I recently read an article about a woman who was devastated after discovering that her husband had read her private journal. What made the story even more interesting was that her journal apparently contained almost entirely negative thoughts. That struck me as unusual. I prefer a journal that reflects the whole landscape—the ups, the downs, the frustrations, the wins, and all the ordinary stuff in between.
One thing I loved about her story was that she used her journal as part of therapy. Her therapist actually worked with her journal entries, which makes a lot of sense to me. A journal can preserve thoughts and feelings that may be difficult to reconstruct accurately weeks or months later.
That gets into something I find fascinating: contemporaneous notes. It sounds complicated, but it simply means recording your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and observations as close to the time they happen as possible. Contemporaneous notes can carry weight precisely because they capture what someone thought or observed at the time, rather than what they remember much later. We sometimes hear the term when politicians, military leaders, executives, or witnesses produce notes documenting important conversations or events.
There’s another psychological concept worth considering here: negativity bias—our tendency to give negative experiences more attention and weight than positive ones. I wonder whether that partly explains why some journals can sound considerably darker than the person’s overall life actually is. When something is bothering us, that’s often when we feel most compelled to sit down and write. There’s nothing wrong with getting the difficult stuff out, but personally, I want my journal to capture more than that.
That’s one reason I’ve come to prefer audio journal dictation. I start with bullet points from the day and then talk through them. Speaking seems to naturally give me more context. I might describe something frustrating, but then explain what happened afterward, what I learned, what was funny about it, or what else happened that day. The result tends to feel more like my actual life and less like a collection of grievances.
The biggest takeaway from the article, though, may be privacy. Everyone deserves a place where they can think freely without wondering who might eventually read it. If you’re keeping a digital journal, it’s worth thinking about how well it’s protected rather than simply leaving a document accessible on your phone or computer. Microsoft Word, for example, allows documents to be password protected. My personal preference is the Day One journaling app, which can be protected using a passcode or biometric security such as Face ID. I love the app. It has genuinely changed the way I journal.
A journal doesn’t have to be a record of only the worst moments—or only the best ones. I want mine to show the messy, balanced reality of a life being lived in real time.
Where do you keep your journal?