5 journal habits that quietly transform your life

I believe one habit that can make the biggest impact in your life is keeping a journal. But the most common question I get, how do I get started? So that's why in this video, I want to give you the five journaling methods I wish I had from day one that'll help you get started long enough to build the habit and see benefits. We're going to cover one method that breaks you out of your overthinking ruts, my 10 favorite journaling prompts. I'll tell you why I threw out my second brain after three years of building the thing and even one method you can do that takes less than 20 seconds a day. All right, here's

method number one. Sometimes you sit down to journal and nothing is flowing. So, one of the easiest places you can start is with journaling prompts. Over the years, I've answered hundreds of these, but I'll give you 10 of my favorites. And I like to think of them in three categories. Prompts for your past, your now, and your future. Feel free to screenshot, write these down, and answer them if you're feeling brave. What's a lesson I keep learning over and over the hard way? When was the last time I felt truly like myself? What was I doing? Who is it with? What did I used to love doing that I quietly stopped? The now. What's working? What's not working? What would I tell my best friend if they were living my life right now? What's a conversation or decision I keep avoiding and why? This one's a new favorite. What am I significantly over complicating and how would I approach it if I was dumb? Your future. If I couldn't fail and nobody would judge me, what would I do with my next year? What would my ideal Tuesday look 5 years from now? What story do I need to let go of to become the person I keep saying I want to be? Some of those about the future when I was 30 grand in debt in my mom's basement. I asked and it led to me starting this YouTube channel. I said, you know, if I couldn't fail, I would teach. I love teaching. I love learning and I would find a way to turn that into a business. And so, I started sharing ideas from books that I was reading. And that gave enough momentum to show me it was possible to start a YouTube channel. Now, sometimes prompts are standalone questions you do as a one-off. Other times they're reoccurring. So, this is one that I did in 2025 at the end as sort of an annual review. I came up with 10 questions that I answer at the end of every year. Real cool systemized way that you can look back on previous journals and see what your 10 answers are. But yeah, I just find that journal prompts sometimes get the gears turning more than just staring at a blank page, which is why we're starting with this as the first method. That leads us to the

second big method that I get the most breakthroughs from, and that is what I call a brain dump. So, anytime you find yourself like so in your head, overinking, making things really complex, take out the journal, open a blank page, and just start writing. Okay? I truly believe like 80% of the benefits from this is just taking ideas out of your head and putting them on paper. And like in a conversation, you ever said something out loud and you're like, "Oh, that sounds dumb. That's never going to happen. " When we don't have a place to take our thoughts and put them somewhere, we identify with all of them. It's like we're carrying them around with us. All our fears, all our insecurities, everything. And you might have the idea, well, if I put it on paper, then it's real. But I've actually found it's the opposite. Like once you see it written down, it either can be a problem you solve or you realize it's not even worth your time and it's never going to happen. So, with brain dumps, they're harder for me to find and show because they're so messy, and I don't know if there's much value in just seeing a big wall of text. But I did find one from my 2015 journal, so over 10 years ago. And this one's cool because it was one I did in Cambodia when I was watching I was backpacking around watching the sunset. And this is where I wrote the vision for where I wanted to be at age 30. In fact, I said my commitment when I get home, I will bust my ass harder and longer than I ever have because I will put my heart and soul and passion into every [ __ ] piece of content. Time to peak past the dip. I will turn pro this year, 2015, the year Clark Danger makes something of himself. And 2015 is also the last time I speak in third person. Stop settling, start living. You write notes to yourself in the future if you want to look back and read it. But that's one of the biggest benefits I've gotten. I don't always go back and read my brain dumps because they're pretty messy and raw. Um, but when I do, I always find something that like connects a thread through the past you, current you, and it feels like, I don't know, like you're having a conversation with the old version of you, and you can see how that version of you 10 years ago thought and the state of life they were in. It's like even a more raw version of a home video. This is just like you in a journal, man. So, if you haven't tried a brain dump, I would highly recommend just like putting your thoughts on paper where you are right now. Again, it doesn't have to look pretty. I mean, you're looking at mine right there. It's chicken scratch. I even have a hard time reading my own handwriting. There's good research from James Pennbaker, Penny Baker. He was a college professor and he had a group of students write for four consecutive days, 15 minutes about whatever they hadn't processed yet on paper. And those students had fewer visits to the student health center over the next six months. Some other research I've seen where students who just wrote about anything ended up getting better grades. I got two German shepherds running around behind the scenes. You can't see them. The days I don't walk them, they are crazy. They are little menaces chewing up Birkenstocks. They're [ __ ] on rugs. But the days we work them really hard, retrain them, they're way better throughout the day. Journaling is that internal workout for that sensor that you have that pipes on. You know, we have mirrors for our outer appearance. Okay, how do we look? Is does this look all right? All right, great. But we don't have any mirrors for our internal state of being. And I think your journal is that place where you yes, spend time with yourself, but it's internally checking in with yourself and viewing yourself through the mirror. And if you never do this, you're going to feel like a stranger in your body. You're going to feel disconnected. Who wouldn't? So, in that way, I say stop looking for answers and start listening to them.

