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How to change your life by journaling in 2026

2025-12-12 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 23:07 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Goals, purpose and life design · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present, His medical past, AI, Feel-Good Productivity thesis

Ali calls journaling, which he has done almost daily since 2015, the habit that has most changed his life: thoughts and feelings drive decisions and actions, and writing them down takes away their power. He sets out three levels (what you did, what you think and feel, your goals and plans) and four tips: a physical journal, a journaling app, a list of prompts and journaling with AI, plus a deep-dive think day.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Journaling as the habit that most changed his life; the three parts of the video

  • ★★★ Ali has journaled pretty much every day since 2015, on paper and digitally, and calls journaling the single habit that has most positively changed his life, leading to all he has done in ten years. — 00:00:00

    “journaling has been the single habit that has most positively impacted my life”

  • ★★ Ali believes that people who have not yet started journaling will find it drastically changes their life for the better if they start. — 00:00:00

00:00:55 — Why journaling matters: thoughts and feelings drive decisions and actions, and writing them down weakens them

  • ★★ Ali says his decision in 2017 to start his YouTube channel led to about eight years of making videos, which had a very positive impact on his life. — 00:01:25
  • ★★ Ali argues that actions come from decisions, and decisions form from thoughts and feelings; beliefs are just thoughts we take more seriously than others. — 00:01:54
  • ★★ Ali says that when he polled his audience, about 78% wanted to start a business but had not yet started one. — 00:02:39 · work optional
  • ★★ Ali says combinations of thoughts and feelings, such as fear of rejection or cringe at outing yourself as a would-be business owner, stop many people who want financial freedom from ever starting a business. — 00:03:38
  • ★★★ Ali defines journaling as writing down your thoughts, feelings and to an extent beliefs, and says thoughts kept in your mind rather than on paper have far more power over you. — 00:04:07
  • ★★ A thought Ali often hears from Lifestyle Business Academy students, successful professionals who want a business for financial freedom, is the worry that colleagues will laugh at them if they post on LinkedIn. — 00:04:07
  • ★★ Ali says the mind, a survival machine, optimises for safety rather than growth, whereas changing your life for the better means optimising for growth. — 00:05:22
  • ★★ Ali compares thoughts to designing a bridge or solving a complex equation: nobody does those in their head, they put them on paper, yet most people never put their thoughts and feelings on paper. — 00:05:51
  • ★★ Ali says that once you write down a fear such as "I am not starting my business because Sarah from accounting will laugh at me", the thought loses most of its power and you see it for what it is. — 00:06:32
  • ★★ Ali thinks that unless you have a strong journaling or meditation practice you probably take your thoughts far too seriously; he likens thoughts to passing clouds. — 00:06:32

00:07:40 — Sponsor read for Brilliant

00:09:12 — The three levels of journaling: what you did, what you think and feel, your goals and plans

