20 Benefits Out Of Future Self Journaling, (2024) Guide

Future self journaling is an incredible practice that can propel you into your dream life.

If you’re looking to create a brighter future, I couldn’t recommend it enough. 

In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn 20 benefits of future self journaling from the perspective of a certified life coach.  

If that’s not enough to convince you to start a future self journal, I’m not sure what to say.

Let’s dive right into it.

Future Self Journaling
Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

1. Borrow Confidence From Your Ideal Future Self

The human brain struggles to tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined. You can see evidence of this by the way we react to TV shows and movies, other people’s stories or our own recollections of uncomfortable past moments, for example. 

This is a big reason why so many people recommend future self journaling.

Future self journaling involves writing daily journal entries, as if you are your ideal future self. You’ll write it in the present tense.

This fires up new neurons in your brain that connect you to your ideal future self. These connections – that wouldn’t have otherwise existed – help you to start behaving like this ideal version of you.  

You gain the self-confidence, the work ethic and the habits of someone who has already achieved the successes you desire. 

This is great because when your actions mirror your ideal self, you’ll eventually gain your ideal life. 

2. Realise What You Really Want From Life

The first step to getting what you want from life is painting a clear picture of what that is. Yet, so many people don’t even dare to dream.

With a future self journal, you’ll go several steps beyond dreaming. You’ll be writing every day as if you already have everything you ever wanted.

This practice forces you to think about what you really want in great detail.

Often, you’ll bring your subconscious desires into your conscious mind. This self-awareness is an important first step to making them real in the future. 

3. Transform Your Dreams Into Goals 

Your goals are only dreams until they’re written down. There’s something more real about your ideal life when it’s written on paper. 

Now it’s tangible. You can see it, touch it or show it to your friends. It’s no longer a fantasy.  

4. You Can Work Backwards From The Finish Line

The easiest way to create a roadmap to your ideal life is to know exactly where your finish line is. 

Your future self is a best-selling author in the self-help field? Amazing! What did they do to get there?  

Oh, they built a huge audience of adoring fans? Cool! How did they do that?

Oh, they increased their reach, spreading their self-help knowledge to as many people as possible for free at first? Interesting! How did they learn to do that? 

These are questions you can explore while future self journaling. They can go on and on until you reach your present self. 

This bigger picture not only reveals crystal-clear directions. It should also motivate you to keep going, even if your self-help blog only attracted 11 views today. 

5. Focus On The Behaviors You Want To Change 

If you have no idea what to write in your future self journal, you can make use of future self journaling prompts. Essentially, these are expert tips for what to write. Perform a web search for that term and you’ll find plenty of them. Choose what prompts resonate with you.

One of the most popular journaling prompts is: what behaviors did I change and why?

This prompt will help you realise which habits you need to drop – and which you need to develop – to get to where you want to be. 

Like a lot of the things you’ll learn when self-journaling, you may already know the answers to this question, but the journaling process brings them to your conscious mind. In fact, it will do this consistently until you actually make the change. 

6. Maintain Your Self-Belief

Perhaps your present self often feels like giving up? Maybe you sometimes think you’ll never hit your goals?

Does your future self think like that? No, because they already hit these goals!

By becoming your future self while journaling, you can maintain the rock-solid belief needed to reach the promised land 

If you looked into the future and already knew you’d reach your goals one day, would you ever give up? No, because you’ve seen yourself at the finish line, you’d be certain of making it. 

Future self journaling provides you with that level of certainty throughout your journey to the top. 

In fact, a popular future self journaling prompt is to write a letter to your ‘past self’, encouraging them to keep going. 

Perhaps you’d like to create this letter as part of your first future self journal entry. 

7. Maintain Your Self-Esteem

When you’re living your dream life, this can do wonders for your self-esteem. When you reach all of your meaningful goals, it really helps you to feel amazing about yourself.

By becoming a successful person through future self journaling, you can gain the self-esteem of a successful person early. 

8. Calm Your Anxiety

A good question to calm your anxiety is: will this matter in five years?

Your future self might not live that far in the future, but there’s still a good chance they’ve completely forgotten about whatever inconveniences bothered you today.

So, future self journaling can help you to stop sweating the small stuff and regain focus on your long-term goals.   

9. A Teammate In The Battle Against Your Old Self

Your brain doesn’t care about your future goals. On a biological level, it just wants to keep you alive and comfortable today. The thing is: identity-level change is inherently uncomfortable. That’s why it’s so hard to make big improvements to your life.

It may feel like the journey to your dream life is a constant battle against your biological monkey brain.

Often your friends and family won’t be terribly supportive either. That’s mostly because it’s more comfortable for them if you stay the same. Often, they’d love it if you didn’t highlight their failures by making improvements to your life. 

By future self journaling, you give yourself at least one loyal supporter in your self-improvement journey. This person knows you have what it takes to achieve your goals – and they know how happy you’ll be once you get there. 

10. Become More Patient

Perhaps you’re frustrated at the speed of your progress towards your goals.

If so, future self journaling can help you stay patient. When you know a happy ending is arriving, you’ll probably find it a lot easier to relax and enjoy the whole story. 

11. Stop Negative Self-Talk And Practice Self-Love

Perhaps you tend to browbeat yourself whenever you make a mistake. This is a habit that most people would like to remove from their life – and future self journaling can help you with that.

Would you reprimand yourself for trying and failing if you knew you were definitely going to succeed eventually?

Probably not. Future self journaling helps you gain the self-love today based on the success of your future actions.

This helps you become a more positive person, which tends to attract more positive things into your life. See my guide on the Law of Attraction for more information on how this manifestation works. 

12. Become More Aware Of Your Inner Dialogue

When you write down your thoughts in a journal every day, you begin to become aware of this voice in your head. 

Is it a positive voice, like the one you heard while writing your future self journal today? Or does this voice make you feel worse?

With added awareness of this inner voice, it becomes easier to choose (or at least amend) what it tells you. That’s important if you want to gain a stronger control of your emotions.

13. Get A Daily Glimpse Of Your Higher Self

When you’re writing in your daily journal, you’re giving yourself a glimpse of your higher self. This version of you doesn’t lash out. They don’t become petty, or make ego-based decisions. In fact, all their decisions are made with honor and integrity. Their behavior is seemingly perfect. Why would we create our ideal self any differently?  

While it’s almost impossible to be this enlightened vision of ourselves all the time, it’s still useful to have this vision to inspire us to like our best selves today. 

When faced with decisions, we can then ask ourselves: what would our higher self do? 

14. Keep Your Focus And Stay Accountable

Any form of daily journaling will help you maintain focus on your goals.

Sometimes, when future self journaling, you may notice an uncomfortable disconnect with your future self. Often, that’s a sign you recently haven’t been engaging in the habits that will allow you to become that person.   

Don’t ignore these feelings. Instead, ask yourself what you can do today to avoid feeling so disconnected tomorrow.

15. Create Ideas 

When you only focus on how to get through today, it’s almost impossible to think of ideas to improve your future.

It’s only when we quieten our minds – or focus our thoughts on the future – that these ideas tend to pop up.

16. Get Out Of A Rut

When you experience the same thoughts and feelings every day, your weeks, months and years will all prove to be very similar. There will be no inner or outer growth.

Future self journaling encourages you to improve your mindset and change your actions. A great way to get out of a rut.  

17. Inspiration From The Joy Of Future Self Journaling 

Just like any new habit, you may find future self journaling difficult at first. It might be difficult to get started at the beginning of any journaling session. Writer’s block is a real thing (although your journaling prompts should help to guide you to a great writing session).

With that said, once you get into the flow of future self journaling, you’ll probably grow to love it. In fact, it could easily become one of the most consistently joyful parts of your day. Thinking about having everything you ever wanted is an inherently enjoyable activity, after all.  

Take a mental note of how happy this future vision of you is. That should inspire you to hustle harder to become that person in real life.   

18. Gain Gratitude

Another popular future self journaling prompt is: what am I grateful for? 

Dive deep into this question. While your future self might be grateful for the new superficial things in their life, they could also choose to feel gratitude for a lot of the things you already have today.

It’s often the simple things that make life really joyful. But, sometimes, you need to fufil all your superficial desires to learn that.

19. Boost Your Creativity

Your journal entries don’t have to be long and compelling personal stories. The most important thing is the impact your writing has on your mind.

Even so, writing about the future every day is bound to boost your creativity. 

20. Build Discipline

By engaging in a difficult daily habit, you build your discipline across other areas of your life. If you can write in your future self journal for 60 days in a row, what’s stopping you from keeping to your gym routine for two months or more?

Whatever habit you choose to begin, your future self journaling success can inspire you to get started.

Any More Questions About The Benefits Of Future Self Journaling? 

I hope this guide helped you to understand the benefits of future self journaling. Perhaps you’re ready to get started and create a brighter future today?

This is a simple routine to follow, which only needs to take 10 minutes per day, but it can do so much to increase your self-awareness and skyrocket you towards your goals.  

If you have a question for me, write it in the comments section. I’d love to hear what you have to say about this topic

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About The Author

Bijan Kholghi is a certified life coach with the Milton Erickson Institute Heidelberg (Germany). He helps clients and couples reach breakthroughs in their lives by changing subconscious patterns. His solution-oriented approach is based on Systemic- and Hypnotherapy.

Bijan