Now, if you've wanted to keep a journal, you've probably had the idea, what if I just do this digitally? Because like, why would you keep this old school physical thing? And the idea comes about when you hear things like a second brain. And if you haven't heard that term, it's essentially a place like in notion or obsidian. Those are tools people use where you collect everything and you put it in one place. It syncs in there. Right now, I'm scrolling through my notion doc showing you this. Every single idea I had, I would put in here. probably hundreds of thousands of words throughout 3 years I have been doing this. But I found some problems and here's why I'm actually throwing it away after 3 years. I found that having a second brain rewarded overthinking. It was sort of a digital form of hoarding. I found that the intention became about collecting instead of understanding. And in that way the second problem I realized is it solved the problem that I didn't have. My problem was never I don't have enough ideas. That's probably your problem too. It's that I'm not acting on the ideas I do have. I say all that not to knock second brains. Like obviously if it works for you, go for it and uh knock yourself out. But for me, what I found is that the benefits I loved from journaling didn't translate to when I did it through a second brain. I found that having a journal has built-in constraints that I really enjoyed. like not being able to go back and find everything I've ever said on the subject, but just having the one year I'm keeping a journal before I swap it every year. I'm not overwhelmed. I'm actually spending more time connecting the ideas between what I know and what I'm doing and where that gap is. And real quick, the journal method I like and use to this day is the same one I've been doing for 16 years. I call this the threein-one journal method. It's where you take a journal like this and you split it up into three sections. And each section is about 20 or so pages each. So the three I like to do are a student section. This is anything you learn from books or podcasts or content online and you want to capture sort of like a manual second brain. Now I have whole videos showing you like inside journals and whatnot with this method, but here's just one quick example. when I was learning uh Carl Rogers therapy model and IFS stuff like that is what you're putting in the student section where you are the student and you're learning and you capture ideas. The next section I have is creative. Now for me this is where anything I'm doing with YouTube content or my business. And so some examples of that are like chart videos. You know when I get ideas for charts I like to sketch them out here first and this is where I just am able to have that. or if I want to, where is it? Oh, yeah. This is really meta. Uh, the journal video I'm filming right now, I wrote as an outline in this section. I feel like it helps me get my ideas out of my head onto paper and create a clearer video when I know exactly where it's going. And this is the outline I work from. The last section is freedom. And this is where all the brain dumps go. Normally, the prompt entries I was telling you about earlier go. If you're interested in that, our My Best Journal program goes into that in detail of like how do you set this up in that method and I'll also link down our ultimate guide to keeping your journal videos that are free on YouTube. All right, so