  • ★★★ Level one of Ali's three levels of journaling, for complete beginners, is simply writing down what you did, in the evening for today or in the morning for yesterday. — 00:09:12
  • ★★ Ali recommends homework for life from Matthew Dicks's Storyworthy: at the end of each day, ask what the most storyworthy moment was and write it down, finding something even on a boring day. — 00:09:41
  • ★★ With about ten years of journal entries, Ali can see in his app what he thought and did on the same day years earlier; reliving memories is nostalgic and shows how far you have come. — 00:10:11 · Day One
  • ★★ Level two of Ali's journaling is writing out what you are thinking, for example with morning pages from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: three pages (or fewer) each morning of whatever comes to mind; he starts with "today is going to be a great day because". — 00:10:40
  • ★ Julia Cameron says morning pages should be handwritten, but Ali types his because writing by hand is sometimes annoying. — 00:11:09
  • ★★ Writing out what you are thinking gives you insight into your thought processes, Ali says, such as noticing that your recurring thoughts are negative; it also helps creative work. — 00:11:09
  • ★★ Ali adds to level two writing what you are feeling and putting feelings into words, which gives self-awareness of feelings that subconsciously dictate decisions and actions. — 00:11:50
  • ★★ Once feelings such as anxiety or a sense of running out of time are on paper, Ali says, you start approaching your thoughts and feelings like a detective, asking where they come from and whether they are true. — 00:12:45
  • ★ Ali suggests having the conversation with yourself on paper, or pasting it into ChatGPT or Claude for an analysis. — 00:13:10 · ChatGPT
  • ★★★ Level three of Ali's journaling, the one he likes most as a self-described productivity bro, is journaling about your goals and plans for the future. — 00:13:39
  • ★★ One level-three journaling prompt Ali gives is "What would you like people to say at your funeral?", where people talk about service and character rather than achievements or money. — 00:13:39
  • ★★ Another prompt Ali gives is "What does your ideal end state look like?": imagine you have achieved everything you want and ask what your day-to-day would be. — 00:14:08 · ideal Tuesday
  • ★★★ Journaling for even five or ten minutes consistently gives distance from day-to-day chores to ask what you actually want, which Ali calls one of the key things journaling has given him. — 00:15:36
  • ★★★ Ali says journaling helped him realise his career as a doctor was not for him: his greatest enjoyment as a doctor came from learning something new or teaching. — 00:16:35
  • ★★ Ali says he does not care about money for its own sake but because money gets him freedom, and freedom lets him teach. — 00:16:35
  • ★★ Once you work out what you actually want, Ali says, turn it into a goal, a plan and a system to follow the plan: his GPS method for goal setting. — 00:17:32 · GPS: goal, plan, system
  • ★★★ When people at his events ask how to figure out what to do with their life, Ali first asks whether they have journaled about it: set a ten-minute timer, ask yourself a question and type or speak whatever comes to mind. — 00:18:01

00:18:45 — Actionable tips: physical journal, digital journal, prompts, AI; daily habit versus deep dive

  • ★ Ali loves buying Harry Potter-themed journals, such as a Ravenclaw journal and an Expecto Patronum notebook. — 00:18:45 · Harry Potter (book series)
  • ★★ Ali's first journaling tip is to get a physical journal you feel good about using, applying the idea of his book Feel-Good Productivity that we do things more and better when they feel good. — 00:19:30 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), feel-good productivity (concept)
  • ★★ Ali's second tip is to also keep a digital journal in an app: Apple has a free built-in journaling app, and the one he has used for years is Day One. — 00:20:00 · Day One, Apple
  • ★★ Ali has used Day One about weekly since around 2014 and photographs pages of his physical journal into it, a physical and digital hybrid that makes looking back easy. — 00:20:22 · Day One
  • ★★ Ali's third tip for beginners is to get a list of good journaling prompts as an easy way to start. — 00:20:22
  • ★★ Ali's fourth tip is that starting to journal has never been easier because you can talk to an AI, for example asking it for journaling prompts; his favourite AI for this is Claude, but any tool works. — 00:20:22
  • ★★ Ali's daily journaling takes two to five minutes on most days, prompted by a Day One notification or over coffee at a local coffee shop with his Harry Potter journal. — 00:21:08 · Day One, Harry Potter (book series)
  • ★★★ To make specific, tangible changes to your life, Ali recommends a journaling deep dive: set aside half a day or a couple of hours, go somewhere new with journaling prompts and no phone, a mini self-discovery retreat. — 00:21:38

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked whether tweets count as journal entries, the channel replies that they could if you are consistent with them. (hedged) — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Day One · three levels of journaling

Also: People: Julia Cameron · Matthew Dicks

Projects: Lifestyle Business Academy

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Harry Potter (book series) · Storyworthy · The Artist's Way

Organizations: Apple

Concepts: bullet journal · GPS: goal, plan, system · homework for life · ideal Tuesday · meditation · morning pages · think day

Places: Hong Kong

Products: ChatGPT · Claude · DeepSeek · Gemini · Grok · Poe

Also centred on three levels of journaling: Change Your Life by Journalling in 2026

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