How Reading Your Journal Entries Can Make You Happier

From someone who's journaled over 750,000 words

I journal a lot. Across all my journals, I’ve written at least seven-hundred and fifty thousand words.

From the many avid journalists I’ve spoken to, a common practice is to write, shut the journal, and never look at it again. But, this is a mistake in my opinion. There’s a ton of self-improvement to be found in reading your entries.

When you read your journal entries, you’re forced into thinking about your past thinking (I call this “retrospective metacognition”). Metacognition, on its own, means thinking about your current thinking.

There are two major limitations to this: you can only think about your current thoughts and if they’re emotionally charged, you’re more likely to be non-objective about them. 

Reading journal entries of your thoughts, though, enables you to think about your past thoughts and have distance from the emotions that surrounded those thoughts. This can help make you more objective and make better decisions about your life.

Here’s an example. Years ago, I made myself miserable while working at a fast-food chain called Chick-fil-A. Every day I would show up ruminating, “I’m better than fast food. I should be working a more meaningful job. This sucks.” These thoughts, in turn, made me miserable.

After feeling sucky for a while, I decided to journal about how I felt. I poured all of my pent up rage and misery into those pages and then left them alone for a while. Later, I came back to those pages and read them. A lightbulb came over my head. I realized, “I’m falling prey to confirmation bias.”

Every time I walked into Chick-fil-A I was looking for information that confirmed my assumption “This sucks.” As a result, that’s all I allowed my mind to find. I allowed other people’s negative opinions of fast food work to cloud my judgment of what was actually there.

This pattern of thinking was making me miserable, so, I decided the solution was to look for things that confirmed a new assumption: “This is meaningful.” What I found astonished me. There were numerous meaningful things in this job: experiences I could learn and grow from, skills to master, relationships to build, time to improve my work ethic for my next job, money to save, and so on. The next day, I found myself pumped about going to work.

Objectivity and happiness are inextricably linked. The more objective you can be, the happier you’ll become. Without journaling—and especially without reading my entries—I could have never gotten the space I needed to view my thoughts surrounding my work with a fresh set of eyes.

Reading your journal entries is a tool to be more objective about any area of your life, make independent judgments in it, and become happier as a result.