The Comeback of the Diary – and How It Boosts Your Wellbeing

This blog post was translated from German into English. You can find the original text here.

Why on earth should you keep a diary – or start again after a long break? Writing a diary sounds like routine, ritual, regularity. Like a book or a notebook that you open every day, no matter how uneventful the day has been or how bleak the topic is, to write something that you may not want to write or ever read again.

And besides, you are probably not a lovesick girl pouring her heartache into a diary, nor are you a priest jotting down confessions, or a writer whose well-crafted words will one day find their readers in a published work.

Time races on. There seems to be no space left for written reflection on being and doing. Or could this already be a good reason to commit oneself to the page?

Slowing Down

In diaries, we celebrate the now. Nothing matters except what can be perceived, inside and outside, right at this moment. At best, the moment when the pen moves across the page manifests an island of deceleration, a flow experience, a joyful state of being in the present.

Stopping time, breathing, allowing life to be lived.

Relief

The writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) commanded the power of language in part for her own relief: “I want to lie down like a tired child and weep away this life – and my diary shall receive me on its downy pillow,” she wrote in 1925. For anyone prone to low moods, a diary can offer support. Writing down feelings and describing distressing or frightening situations helps to create distance and, at best, leads to emotional stabilization.

“Give yourself permission to put onto paper whatever is there.”

Daniel Siegel (born 1957), an American psychiatrist, coined the phrase Name It To Tame It and showed in studies that labeling burdensome emotions can reduce stress. Austrian author and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) seems to have known this already. He described his diary as a Spucknapf seiner Verstimmungen (literally: “spittoon for his bad moods”) – a vivid image of the diary’s relieving function.

Here are some recommendations for budding diarists:

• Give yourself permission to put onto paper whatever is there – without censorship, without worrying about taboos, future readers, or your own demands on form and content.
• Respect your own boundaries and put the pen aside when the emotional pressure becomes too strong.
• Work with distancing techniques, such as a change of perspective. Instead of using the first-person point of view, try using the third-person singular. Describe traumatic events from a helicopter perspective. Alternatively, you can deliberately write in the style of a chronicler: detailed, objective and based on facts. Without emotion or personal involvement.

Strengthening Resources

“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” With this line, Albert Camus (1913–1960) sketched an attitude we would today call resilience – the ability to focus, in difficult times, on what provides support, on the resources available both inwardly and outwardly.

In writing to myself, I encounter myself in unusual ways; I can use the power of language to search for that invincible summer within. I use paper and pen as a playground where all prohibitions are lifted and, through writing, I can clarify my feelings, thoughts and relationships.

“I use paper and pen as a playground where all prohibitions are lifted.”

Numerous studies show that consciously focusing on personal strengths, positive experiences, and coping strategies increases psychological resilience. The best-known examples are gratitude and success diaries, which train our gaze on the brighter sides of life. Professor Silke Heimes writes in her book Warum Schreiben hilft (Why Writing Helps): “This does not mean that difficult feelings are ignored, but rather that our view is broadened to also include what strengthens us and makes life worth living.”

Documenting

But it’s not always about relief or resource activation. Not all writers fit the characterization offered by American journalist and writer Joan Didion (1934–2021): “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

Documentary diary writing – more accurately described as a journal or chronicle – is especially suited to those who observe their surroundings with keen eyes and sharp minds. They want to record what they have experienced, and perhaps also to comment on it. The idea of posterity, of a future reader taking interest, also resonates. These chroniclers carry a mission: what they experience, how they experience it, and – last but not least – how they put it into words must also be interesting to others. They are convinced of this.

Thus, the diary of Harry Graf Kessler (1868–1937) spans over ten thousand pages. Between 1880 and 1937, the German diplomat and patron of art wrote about the world around him – without psychologizing or dwelling on his own feelings. He was interested in events and people.

“Let us give ourselves permission to dust off the prefabricated image of the diary.”

Yet it is not only dramatic events in the outer world that demand to be recorded. Even great minds like Thomas Mann (1875–1955) noted down small, everyday episodes in his diaries: “Hair wash, followed by application of too strong a French hair tonic. The irritation and dryness caused by it gave me an unpleasant feeling for the whole day.”

Diary Reloaded

I would like to invite you to reimagine your diary as a space that both enriches your life and complements your busy, full, challenging and wonderful existence.

Whether we lament life or celebrate it; whether we document our experience, comment on it, condense its essence into lyrical form, or whether we simply record banalities and preserve our insights: Let’s give ourselves permission to dust off the prefabricated image of the diary. Let us fill those pages in a way that best suits our own needs and personal style.

Or, as poet Peter Rühmkorf (1929–2008), who explored both his inner and outer worlds in his diaries Tabu I and Tabu II, put it: “The diary: the unqualified, resentful grumbling with which one accompanies the day’s course. Fate. The weather. The news.”

Dive deeper into the world of diary writing – with this German-language guide

Angelika von AufseßTagebuch reloadedSchreibimpulse von A bis Z

[Titelbild: Milko/E+/Getty Images]