, but you should also keep in mind that this practice should be fun in the first place and suitable for you and your lifestyle.

2. Try several different techniques

Writing diaries is a very common practice; therefore, people have devised several techniques, some of which are:

Free writing.
Structured writing that includes tasks, calendars, and notes.
Morning diary, which lists things you're grateful for or things you intend to accomplish.
The style of lists.
Self-reflection.
Future goals.
A gratitude diary.
Dream diaries include dreams you see during sleep and perceptions during wakefulness, and they have a great benefit in the field of mental health.
A diary that takes the form of a letter.

3. Go hard or go slow

There are so many topics you can write about and so many techniques you can use, so you may be wondering how to get off to an effective start. The answer is that you can start hard or start slow.

When you go strong, you can write about topics, such as self-reflection diaries, future goal diaries, little gratitude diaries, and others.

This will take you a while initially, but soon you will know what topics inspire you and dispense with the rest. You can also start a little writing by trying the topics one by one to discover each of them. Over time, you will have tested all the topics, and you will understand what is best for you. Each of the two methods has its benefits, and you can choose.

4. Try free writing

Freelance writing can be a bit confusing. You may not know what to write and where to start. So, start with this idea: “I don't know how to start freelance writing, and I'm thinking I'm wondering now where to start; it's really funny, and it makes me wonder where my thinking will lead me.” Now, unleash your thoughts, and you'll be surprised how they flow on the paper.

5. Try writing guides

Writing guides are a great way to guide your thinking, and here are some of the topics that this genre includes:

Name three wonderful things that happened today.
What goal do you want to achieve today?
What are you grateful for in your life?

Writing guides are a great activity to prepare yourself for happiness and success because you stay focused on the things that matter to you, and as we said, what you think about a lot turns into beliefs, and beliefs create reality.

6. Don't worry about messy writing

Remember that you write for yourself, so no one cares if your writing is chaotic, and then the moment you drop your feelings and thoughts into the notebook is the most important. You may write and rarely reread what you wrote. Of course, you can, but do not let your self-judgment prevent you from starting this practice.

7. Commit to a specific writing time

When you try something new, it's important to try it for a long enough period to know if it's useful or not, in the sense that you should try hard.

The good thing about the 30-day period we discussed is that when you practice writing diaries every day for 30 days, you first don't feel overwhelmed, and at the same time, this time is enough to know whether you are benefiting from what you are doing or not.

8. Make writing diaries fun

Keep track of anything that makes your writing diaries fun. It can be fun to write down small daily goals and then cross off what you've achieved and watch your progress. So, try things out, and keep the fun going while journaling.

Start your diary with a challenge

Now you have the information you need to start writing your diary, start by choosing a topic to write about, write daily for 30 days, and if you still don't know where to start, you can start with these questions:

What are the things that make you feel grateful?
Goals: What are the three goals you want to achieve today?
What can give you energy during this day?

In the evening, ask yourself:

List three good things that happened to you today.
What happened to you today that you could have handled better?
What is the biggest problem you want to solve and why?

These questions are easy and short and have helped many to focus on the future they wanted to reach, and we hope they will also help you start writing your diary.