The Daily Stoic - Just Start Journaling

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

In today's audiobook excerpt, Ryan cracks open his best-selling book Stillness Is The Key to read the chapter titled “Just Start Journaling,” which covers why you should start your journaling practice.📔 Visit the Painted Porch to order a copy of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, from the Stoic texts, audio books that you like here recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to of life. Thank you for listening. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. Here on a Sunday, a chapter from Stillness is the key about journaling, and why journaling is such an important habit, it goes to the core of what still is a mis. Of course, we wouldn't have meditations without the practice of journaling. We wouldn't have so many great works of art, so many insights, so many inventions without the solitary time that people put in to the practice of journaling.

And as funny, this is a weird, a little more, but thing, but I was to my kids, the supermarket today, and as we were checking out, they had these magazines. And I guess no one really buys magazines anymore. So there's all these kind of special one-off editions. But there was an Anne Frank like a magazine, like an issue dedicated to Anne Frank, who is a character in Stillness is the key, who I read a lot about as I was writing the book and someone who's, you know, sort of a profoundly brave and wise beyond their years person. But what struck me is that this girl whose life was so tragically cut short by one of the worst things that human beings have ever done to each other,

a victim of incredible injustice. Why is there this magazine to her? I mean, she'd be like in her, she and Martin Luther King were born almost the same year. So she'd be quite old, but still alive today. Quite reasonably, potentially. She very well could be alive today, but she's not. She's been dead for a very long time.

And why has she had the impact that she's had? It's not because she was a victim. That was a thing that happened to her. But what she affected, who she was, what she did, was all in the pages of this little journal. And I tell that story in Stillness's Key, which this episode is excerpting. So you can listen to that. And it's actually a really moving biography of Anne

Frank that we carry in the painted porch all into that. And today's show notes. And of course, you can get Stillness's Key anywhere, books, or sold. It's funny. I talked to lots of people and a good chunk of those people haven't been readers for a long time, they've just gotten back into it. I always love hearing that and they tell me how they fall in love with reading, they're reading more than ever and I go, let me guess, you listen, audiobooks don't you? And it's true and almost invariably they listen to them on Audible. That's because Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks across every genre

from bestsellers and new releases to celebrity memoirs and of course ancient philosophy all my books are available on audio read by me for the most part audible. Let's you enjoy all your audio entertainment in one app you'll always find the best of what you love or something new to discover and as an audible member you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog including the latest bestsellers and new releases You'll discover thousands of titles from popular favorites, exclusive new series, exciting new voices in audio. You can check out Stillness is the key, the daily dad, I just recorded so that's up on Audible now.

Coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the obstacle is the way audio books, so all those are available. And new members can try Audible for free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500 500. That's audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500 500. Start journaling. Keep a notebook, travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it, slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain.

Jack London. For her 13th birthday, a precocious German refugee named Anne Frank was given a small, red, and white autograph book by her parents. Although the pages were designed to collect the signatures and memories of friends, she knew from the moment she first saw it in a store window that she would use it as a journal. As Anne wrote in her first entry on June 12, 1942, I hope I will be able to confide everything to you as I have never been able to confide in anyone and I hope I will be able to confide everything to you as I have never been able to

confide in anyone and I hope you'll be a great source of comfort and support. No one could have anticipated just how much comfort and support she'd need. 24 days after that first entry and and her Jewish family were forced into hiding in the cramped attic annex of her father's warehouse in Amsterdam. It's where they would spend the next two years hoping the Nazis would not discover them. Anne Frank had wanted a diary for understandable reasons. She was a teenager. She had been lonely, scared and bored before, but now she was

cooped up in a set of cramped, suffocating rooms with six other people. It was all so overwhelming, all so unfair and unfamiliar. She needed somewhere to put those feelings. According to her father, Otto, Anne didn't write every day, but she always wrote when she was upset or dealing with a problem. She also wrote when she was confused, when she was curious. She wrote in that journal as a form of therapy, so as not to unload her troubled thoughts on the family and compatriots with whom she shared such unenviable conditions. One of her best and most insightful lines must have come on a particularly difficult day. Paper, she said, has more patience than people.

And used her journal to reflect how noble and good everyone could be, she wrote, if at the end of the day they were to review their own behavior and weigh up the rights and wrongs. They would automatically try to do better at the start of each new day, and after a while would certainly accomplish a great deal. She observed that writing allowed her to watch herself as if she were a stranger. At a time when hormones usually make teenagers more selfish, she regularly reviewed her writings to challenge and improve her own thinking.

Even with death lurking outside the doors, she worked to make herself a better person. The list of people ancient and modern who practice the art of journaling is almost comically long and fascinatingly diverse. Among them Oscar Wilde, Susan Sondhogg, Marcus Aurelius, Queen Victoria, John Quincy Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didian, Sean Green, Mary Chestnut, Brian Coppeman, Anaïs Nyn, Franz Kafka, Martina Navratilova, and Ben Franklin. All journalists. Some did it in the morning. Some did it sporadically. Some like Leonardo da Vinci kept their notebooks on their person at all times. John F. Kennedy kept a diary during his travels before World War II.

