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Evidence review

Why Keep a Video Diary? 4 Reasons With Evidence, and 5 Without

You will forget the ordinary days, you'll underestimate how much you'd like them back, and your sense of your own change is unreliable. Those reasons have evidence. The usual ones mostly don't.

By , Creator of JourvelopePublished ·9 min read
What's in this article
  1. Reason 1: you'll want the ordinary days back more than you think
  2. Reason 2: your sense of your own change is unreliable
  3. Reason 3: video keeps what writing loses
  4. Reason 4: it's the lowest-effort record there is
  5. The cost: recording changes what you remember
  6. Video diary benefits that don't hold up
  7. So, why keep a video diary?
  8. FAQ
  9. Sources

The short answer: keep a video diary because you will forget most of your ordinary days, you will underestimate how much you'd like to see them again, and you can't trust your own sense of how much you've changed. Each of those has research behind it. A video diary is a cheap, honest fix for all three.

What it isn't, as far as anyone has shown, is a proven treatment for stress, anxiety or anything else. Most articles that answer "why keep a video diary" lead with those benefits. I build a video journal app, so I'd love them to be true — but nobody has tested them, and I'd rather give you the reasons that survive checking.

Reason 1: you'll want the ordinary days back more than you think

This is the best-supported reason, and it's the least obvious one.

In 2014, Ting Zhang and colleagues at Harvard published a set of four studies in Psychological Science called "A 'Present' for the Future: The Unexpected Value of Rediscovery". In the first, 135 students wrote time-capsule entries at the start of summer — a recent conversation, a social event, the songs they were listening to, an excerpt from a final paper. They predicted how curious and interested they'd be to read each one later. Three months later they opened the capsules, and rated them as significantly more interesting than they had predicted.

The later studies sharpened the finding in a way that matters for a diary: people were especially likely to underestimate the value of rediscovering mundane experiences, not extraordinary ones. And in the fourth study, that misjudgement changed behaviour — people passed up documenting the present, then later preferred rediscovering those moments over an alternative fun activity.

The authors tie the effect to overconfidence in memory. We assume we'll remember an ordinary Tuesday, so recording it seems pointless. We won't, and that's exactly why it's worth having.

That's still the most direct answer to "why bother" that the research offers. Most people who stop a diary stop because the entries feel too ordinary to be worth making. The ordinariness is the point.

Reason 2: your sense of your own change is unreliable

The second reason is about goals rather than memories.

In Quoidbach, Gilbert and Wilson's 2013 paper in Science, people of every age reported that they had changed a lot over the past decade but predicted they'd change much less over the next one — the "end of history illusion." The authors' interpretation is that we underestimate how much we will change. (There is a reasonable methodological critique of how big the effect really is; I've covered it in the evidence review.)

The narrower point holds either way: your own account of how much you've changed is a poor instrument. If you're learning a language, getting fit, or recovering from an injury, you can't remember accurately what you sounded or moved like eight weeks ago. You'll fill the gap with a story, and the story will be biased in whichever direction your mood is that day.

A video record doesn't have that problem. Day 1 and day 60, played back to back, is a measurement rather than an impression. That's the use Jourvelope is built around — one journey per goal, with Day 1 kept beside today — and it's the one reason on this list I'd defend without hedging, because it doesn't depend on any psychological effect at all. It's just a record.

Reason 3: video keeps what writing loses

A written entry is a composed version of the day. You decide what to say, you tidy it, and the tone is whatever you write it in.

A video entry catches what you don't control: how tired you look, how fast you're talking, the pause before an answer, the room you're in. That isn't a research finding, and I won't dress it up as one — it's the plain difference between a recording and a description. But it's the reason most people give for choosing video over writing, and it's a real one. I've laid out the full trade-off between the two, including where writing wins.

Reason 4: it's the lowest-effort record there is

Writing a paragraph asks for a decision about what to say. Pressing record and talking for thirty seconds asks for less. On a bad day, the format with the lower floor is the one that still happens.

That's a practical argument, not an evidential one, and it only holds if you keep entries short. A ten-minute monologue is more work than a paragraph. If you want the setup that keeps the floor low, this guide is the version I'd use.

The cost: recording changes what you remember

The honest version of this piece has to include the research that cuts the other way. The closest studies are about photos, not video diaries, but they're about the same act: pointing a camera at your life.

  • Recording can weaken memory. In Henkel's 2014 Psychological Science study, people on a museum tour remembered fewer objects, and fewer details about them, when they'd photographed them than when they'd just looked. But when they zoomed in to photograph a specific detail, the impairment disappeared — attention, not the camera, was doing the work.
  • It shifts what you remember. Barasch and colleagues (2017) found that taking photos improved memory for what people saw and reduced memory for what they heard.
  • It can make good experiences better and bad ones worse. Diehl, Zauberman and Barasch (2016), across nine experiments with more than 2,000 participants, found that taking photos increased enjoyment of positive experiences by increasing engagement — but not when the equipment got in the way, and it made negative experiences more unpleasant.

For a diary, the practical reading is: record about your day, not during it. A thirty-second entry at the end of the day doesn't compete with the experience the way filming a concert does. And if an entry is about something painful, it's worth asking whether recording it is helping — that study is a reason to stop, not push through.

Video diary benefits that don't hold up

These are the ones you'll see most often. As far as I can find, none of them has been tested for video diaries specifically.

Common claims about video diaries, and the state of the evidence
ClaimWhat's actually behind it
"Reduces stress and anxiety"Borrowed from expressive-writing trials, which tested short-course writing about difficult experiences. No equivalent trial of video exists.
"Builds self-awareness"Not measured for video diaries. Plausible, but a plausible claim isn't a finding.
"Improves confidence on camera"Plausible from practice alone, but untested. Hearing your recorded voice is reliably uncomfortable at first — psychologists have studied it since at least the 1960s.
"We remember 60,000× faster with visuals"A widely repeated statistic that nobody has traced to a study; the earliest known appearance is a 1982 advertising insert. Ignore it.
"You'll remember things better"Mixed. See the photo studies above: recording can impair memory for the thing recorded, depending on attention.

None of that means a video diary can't help with stress or confidence. It means nobody knows yet, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing.

So, why keep a video diary?

Keep one if you want an accurate record of something that's changing — a skill, a body, a child, a recovery, a year. Keep one if you suspect, correctly, that you'll forget the ordinary weeks. Don't keep one because a blog post told you it would fix your anxiety.

If you're not sure what to record, these video diary ideas are sorted by how much time each one takes, and this short history covers where the format came from.

FAQ

What are the benefits of keeping a video diary?

The best-supported ones are practical: an accurate record of ordinary days you'd otherwise forget, and a way to see change in yourself that your memory can't reliably report. Research on time capsules found people significantly underestimate how interesting they'll find records of ordinary moments later. Claimed mental-health benefits haven't been tested for video diaries.

Is a video diary better than a written one?

It's better as a record and worse as a thinking tool. Writing has decades of research behind it for processing difficult experiences; video has none, but it captures tone, posture and voice that a written entry can't. The full comparison.

Does recording your life make you remember it less?

It can. In a 2014 museum study, people remembered less about objects they photographed than objects they just looked at, unless they zoomed in on a detail. Recording a short entry about your day afterwards avoids most of that, because it doesn't compete with the experience itself.

How long should a video diary entry be?

Short enough that you'll still do it on a bad day. Thirty seconds is a good ceiling for a daily entry; longer entries are fine occasionally but make the habit harder to keep. How to set one up.

Sources

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