twelve journaling podcast episodes worth your commute | Daylogg
the practice of journaling
twelve journaling podcast episodes worth your commute
no podcast is worth subscribing to for journaling. twelve specific episodes are. researchers, writers, and one prescriptive host.
by ··14 min read
references.
1.Pennebaker, J.W. & Beall, S.K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 95(3), 274–281.doi:10.1037/0021-843X.95.3.274
2.Walsh, L.C. et al. (2022). What is the Optimal Way to Give Thanks? Comparing the Effects of Gratitude Expressed Privately, One-to-One via Text, or Publicly on Social Media. Affective Science 4(1), 82–91.doi:10.1007/s42761-022-00150-5
There is no great podcast about journaling. The shows that brand
themselves as journaling podcasts sit in the basement of Apple's
charts with twenty-six ratings and a single-host monologue feed; the
once-flagship Journaling Saves went dark in 2020 and never came
back. The good material lives somewhere else. It lives as single
episodes inside larger shows, scattered across science podcasts and
poetry interviews and one celebrity-host pep talk. Twelve of those
episodes are worth your commute. Most of them are hosted by people
who write very little themselves and reread by nobody, including the
writer who wrote them.
Each entry below is tagged by what the episode is actually good for,
not by host fame. The order moves from protocol to philosophy, with
the contrarians in the middle. None of the twelve assumes you
already journal.
huberman lab on the protocol that already existed
A Science-Supported Journaling Protocol to Improve Mental and
Physical Health, Andrew Huberman, solo, November 2023. The most
listened-to journaling episode of the decade.
Good for the protocol with the most trial data behind it. Huberman
walks through Pennebaker's 1986 four-day, fifteen-to-thirty-minute
expressive-writing assignment, the proposed immune and sleep
mechanisms, and the conditions under which the effect was originally
measured. He reads the prompt aloud roughly verbatim from the source
paper. [1]
The honest beat is one Huberman makes himself, near the top of the
episode. Pennebaker and colleagues came up with a precise protocol
for journaling in 1986. The most-listened journaling episode of the
2020s is the careful re-telling of a thirty-seven-year-old protocol,
unchanged in any of its load-bearing parts. The trial data lives
where the protocol started, and Huberman is honest about it. The
episode is good because he does not improve on what he found.
james pennebaker on why he barely journals
Expressive Writing Can Help Your Mental Health, with James
Pennebaker, APA Speaking of Psychology, host Kim Mills, March 2024.
Good for the inventor in his own voice. Pennebaker recaps the 1986
trauma-writing study, walks through what the protocol is and is not,
and draws the boundary the wellness press almost never quotes. The
canonical pick for anyone whose only previous Pennebaker exposure is
secondhand.
The line worth pulling is his admission about his own practice. I
write maybe two or three times a year when something miserable is
going on. When I hear about journaling and writing every day, I just
get nervous about it. I would hate that. He prefers the antibiotic
metaphor. You have all these bad things going on and then you use
this method to get past it, and then next time something bad happens,
I'll use writing again. The man whose name anchors the modern
journaling-as-medicine genre treats writing as episodic medicine, not
daily routine.
self-reported frequency, on mic, March 2024
2 to 3
times per year that James Pennebaker, the inventor of the expressive-writing protocol, says he writes about something difficult. the wellness-press version of the protocol typically prescribes daily practice; the originator does not.
APA Speaking of Psychology, March 2024
If that one paragraph
landed, the next two episodes (Dan Harris on Ten Percent Happier
#856
and Therapist Uncensored
#225)
are the same person, pushed harder, with more on rumination and the
neuroscience-of-trauma framing respectively.
hidden brain on what your own writing reveals about you
What's Hidden in Your Words, with James Pennebaker again, host
Shankar Vedantam, October 2024.
Good for after you have already started, when you want to know what
your own pages are quietly saying about you. Vedantam zooms out from
the protocol to function-word analysis. The episode covers the
finding that depressed writers use I roughly half again as often as
non-depressed writers, the explorer Henry Hellyer whose first-person
rate climbed from one percent to nine in the months before his
suspected suicide, and Pennebaker's expert testimony in the Kathleen
Folbigg case where linguistic analysis helped overturn a twenty-year
conviction.
These words, what I love about them is they're invisible. We can't
hear them. We can't control them very well. But they are revealing
parts of ourselves that we just didn't know that we were spilling
those beans.
James Pennebaker, Hidden Brain, October 2024
For the journaler, the surprise is that what you write about matters
less than people think. The function words underneath, the Is and
thes and becauses you do not notice typing, are doing the
diagnostic work. You are leaving a fingerprint regardless of the
topic.
sonja lyubomirsky on the second-best gratitude practice
unSILOed Podcast with Greg LaBlanc, episode 627. Lyubomirsky is the
researcher whose name anchored the modern gratitude-journal
intervention literature.