And then as president was more of a note taker and a doodler, which is shown in studies to improve memory on White House stationary, both to clarify his thinking and keep a record of it. Obviously, this is an intimidating list of individuals. But Anne Frank was 13, 14, 15 years old. If she can do it, what excuse do we have? Seneca, the stoic philosopher, seems to have done his writing and reflection in the evenings, much along the lines of Anne Frank's practice. When darkness had fallen and his wife had gone to sleep, he explained to a friend, I examine my entire day and go back over what I've done and said,

hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by. Then he would go to bed finding that the sleep which follows this self-examination was particularly sweet. Anyone who reads him today can feel him reaching for stillness in these nightly writings. Life can get you down, I'm no stranger to that. When I find things are piling up, I'm struggling to deal with something. Obviously, I use my journal, obviously, I turn to stochism, but I also turn to my therapist, which I've had for a long time and has helped me through a bunch of stuff. And because I'm so busy and I live out in the country, I do therapy remote,

so I don't have to drive somewhere. And that's where today's sponsor comes in. Toxbase makes it easy to find a therapist that you like. It's convenient. It's affordable. By doing everything online, Toxbase makes getting the help you want easy and affordable, so why wait. And talk space can help with any specific challenge you might be facing. That's why it's the number one online therapy platform with license therapists and over 40 specialties.

It's secure and private and in network with most major insurers. As a listener of this podcast, you can get 80 bucks off your first month with talk space when you go to talkspace.com slash stoic to match with a license therapist today go to Talkspace.com slash stoic to get 80 bucks off your first month and show your support for the day with stoic that's Talkspace.com slash stoic. Hi I'm David Brown the host of Wendery's podcast business wars and in our new season Walmart must fight off target the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you

get your podcasts. Michelle Foucault talked of the ancient genre of Hupam Nomada, notes to oneself. He called the journal a weapon for spiritual combat, a way to practice philosophy and purge the mind of agitation and foolishness and to overcome difficulty, to silence the barking dogs in your head, to prepare for the day ahead, to reflect on the day that has passed.

Take note of the insights you've heard. Take the time to feel wisdom, flow through your fingertips and on to the page. This is what the best journals look like. They aren't for the reader. They are for the writer to slow the mind down to wage peace with oneself. Journaling is a way to ask tough questions. Where am I standing in my own way? What's the smallest step I can take toward a big thing today? Why am I so worked up about this? What blessings can I count right now? Why do I care so much about impressing people?

What is the harder choice I'm avoiding? Do I rule my fears or do they rule me? How will today's difficulties reveal my character? And by the way, if you want a journal with prompts, you can check out the Daily Stoic journal, which is written by me and published by Portfolio. While there are plenty of people who will anecdotally swear to the benefits of journaling, the research is compelling too. According to one study, journaling helps improve well-being after traumatic and stressful events. Similarly, a University of Arizona study showed that people were able to better recover

from divorce and move forward if they journaled on the experience. Keeping a journal is a common recommendation from psychologists as well because it helps patients stop obsessing and allows them to make sense of the many inputs, emotional, external, psychological that would otherwise overwhelm them. That's really the idea. Instead of carrying that baggage around in our head or our hearts, we put it down on paper. Instead of letting racing thoughts run unchecked or leaving half-baked assumptions unquestioned, we force ourselves to write and examine them. Putting your own thinking down on paper lets you see it from a distance.

It gives you objectivity that is so often missing when anxiety and fears and frustrations flood your mind. What's the best way to start journaling? Is there an ideal time of day? How long should it take? Who cares? How you journal is much less important than why you are doing it to get something off your chest to have quiet time with your thoughts to clarify those

thoughts to separate the harmful from the insightful. There's no right way or wrong way. The point is just to do it. If you've started before and stopped, start again. Getting out of the rhythm happens. The key is to carve out the space again today. The French painter Eugene Delacroix, who called stoicism his consoling religion struggled as we struggled. I am taking up my journal again after a long break, he said. I think it may be a way of calming this nervous excitement that has been worrying me for so long. Yes, that is what journaling is about. It's spiritual windshield wipers as the writer Julia Cameron once put it.

It's a few minutes of reflection that both demands and creates stillness. It's a break from the world, a framework for the day ahead, a coping mechanism for troubles of the hours just past, a revving up of your creative juices for relaxing and clearing. Once, twice, three times a day, whatever, find what works for you. Just know that it may turn out to be the most important thing you do all day. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized,

you can get them sent to a friend. The app goes away, you go as the enemy, still this is the key, the leather bound edition of the Daily Stoke, we have them all in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery

Plus in Apple podcasts. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace,

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You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet. this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet.