Core exercise · 4 of 12
Review
Yes / no, once a day
"What did I do today?"
If anyone asked me how my last ten years went, all I could answer is "Work, marriage, adopt a cat, coronavirus, wait for payday..." If it weren't for the photos and videos on my phone, I'd have nothing tangible to fill in the gaps between the lines. At some point I lamented to myself, "I don't want to spend my life without being able to remember any of it!" I learnt that keeping a diary, running quickly through the day one last time in my head before bed, or writing it down, keeps my sense of time fresh. Still, this generally runs along the lines of "Got up and made the bed. Loo. Morning meeting. Breakfast. Work, work, work. Cooked dinner. Went to the gym. Had a shower and read a bit in bed.", and as a practice it can be boring for anyone else to read or listen to. But looking at it, I noticed that the "I'm missing my life!" panic inside me and the judging looks of toxic productivity had eased, and that the answer to "What did we even have for dinner last night?" had started to come faster. Even if I hadn't put my name to anything "valuable" during the day, I saw that my feelings about that day had taken on a more peaceful shape. Peaceful feelings started bringing small but constructive steps I could take towards the future I dream of, like "Right, let me pull that half-finished novel of mine together." The "Better than nothing." energy that started to replace the sharp "All or nothing!" mindset in my head began to open up, in place of this gloomy pit I was stuck in, a path I could walk with these small steps; narrow, maybe, but at least visible.
"What was the best moment I lived today?"
On top of that, trying to answer the question "What was the best moment I lived today?" planted in my brain the reassurance that "However awful the day, you are here and you are with me." and let me calm, slowly but surely, like the surface of a lake settling after a storm, my nervous system's effort to be on alert 24/7 and merely survive. Even when the "best moment" of the worst day I've had was nothing more than a mug of hot tea, being able to take a deep breath and say "Oh well..." at least softened my fall. In the first months I kept asking myself, "Why do I make myself hunt for the best moment of the day every evening, why do I do all these fiddly little exercises?" Then I realised that if my soul had teeth, without these exercises its molars would have rotted and been pulled long ago.
Research
Research: Review
Looking back over the day, the "three good things" exercise, sleep and memory, and why routine years vanish.
These notes are a starting point for the author's own reading; nothing here is medical advice.
Two things in this exercise have been studied under other names. Running back through the day, in your head or on paper, is a cousin of expressive writing: writing about your experiences for a few minutes a day has been linked, across many trials, to small improvements in mood and health (Pennebaker 1997). The second question, "the best moment of today", is almost exactly the "three good things" exercise, in which people write down three things that went well each evening and why; in a randomised trial it raised happiness and lowered depressive symptoms for months afterwards (Seligman and colleagues 2005). The author's point about memory is on solid ground too: sleep after learning helps the brain consolidate what the day taught it (Walker and Stickgold 2004), and the feeling that whole years have vanished without a trace is what writing on time perception describes as the effect of routine: days with nothing new in them leave few memories, so in hindsight they shrink (Hammond 2012).
References
- Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science.
- Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., and Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist.
- Walker, M. P., and Stickgold, R. (2004). Sleep-dependent learning and memory consolidation. Neuron.
- Hammond, C. (2012). Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception. Canongate.
Notes last touched October 16, 2026