Why Every High Schooler Should Keep a Journal
Leonardo Davinci, Oprah, Edison, Warren Buffet, and Arianna Huffington all had one thing in common: they kept extensive journals. When I look back at the thousands of students I’ve worked with over the years, the most successful students are the ones who journal.
The focus of this post is not on journaling in general but on how it is uniquely essential for high school students to develop this habit in a critical time of life. What’s most important is identifying the practical and personal benefits that come with building a journaling habit at a young age. This post (and all my posts) are written for students first and foremost, but if you are a parent reading this, you might want to read this for yourself and then discuss these ideas with your student.
Journaling Makes Your College Apps Better
Nearly every high school student in the world is concerned first and foremost with college. For better or worse, it’s our reality. So you might be wondering, how does journaling make someone more attractive to college admissions offices? In my experience, the students who journal are by far more effective and efficient with their college applications. It’s not even close compared to their non-journaling peers. Here’s why.
Improve Your Personal Writing
Being good at English class will not necessarily make your college application journey any smoother. The type of writing required for college admissions is entirely different from the kind of writing expected from a typical high school English class. From Freshman English all the way to AP or IB English, the same fundamental style of writing persists; students write to explain, analyze, or argue a point. This is not what college application essays are looking for, and this is why strong English students can often struggle with writing college application essays. Being a strong writer does not necessarily mean you have clarity of self or have practice with telling a compelling personal narrative.
Instead, college application essays require you to write essays that highlight your personality and character. Every essay is an opportunity for the admissions office to better understand you and your motivations and the kind of student or the kind of person you will be one day.
What happens when college essays are written like high school essays? This is actually what occurs most of the time, and the resulting essays read more like long-form versions of resumes or a portfolio of the greatest hits. Such essays might seem impressive because of their content, but they are incredibly dull to read and incredibly easy to forget about. Great stories move us and inspire us. A great college application essay tells a powerful personal story with you as the main character and leaves a lasting impression on everyone who reads it. You can practice this kind of writing by journaling.
Get More From Your Experiences
I’ve seen countless students struggle to break past the obvious surface-level details when writing about a significant experience they had. They know in their gut that it was life-changing, but those are the only things they can remember are cliche and predictable. Why is this?
Imagine the amazing summer program you attended last year, where you learned a ton, made some great friends, and came home energized and excited. If you’re like most students, that experience now lives in your memory as a vague impression. Do you remember the most valuable lessons you learned from the experience? Do you remember the details of the challenge that you overcame? You probably knew all of these details in sharp clarity shortly after they happened, but most experiences (especially powerful ones) happen so fast that our brains can’t fully absorb them. As a result, we are left with only vague and blurry impressions of our experiences. But journaling while the memories are still fresh helps you process your experiences as they happen and deepens the mental connections, which in turn creates greater and longer-lasting meaning for you.
Think of journaling as a way to stack and store your memories neatly. By writing about your experiences, you relive them and process them a second time. This not only encodes the memories more deeply, but you can simultaneously filter and focus on specific parts that you consider more valuable. By writing, you shine the spotlight of your attention on specific aspects of the experience, which allows you to see more and absorb more.
Journaling Makes You Mentally Healthier
Besides helping with college apps, journaling also has genuine mental health benefits as well, which I would argue are ultimately much more important and valuable. As important as college is, a healthy mind is even more valuable, and it’s worth spending time maintaining.
Some might be skeptical because journaling is rarely a direct solution. While just writing about your problems doesn't make them go away, the process of writing can help you manage your emotions and mitigate the harmful effects of stress. Journaling is one of the most essential tools you can have in your toolbelt to make you more resilient.
Process and Reduce Stress
Stress and anxiety have reached critical levels in high school students, and there doesn’t seem to be much end in sight. Since stress cannot be avoided or decreased, it’s important to develop methods to manage and mitigate its negative effects.
Research has shown that reflecting and writing can reduce the harmful effects of stress in as little as just five minutes of journaling. Your journal effectively becomes a container for your thoughts and feelings and functions as a space for you to work through those feelings in a space other than just your mind. Just as simply talking to someone can make you feel better, writing can also serve this purpose.
As you write about your feelings, you are also creating an opportunity to understand them better. Emotions do not arrive in a neat and organized stream, complete with labels and explainers. But by putting words to the torrent of emotions, things become more orderly, and definitions become clearer. In the safety of your journaling, you can make sense of your emotions as steady instead of a flood.
Avoid Future Sources of Stress
By taking stock of your experiences and reflecting on them, you can develop greater clarity of your situation. This clarity can help you course-correct and can even help you foresee and avoid potentially stressful pitfalls in the future. By understanding yourself and your experiences better, you can learn to spot the leading indicators of problems before they occur and thus put yourself in fewer situations where stress and anxiety can arise. After all, if you’re like most people, you have probably walked away from some personal calamity thinking, “I should have seen it coming! All of the signs were there!” Journaling helps you see the signs before it is too late.
But not all pitfalls are avoidable, and sometimes the best you can do is ride out the storm. Even then, research has shown that knowing about negative events ahead of time reduces the stress experienced because of a greater sense of control.
Journaling will not let you see the future, but with practice, it will give you a better sense of your present and allow you to change course if needed.
How To Get Started
If you already have experience with journaling, hopefully, this post has reaffirmed the why behind your practice and given you confidence that all your time is well spent.
If you’re new to journaling, then I hope you’ve been persuaded to at least give it a try. Start small. You don’t need to be writing epic autobiographies just yet.
The most successful journal writers are ones who treat their journaling like a practice. Throughout this series, you’ll see journaling referred to as a practice. This is because it’s something you should constantly be trying to improve. You will naturally feel yourself quickly getting better early on, but it’s essential to continue to push yourself even after you hit your stride and arrive at a place where you are able to write comfortably and consistently.
Start with your why
There are countless benefits to journaling beyond the few I have listed here. Your journey should start with thinking about what you want to get out of journaling. Find your personal why(s). Your whole practice will develop from your why(s), from the topics you write about to the length of your entries, from the tone of your author’s voice to the very tools that you use. If every aspect of your practice is designed to serve your main purpose and goal for journaling, then you will get much more out of the experience, and you are much more likely to persist and continue with the habit.
If you’re looking for more guidance, you can check out these other posts:
What to Write About
How to Build Your Journaling Setup
When to Journal and Form a Habit