here's method number four. You might have heard the benefits of keeping a gratitude journal. This is where you write the things you're most grateful for and in doing so you feel all these positive emotions with it. But then I was like, okay, what's another word for gratitude? It's a win. What is winning in your life? So, I call this one a win log where you write down the things that are going well. That's the only intention here. I think this is important for people who are susceptible to rumination where if they journal, they just keep going about the problem and then they might say, "I walk away feeling worse. " Well, that's cuz you're never writing about the other side, which is what is not working, what is working. And I think in that way, you're training your mind to seek more of it. You know, there's something in your brain called the reticular activating system. And this is where you tell it something is important. It starts showing up more in your life. So when I got my Bronco, um I started seeing Broncos everywhere. And the amount of them didn't go up. It was just that I told it was important and you start seeing more of it. So it's the same thing with your life that yeah, when you point out the wins and things that are going well for you, you'll start to see more things in your life that are going well. So this is an example of a win log I found. Sometimes these are standalone like what I'm showing you. Most of the time it's in a entry somewhere buried in the journal. But for this I started with just five things I'm feeling grateful for. So I got my dogs, my relationship, a phone call I had, my health and the work I do. And then I move into the question, what's working? Things like getting back into running, being able to hit 5 miles around Tempe Town Lake. Uh having fun with content, the reinvention journal I'm working on, and feeling like I'm getting back into meditation. Sometimes it's just one thing or one win. Other times it's like this where it's four and five. The point is not to put an arbitrary number to this. The point is that you just write what feels natural and not forced. One of my favorite books of last year was called the winner effect. And it's all about that. That when you win, you're more likely to keep winning in the future. In the book, it talks about stock traders how when they had a few wins, that built up their confidence and they would take riskier trades that actually led to more payouts. It spoke about Mike Tyson, how he got out of jail, making a comeback, they put him against a few easy fights first, builds up the confidence, goes on and wins. Now, wins don't have to be massive. They can be small. In fact, I think that small wins often get overlooked, and that's part of the point. You made your bed this morning, that's a win. You had a great conversation on the phone with a friend you didn't speak to in a while, that's a win. You sat down and filmed a video, that's a win. And then that builds this like positive momentum that gets you going in the right direction. But what do you do if you're in a time crunch and you still want to journal? Well, the good news is this next method only takes

about 20 seconds. Last year I experimented with a new method called one line a day. And it is exactly that. You sit down and you write one line in your journal every day. I'll read you a few so you can see how normal they are. And that's the whole point. like on April 4th where I had pizza and white lotus with Danny and her sister. We had a family night and I wrote my email newsletter that week. The next day edited a book breakdown video I was working on steakhouse at home. Butterbased some stakes and I hit a deadlift PR. One modification I came up with to this that I really enjoy looking back on. At the bottom here, leave a couple inches and this is your monthly review. So you have all these lines. Well, at the end of the month, what are like the five to 10 little bullets that if you're flipping back on? And I found looking back on some of these really summarizes the month and is a cool little add-on addition you can try. Another alternative to this that I've experimented doing is one true sentence a day. We carry this persona around with us all day that gets exhausting. It's like at work, you know, you have to put on this mask or maybe you have to hold it all together for the people around you. But when you just have one honest sentence a day, it's at least a little pressure valve that gets released. One line I wrote the other day is, "I thought I should be over this by now. " Where I'm talking about how I still get in my head creating content. It's extremely can be extremely draining to be honest. Um, I still love what I do creatively, but I think there's a lot of pressure to not fall off and compete with who you were in the past in like how you created content and the views and the metrics and all this [ __ ] really. You got to give yourself permission to evolve into the next version of who you want to be, which is what I've done the last two years, and feeling the pressure dynamic between being trapped in the old way I used to create with like all this energy and enthusiasm and scripts and lines and hooks and feeling like I've outgrown that version. Finding a way to mature into the next version of me in my 30s instead of Clark in his 20s who had a YouTube channel, but like, you know, I'm going to be married. I'm having kids soon and I overall want to feel way more grounded and real. I want that to translate to the work I do. Anyway, that's way more than one sentence. I don't mean to dump on you there, but uh that is what I'm talking about when you're honest. And it takes a weight off of you and you can finally just like, you know, that is how I feel. I don't always have to be Mr. Funny or Mr. Charismatic. And it's okay to show up who you are in that moment. And for me, that's the whole process of journaling really in a nutshell is where you remove the persona and you strip it down into who you actually are. And there is a massive relief when you feel like you can live from that honest place. Those are the five methods I would use. You got the free writing with a brain dump to just get it out and chill out more. Consume your own thoughts instead of other people. You got the journaling prompts for the moments where you feel like you do want to a workout and you want to go deeper in yourself, but you don't know how to start. You got the second brain method I told you about. Instead of digitally, you do it physically. It has built-in constraints and I think rewards the right things instead of hoarding and collecting information. You got the gratitude log, which I like to frame as a win log for you. and you got the one true sentence a day or one line a day journal that uh I think is really fun to look back on. If you made it to the end of this video, would appreciate a like, comment if you got a method I didn't mention that has worked for you, and I'll link up right here our ultimate guide to keeping a journal video if you want to see the setup and more inside of how this actually comes about. Thanks for being here. I'll catch you in the next one. Stop settling, start living. Peace.