Making sense of the past
Dear Diary: How keeping a daily journal can help bring clarity to our lives
We love to read about other people. Though the popularity of many types of books has declined, sales figures for biographical and autobiographical memoirs have remained strong, even as the proliferation of blogs and the use of social media to recount events in our daily lives have grown rapidly. Everyone, it seems, wants to tell their story.
Throughout the last century, a number of psychologists wrote about the powerful human need to make sense of one’s life. Erik Erikson described the lifelong desire to establish a unique identity and find a sense of purpose. His contemporary Abraham Maslow created a theory of “self-actualization” — five sequential stages of human needs that culminate in the urge to feel a sense of accomplishment and to achieve one’s unique potential. Clearly, recalling and making sense of our past helps us establish identity and purpose.
Nowadays, however, when we’re constantly tempted by distractions and besieged by more information than we can process, life can seem disorganized and chaotic. This may cause us to doubt our memory and wonder if we’ll ever find clarity, direction and purpose.
One of the best ways to remember and make sense of what happens in your life is to keep a written diary. According to Arthur Applebee, professor in the School of Education at Albany University in New York, keeping a record of personal events — either online or, better yet, by hand — enables you to reach more reasoned conclusions about what you’ve learned.
Writing down what you experience also improves your ability to remember it later, as Martin Conway and Sue Gathercole showed in a series of experiments conducted at Lancaster University.
If you wish to make it as easy as possible to recall recent events accurately, the best time to do so is bedtime, as Agnes Szollosi and her colleagues at the University of Technology and Economics in Budapest discovered. They recruited 109 young adults and asked them to keep a daily diary for five days. Participants were given one of three sets of instructions: to record in the evening the events of that same day; to record in the morning events of the previous day; or to record in the evening events of the previous day.
Thirty days later, participants were asked to recall as much of what they’d recorded as possible. Those who’d kept their diary in the evenings — whether they recounted events of that same day or the day before — had greater and more accurate recall than participants who’d written their diary in the morning. The researchers suggest that this is because when we recall events just before bedtime, the memories are consolidated and stabilized during the sleep that follows.
So, if you’d like to increase the chance of remembering and making sense of your past, keep a written diary — and do so just before bedtime.