Good for anyone whose gratitude journal stopped working and who
suspects they are doing it wrong. The episode discusses Walsh,
Regan, Twenge, and Lyubomirsky's 2022 four-arm trial in Affective
Science. Nine hundred and sixteen undergraduates were assigned to
write private gratitude letters, text thanks to one benefactor, post
gratitude publicly on social media, or track daily activities as a
control. Texting won on connectedness and social support, beating
both the private journal and the public post. [2]
The implication for the form most journalers default to is awkward.
Private gratitude listing helps a little; the mechanism, on the data,
is connection rather than enumeration, and the form that maximises
connection is the one where the recipient hears the thanks. The
researcher who built the modern gratitude literature is, in her own
trial, finding the journal second-best.
marie howe on the discipline of refusing metaphor
On Being with Krista Tippett, Marie Howe: The Power of Words to Save
Us, re-released May 2017. Howe is the former New York State Poet
Laureate.
Good for anyone who writes regularly but suspects the writing is
doing nothing. Howe describes the assignment she gives her graduate
students each week. I ask my students every week to write ten
observations of the actual world. It's very hard for them. No
abstractions. No metaphor. I saw a water glass on a brown
tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. And then
the line that makes the assignment hold. To resist metaphor is very
difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself,
which hurts us for some reason.
The surprise is what happens later in the term. By week four or five
the students walk in carrying entries that pour onto the table like
hardware. The slice of apple. The gleam of the knife. The blue jay.
By week six, when Howe finally permits metaphor, the students refuse.
They don't want to. They don't know how. They're like, why would I?
Why would I compare that to anything when it's itself? The
discipline of recording without interpreting outlasts the assignment,
which is what the
quietly assumes too.
jerry colonna on the three questions a therapist gave him
The Tim Ferriss Show #373, June 2019. Colonna is an executive coach
and the author of Reboot; he has journaled daily since age thirteen.
Good for anyone who has been at it for years and feels stuck on the
same prompts. Colonna walks through the three questions his therapist
Dr. Sayres gave him decades ago and that he has used since: What am
I not saying that needs to be said? What am I saying that's not
being heard? What's being said that I'm not hearing? The questions
are not Colonna's invention; he has stress-tested them across a forty-
two-year practice and they survived.
The line that earns the entry is on rereading. What may be unusual
is I never go back and reread. Because it's not about figuring shit
out, it's about the experience. Forty-two years of daily entries,
none of them revisited. He also describes a two-pen technique he borrowed from Marie Ponsot.
A second-coloured pen sits on the desk; the harshest internal voice,
what Ponsot called the crow, gets to write in its own ink. It is the
weirdest practical tip in any of the twelve episodes and the easiest
to copy tomorrow morning.
cheryl strayed on half the pages being her feet
The Tim Ferriss Show #231, March 2017, recorded live at SXSW. Strayed
is the author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things.
Good for anyone who broke a streak and decided their journal was
worthless because the entries were boring. Strayed talks about
returning to her Pacific Crest Trail journals, the raw material for
Wild, a decade after writing them. I have my journals. And I was
reading my journal, like what was I writing about on the PCT as part
of the research for my book. And literally half the pages are me
complaining about how much my feet hurt.
The boring half made the literature possible. The book did not come
from the literary entries; it came from the merciless catalogue of
foot pain no editor would have asked for. You remember your
suffering, and it becomes pleasure afterwards. The journal that
complains about its feet for a thousand miles can become the book
that wins the National Book Critics Circle Award. The same logic
underwrites :
let the entries be ugly, because most of them have to be.
maria popova on the journal as the original internet
The Tim Ferriss Show #39, October 2014, reposted as #460 in 2020.
Popova has run The Marginalian, formerly Brain Pickings, since
2006.
Good for the writer who thinks of the journal as a thinking
substrate, not as a feelings-processing tool. Popova walks through
her commonplace-book practice. She reads heavy material on paper,
annotates relentlessly, retypes the highlights into categorised files,
and lets the corpus accumulate for years before any of it shows up in
an essay. The framing is unusual. Citations and references in older
books, she argues, were the original internet. So, all of those
reference and citations, and allusions even, they're essentially
hyperlinks that that author placed to another work.
The surprise for most journalers is the timescale. Popova does not
write essays out of yesterday's notebook. She writes them out of the
slow accumulation of marginalia from the last fifteen years. The
journal, in her practice, is the link graph upstream of every
publishable sentence. Understanding, really, which is what reading
should be a conduit to, is a form of pattern recognition. Patterns
require enough entries to compare across, which requires patience the
productivity-podcast version of journaling almost never models.
suleika jaouad on the journal as a hiding place and a fighting place
NPR Life Kit, How journaling can help you through hard times, host
Marielle Segarra. Jaouad is the author of Between Two Kingdoms and
The Book of Alchemy.
Good for anyone trying to write through cancer, grief, or a stretch
of life that feels too large for sentences. Jaouad began journaling
when she was diagnosed with leukaemia at twenty-two. Her one rule was
that one word counted. I had to show up in the notebook every day.
It could be three pages. It could be a paragraph. It could be one
word. And if I wrote one word, then it was a win.
