The Unexpected Truths I Learned From 52 Years of Keeping a Journal

The author says a lifetime of journaling taught him that it's best to write down the facts you’re observing, not the emotions you’re feeling. Getty Images Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

My kids recently gave me a formulaic little book called Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story, a “father’s guided journal” filled with ostensibly character-defining questions such as: Did I like

roller coasters as a child, do I think there’s life on other planets, do I believe in love at first sight? To get taciturn dads in a confidential mood, the fill-in-the-blank pages are

peppered with uplifting advice from Euripides to Napoleon to Carol Burnett.

I appreciate the gift but wonder whether my children aren’t inviting me to water the lawn in a downpour, because I have been keeping a journal — unguided — since I was a sophomore in

college. As of last month, I have 137 wide-ruled spiral notebooks; I would have 138 but I lost one in 1989, when my briefcase was stolen from a restaurant in Rockefeller Center. All told,

that’s more than 20,000 pages of scribbling amassed over 52 years. If my kids are ever remotely interested in rummaging through this archive, they will learn that Dad does not like roller

coasters; hopes there is life on other planets given the mess we are making of this one; and believed way too often in love at first sight.

In journal-keeping, per the famous dictum of Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” I found a way of auditing myself, of parsing what was in my mind and heart. Sometimes it

was also a way of slapping myself in the face to wake up, get out of the clouds, drain the angst, bridle the rage, absorb the rush of losses, or just strip away the grime of habit and

routine that so often obscures the astonishment of being alive.

Over the last 40 years, many scientific studies of journal-keeping (or what is often called “expressive writing”) have added an extensive list of practical reasons why everyone ought to heed

the Socratic admonition. Akin to meditation or therapies based on music and art, keeping a journal can improve sleep, enhance immune function, reduce depression, retard memory loss, and

decrease the discomfort of chronic conditions like asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.