How to journal like a Stoic

What Stoic journaling is, and isn’t

The Stoics treated philosophy as something you practice, and writing was one of the ways they practiced it. A Stoic journal is where you put a principle into words and then test it against a real day: the call with your sister, the meeting at ten, the train that is late again. The page is less about what happened than about how you met it.

That rules out a few things that often go by the name.

• It isn’t a diary. Marcus Aurelius’s notebook says almost nothing about the wars or the politics of his reign. Events matter on the page only as material for a judgment about how to act.
• It isn’t a place to vent. Writing out a grievance at length rehearses it. Marcus reminds himself that your habitual thoughts become the character of your mind, because the soul takes on their color like a dye (Meditations 5.16, in our words).
• It isn’t a productivity planner. A Stoic page asks how you will act today, not how much you will get done.
• It isn’t a verdict on yourself. The evening review is honest and fair. Seneca, describing his own, pardons himself before he sets a rule for next time (On Anger 3.36).
• It isn’t written for anyone else. No audience means no performing. You can write the plain truth.

Free Stoic journal template

The template has two pages, one for the morning and one for the evening, and each takes about five minutes. Copy the headings into any notebook, or print this page or save it as a PDF from your browser’s print menu. There is no download form and no email address to give.

Give each day one spread: the morning page on the left, the evening page on the right. When you reread the morning at night, it is right there.

Morning page

1. Date and passage. Copy one short passage by hand, with its source: author, work, book and section. Today’s teaching gives you one each morning, or open the Meditations or the Enchiridion at any page.
2. In my own words. One or two sentences, as if you were explaining it to a friend. If you can’t, read it again.
3. The people and the work ahead. Who will you deal with today, and what work is yours to do? Meditations 2.1 opens with Marcus telling himself, at the start of the day, what sort of people he will meet; in 5.1 he reminds himself why he gets out of bed at all: there is a human being’s work to do. The Stoic morning routine works through both passages.
4. Up to me / not up to me. Take the one thing on today’s list that weighs most and draw a line down the page. On the left go the parts that are your own judgments and choices; on the right, everything else. This is the division that opens Epictetus’s Enchiridion, now called the dichotomy of control.
5. One thing to practice. One small, specific act that puts the passage to work today, something you will be able to check tonight.

Evening page

1. Reread the morning page. Where did the day match what you expected, and where didn’t it?
2. The Evening Examination. Answer the five questions of the Evening Examination, a line or two each. They run from what you did well to what you will do tomorrow, and that page explains where they come from. You can also do the examination there in your browser and copy your answers into the notebook.
3. The passage in practice. Where did this morning’s passage come up today, and did you use it? One moment is enough.
4. Stop. Once tomorrow’s line is written, close the notebook. The evening page is a review, not a second workday.

That is the whole format. Some days a page will hold three lines, and that still counts.

A Stoic journal example: one day, filled in

Here is one day of the template, morning and evening, built on one passage. The people and details are invented. The passage is real: Meditations 7.2 in George Long’s 1862 translation, which is in the public domain.

The morning page

There is nothing here about yesterday and no list of complaints about the railway. The passage gives the day a single test, and the last line turns it into something that can be checked.

The evening page

The evening page is specific without being harsh. It names particular moments, says plainly which ones went wrong and what would have been better, and ends with something to do. That is the shape of Seneca’s own review, which the Evening Examination follows.

How the Stoics actually wrote

The clearest instruction to write comes from Epictetus. In the first of the Discourses he asks what a person should have ready when things go against him, runs his answer past death, chains and exile, and then says what to do with all of it:

Three verbs: meditate on, write, exercise. Writing sits in the middle, between thinking a principle over and acting on it. And what gets written is not the news of the day but the division Epictetus starts from: “What is mine, and what is not mine” (Discourses 1.1). That is why the morning page has an up-to-me column. Later, in Discourses 3.24, he gives the same instruction for his thoughts on loss and change. In our words: have them at hand day and night, write them down, read them, and talk them over, with yourself and with other people.

