Journalling has outlasted every wellness trend that has tried to replace it

"I keep my diary in order to arrange the chaos of my life. I do not weep, I document." Virginia Woolf wrote. It is the best description available of what an enormous number of people are quietly doing right now, at kitchen tables and on night buses and in the pale early hours before the day properly begins, in notebooks that range from the exquisite to the deeply unprepossessing.

Search interest for daily journalling hit its highest recorded point earlier this year. The global market for journal apps is projected to grow from 3.2 billion dollars in 2024 to over ten billion by 2033.

The writers who kept diaries did so for entirely different reasons, which is itself instructive. Kafka (largely) wrote in his because it was the only place he could live out the literary life his father had made impossible everywhere else. Anne Frank wrote because the diary was the one entity she could confide in completely, more than she had ever confided in any person, addressing it as Kitty, as a friend, with the full weight of a thirteen-year-old girl's inner life pressing against every page. Anaïs Nin wrote hers across several decades with the full intention of publication, which raises questions she herself seemed interested in — creative exhibitionism?

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Sylvia Plath wrote because there was a voice within her that would not be still. What connects these figures is perhaps the conviction that the unrecorded life was, in some meaningful sense, less lived.

The unfiltered thought

Sanskriti Seth, a counselling psychologist, describes what journalling does in terms that are less literary but arrive at a similar place. "A lot of times when we're used to filtering what we say, or don't feel safe enough to express our emotions or just our thoughts," she explains, "it allows access to those unfiltered thoughts and in a way to get to know yourself a little better and tap into your identity." The internal monologue most of us carry through our days loops and contradicts itself and returns, reliably, to the same unresolved corners.

Seth describes the specific relief this offers at the end of an anxious day. When thoughts spiral and feel unfinished, she says, "dumping them on paper, the act of doing that, can be a good ritual to recognise that this is something that I have put down and now I can deal with it on the next day. It's a way of letting that leave your mind and be sort of represented on paper. So you gain some sense of control, at least temporarily."

The framework she returns to is narrative therapy, an approach built on the premise that people are the authors of their own histories rather than simply their recipients, and that authorship can be revised. Within this sits a technique called re-authoring, in which a person returns to events that have already happened and rewrites their story of them, or looks at the larger picture of what happened, once they have come to terms with it.

The goal, as Seth describes it, is "taking accountability and making sense of your life and taking ownership over your life especially when you feel like for a large part a lot of things that have happened have been out of your control." Letters written to a younger self, to a parent, to someone who caused harm — whether or not those letters are ever sent — serve a purpose she finds consistently valuable. "They can be very cathartic to put words to the experience that you had, acknowledge the emotions that you have," she says. "It can feel like, again, gaining control over the narrative in some sense."

The scary, messy practice

Seth is careful about the conditions under which specific techniques are introduced. "The timing of these techniques and when it's used and what its function is is very important," she says. "It needs to feel intentional rather than just doing it without knowing what the intention is." The gratitude journal, which has attracted a certain amount of well-deserved mockery for its relentless cheerfulness, has a more specific application in her practice. She recommends it to clients who experienced a great deal of negativity growing up, where people around them pointed out the harsh or cynical parts of things, and who consequently find it difficult to look for what is good in a day.

"You may not have an active tendency or a pattern to look for the good things that are happening in life," she explains, "because the negative things seem a lot more familiar." The technique is not about positivity for its own sake but about slowly repatterning a default formed under conditions that no longer apply.

The diary has always accommodated the full range of what a person might want to bring to it — lists, poems, dream records, letters, descriptions of unremarkable afternoons. Woolf wrote about dinner parties and the light over the Sussex Downs, Nin wrote knowing the world would one day read every word.

The form has no requirements beyond the willingness to begin, and even that, Seth suggests, need not be grand. "It doesn't always have to be like a performance or feel like you have to write in a very put-together manner," she says. "Sometimes it can just start with writing two to three lines at the end of the day with a prompt, based on what you're like, in a personalised manner." The notebook makes no demands on frequency or beauty or coherence. It holds whatever is given to it and returns it, later, changed slightly by the fact of having been written down.