How to Journal Like a Stoic

In this episode, I’m challenging one of the most common assumptions in modern Stoicism: that journaling is somehow an inherently Stoic practice. Marcus Aurelius wasn’t keeping a daily diary, Epictetus wasn’t assigning journal entries to his students, and the kind of expressive writing we now associate with “Stoic journaling” is largely a modern self-improvement practice.

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That doesn’t mean journaling is useless. Regular reflection, planning your day, reviewing your behaviour, and expressive writing can all be helpful. But they’re no more uniquely Stoic than they are Christian, Buddhist, atheist, or useful to an anthropomorphised and literate potato.

So if we’re going to talk about “journaling like a Stoic,” I think we need to invent a better standard for what that actually means.

I break Stoic development into three parts: study, practice, and living. First, we learn the philosophy from people who know more than we do. Then we practise applying what we’ve learned until new patterns of thinking and behaviour become habituated. Finally, we put down the books and training aids and go out into the world to see whether any of it actually stuck.

That middle stage is where I think writing can be genuinely useful to a Stoic practice.

Rather than simply recording what happened during your day or writing about your feelings, I suggest explorative writing: take a difficult question or real-world situation and try to reason through it Stoically without reaching for a book, ChatGPT, or a cheat sheet. The purpose is to discover what you actually understand, where your reasoning falls apart, and what you need to return to your studies to learn.

That’s also the approach behind my year-long program at StoicJournaling.com, available for a one-time purchase of £72.

So, ironically, my advice for journaling like a Stoic is to stop journaling, at least in the conventional sense, and start using writing as a place to practise the philosophy instead.