There is an irony here. By the account in their preface, the Discourses were written down not by Epictetus but by his student Arrian, so the teacher who told his students to write daily is known to us mainly through a student’s notes.

Seneca’s nightly review, the model for the evening page, is not described as writing at all. Once the lamp has been taken away and his wife, who knows his habit, has stopped talking, he goes over the whole day in his own mind (On Anger 3.36). The Evening Examination page tells the story of Seneca and Sextius. Seneca did put days on paper in another form. In Letter 83, his friend Lucilius has asked him for an account of each of his days, and Seneca agrees to watch himself and review each one, then describes a day of his own. (The Letters are summarized here rather than quoted, because the usual English translations are still under copyright in many countries.)

Did Marcus Aurelius keep a journal?

In effect, yes, though not a diary. The Meditations is a personal notebook that Marcus addressed to himself and kept for his own use, probably written in the 170s while he was on campaign (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). He wrote it in Greek, apparently not for publication; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab) puts its purpose as his own moral improvement, a way of keeping the Stoic doctrines he meant to live by in front of him. The Meditations guide covers where the book came from and how its title came later.

Two entries bear on what a notebook like this is for. In the first, he tells himself not to count on rereading what he had saved:

He doesn’t say what his memoirs contained. The point is plain enough: the notes, histories and extracts he was keeping for old age might never be read. The time to use them is now, “while it is in thy power” (Meditations 3.14). A Stoic journal is not an archive for later. It earns its keep the day you write it.

The second is his best-known passage on retreating into himself:

Marcus doesn’t need a house in the country: it is in his power, he says, “to retire into thyself” whenever he chooses. What he takes with him are his principles, which he tells himself to keep “brief and fundamental” (Meditations 4.3) so they are ready when he turns to them. That is a good rule for a journal page too. Write the principle short enough to recall on a train platform. The passage has its own page: Meditations 4.3, read closely.

Making it last

In 7.2, the passage in the example day, Marcus asks how principles die. His answer: when the thoughts that go with them go out. The remedy is in your power: “to fan these thoughts into a flame” (Meditations 7.2). A journal is one way to keep doing that. Each morning you write a principle down again, and each evening you look for where it showed up.

• Keep each page short. Five minutes is enough. A short page you write every day does more than a long one you skip. Epictetus says every habit is kept up and strengthened by doing the matching thing, walking by walking and running by running (Discourses 2.18, in our words).
• Repeat yourself. Copying the same passage on many mornings is fine. Marcus comes back to the same few ideas again and again.
• Start again without catching up. When you miss a day, or a week, don’t backfill. Open a new spread tomorrow morning. Marcus’s line fits: “To recover thy life is in thy power” (Meditations 7.2).
• Reread once a week. This one is our suggestion; the sources describe a daily review, not a weekly one. Read the week’s evening pages together and look for the same kind of moment going wrong. That pattern is what to work on next. A Stoic daily routine shows where the weekly look fits.
• Use a prompt when the page is blank. Stoic journal prompts has questions for mornings, evenings and hard moments, each under the passage it comes from.

Your journal stays yours

Marcus wrote for himself, and a Stoic journal works best written the same way. The page is only useful if it is honest, and it is easier to be honest on a page nobody else will read. Keep the notebook where others won’t pick it up, and if you type, keep the file somewhere private.

This page has no form and collects nothing; the template lives in your notebook. In the Stoic Practice app, the journal stays on your iPhone. There is no account, the App Store privacy label is “Data Not Collected,” nothing syncs, and the app writes a backup file only when you export one. (Your iPhone’s own iCloud or computer backups can include app data, as they do for any app; the privacy policy explains.) The journal holds your Evening Examination answers and any exercise reflections you choose to save, and it is never locked, even without Premium; morning reflections and intentions are part of Premium. It has no blank pages for free writing, so keep the full morning page on paper.