twelve journaling podcast episodes worth your commute

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.

Episode page.

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.

Episode page.

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

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.

Episode page and transcript.

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.

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.

Episode page.

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.

Episode page and transcript.

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 one-line log 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.

Episode page and transcript.

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.

Episode page and transcript.

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 the case against streaks: 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.

Episode page and PDF transcript.

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.

Episode page with full transcript.

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.

Apple Podcasts.

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.

Episode page with transcript.

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.

Episode page.

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 science of journaling books post sits next to this one; for the longer argument against the daily-practice myth, the case against streaks; and for the rest of the thread, the practice pillar.