The line that earns the episode is shorter. In those moments in my
life where I felt most laid bare, the journal has been a hiding
place and a fighting place. Jaouad also shares the contrarian
admission that, like Pennebaker and Colonna, she barely rereads. I,
as a rule, typically don't go back and reread my journals. I tend to
read them with great judgment. Three of the people on this list
whose names anchor the modern canon admit, on mic, that they do not
perform the ritual their fans imagine.
ryan holiday on journaling as stoicism
The Daily Stoic, 5 Life Changing Journaling Habits from the Stoics,
February 2022, twelve minutes, Ryan Holiday solo.
Good for the journaler who wants the philosophy and not the science,
or for the Stoicism reader who has not noticed that the practice and
the philosophy are the same artefact. Holiday's pitch is the cleanest
single sentence in this post. The Stoics were such ardent journalers
that it is possible to say that journaling is Stoicism. The episode
walks through three named habits: Seneca's evening review (when the
light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this
habit that's now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what
I've done and said), Marcus Aurelius's morning premeditation of the
day's faces and temptations, and Epictetus's instruction to write
the maxims down, read them aloud, and talk about them.
The surprise is the inversion. Most contemporary journaling advice
treats Stoicism as a useful flavour to sprinkle on a productivity
hack. Holiday inverts it. The journal is the primary practice and
Stoicism is what falls out of doing it for long enough. The Daily
Stoic does not publish full transcripts; the script is also published
on Holiday's blog and is the source for the verbatim lines above.
mel robbins on the two-column happy-me exercise
The Mel Robbins Podcast, episode 152, The #1 Journal Exercise to
Become the Person You've Always Wanted to Be. Solo, no guest.
Good for the journaler who wants one concrete, prescriptive thing to
try tomorrow morning. Robbins walks through a two-column exercise
she calls Happy Me. Take out a piece of paper, draw a line down the
center, and on the left hand side of that piece of paper, I want you
to write two words. Happy me. On the left, you describe a remembered
self who felt more alive. On the right, the current self. The
exercise is reverse-engineering: find one transferable clue from the
remembered self that the current self could borrow.
The episode is the prescriptive counterweight to the rest of this
list. No study is cited; no researcher is credited; the host does not
apologise for either. Where the Pennebaker tradition asks you to
write toward the future from the present, the Happy Me exercise asks
you to mine the past for usable material to send forward. Memory
archaeology, basically, and the easiest exercise on this list to
actually try once.
karen walrond on the three intentions she sets daily
Unlocking Us with Brené Brown, Brené with Karen Walrond on The
Lightmaker's Manifesto, Part 2 of 2, November 2021. Walrond is the
author of The Lightmaker's Manifesto.
Good for anyone who wants a daily intention practice that takes ninety
seconds and survives a hard week. Walrond's three questions, taken
verbatim from her book and her blog, are what will make me feel
healthy today? what will make me feel connected today? what will give
me a sense of purpose today? In her own framing, the beauty of this
question is that it allows me to stay on task in adding purpose to my
life, but gives me the flexibility to alter it from day to day.
The surprise is the constraint. Walrond does not let the questions
expand or rotate. The three are fixed. The flexibility lives inside
each answer, not in the menu. Most three-question morning prompts
suffer from prompt drift; you switch them every week, then every day,
then stop. Walrond's persist because the questions stayed the same
for years. The episode is conversational; the verbatim wording above
is from the book and the author's blog, not the podcast transcript.
what twelve episodes agree on without saying so
The episodes on this list disagree about almost everything. Frequency,
duration, prompt versus freewrite, looking back versus looking
forward, Stoicism versus poetry versus protocol. The hosts who
program these conversations have different audiences and incompatible
worldviews. None of the twelve guests would, if asked, recommend the
same single practice.
There is one quiet exception. Three of the people whose names anchor
the modern journaling canon (Pennebaker, Colonna, Jaouad) admit on
mic that they do not journal daily and do not reread. Pennebaker
writes two or three times a year. Colonna has forty-two years of
entries he has never opened. Jaouad reads her own pages, when she
reads them, with great judgement. The fourth, Marie Howe, teaches her
students to write without metaphor and watches them lose the
appetite for it. The pattern is consistent enough to be worth naming. The people who
have sustained the practice longest treat the writing itself as
where the work happens; the document is a side effect.
Rereading is a different cognitive mode. Writing, in the protocol
Pennebaker tested and the practice Colonna kept, is generative and
present-tense; the judging voice is bracketed and the page is the
place the unedited thing gets to exist. Rereading reverses those
properties. It is retrospective, comparative, and critical by
structure. Jaouad names the cost in one phrase: she reads her own
pages with great judgment. Colonna refuses on the same ground; the
rereading would turn forty-two years of private entries into material
for an audience of one, his future self. The longest-running
practices in this post are the ones that kept the writing private
from the writer.
If you wanted a podcast you could subscribe to and let run in the
background of your life, the honest answer is that no such show
exists at the quality the rest of your subscriptions hold. Twelve
specific episodes will do the job instead. For the print equivalent,
the
post sits next to this one; for the longer argument against the
daily-practice myth, ;
and for the rest of the thread, the
.