To deal with stress, high performers from Tim Ferriss to Mark Cuban swear by taking the time to journal and reflect on their days. This is why journaling is even more powerful during times of stress—and why you should consider pulling out your pen and writing down your thoughts.
Your memory is unreliable: In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s classic The Black Swan, there’s a great quote about journaling.
“While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context.” The point is that we can gather insights after something happened, but we don’t remember how we were processing things while they happened. By journaling, you can better process your thoughts and learn from them.
It is the only possible way to learn from the past: How did you navigate your biggest challenge, say, five years ago? Chances are you don’t remember the feelings you navigated, the insecurities you overcame or the ways you grew. If you do remember, your view has been shaped by almost 2000 days of experience. Your view is tainted, abstracted and revised. But if you take a moment to journal every day, you can use the lessons you learned from these corona experiences to deal with future moments of adversity.
In short, journaling is a perfect tool for crafting future wisdom.
