The story behind Optimistic Writing

Optimistic Writing is a method of daily journalling that works to establish a general turn of mind toward optimism, in its widest sense, by writing the good things in the last twenty-four hours. The method relies on a body of scientific principles established across many studies, which we set out on the site's science page.

My name is Omar Meriwani. I am a developer, a data engineer and a science writer. The story of this method overlaps with my own, so I am going to tell the two together.

More than 25 years ago, when I was a child, I noticed how we can have good days and bad days for different reasons. My first way of journalling wasn't really journalling, but rather tables where I represented each day with a row. I used to record the weather, my grades at school, whether anything bad had happened during the day, and other data. The habit stopped after a year or two, and I never grasped much of the happiness I was trying to understand.

Years later I got heavily involved in reading about psychology, and I was one of the founders of Real Sciences, a popular-science platform. I wrote hundreds of articles there, reviewed books and made podcasts, and came very close to science, especially psychology.

In 2024 I had a particular interest in psychotherapy, and I went to therapy myself. The therapy I received was focused on compassion, strongly influenced by Paul Gilbert, the founder of compassion-focused therapy. I listened to his audiobook The Compassionate Mind twice. Some of his strongest ideas have stayed with me ever since: the power of imagination and its effect on how we feel, and the power of savouring.

“it's only an image that you've created in your mind, yet it's capable of stimulating physiological systems in your body that make your saliva and stomach acids”

“equally, of course, even if you're alone, you can just imagine something sexy and that can affect your body”

In 2025 I thought about how we laugh every time we hear a joke, sometimes the same joke. That led me to the idea of themes: things that sit in our brains like cassettes, except that instead of playing a song they play a mood. I made a small list of points to remember, ones that could bring me a laugh or a feeling of warmth or whatever positive feeling I had had in that moment. The list was not practical in itself. There was no daily practice for storing these moments and retrieving them.

I can't say I was depressed, or anxious, or that I had any persistent condition I could describe myself with. Like anyone else, I have been through ups and downs in life. I could stay longer in a lower mood, pushed there by something, with nothing that could reset it or let me see the view as I had seen it at some point, when it was good. It felt like an endless, fast-moving flow, where your vision turns black and white for a while and then becomes clear and colourful again, over things you cannot control. In the first article I wrote on my blog about this method:

“I just got tired of that heavy, uncontrollable rain of negative thoughts. Negative thoughts about myself, my self-worth, the future and what will happen to me, what others think, and so on. I wish those thoughts were logical. Often, these thoughts do not belong to reality and could be laughable if heard by someone who knows me.”

That was the other side of it: this rain of thoughts that we all face and cannot control. Why not create a flow in the opposite direction — a positive, optimistic, more realistic flow of thoughts that we can control? That was the beginning of Optimistic Writing. Alongside it I was noticing how people describe their daily lives: what their attention had landed on, and what the rain from the past had brought them. I found that happier people held to a more positive account of reality. A study found that a lower mood came with remembering the negative side of things in the past, the very side the other group discarded, remembering the brighter one instead.

Months after starting, Lisa Feldman Barrett's book How Emotions Are Made came up on my reading list. I was surprised to find that some therapists already recommended to their clients that they write about the good things. I also found that many people do it naturally, by telling others about their day. More importantly, I learned that emotions are largely a vague territory, much closer to concepts in our brains. Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that emotions have no fixed areas in the brain, and that while we can broadly agree on what we experience as good or bad, we cannot really agree on “fear”, “anger” or “love”, not as cultures and not as individuals. We call something anger, but my anger is not the same as yours. This was already a core thing in the Optimistic Writing method.

Concepts like being real, loving or compassionate are hence not mutually intelligible for us in the same way. Not only is our vocabulary different and varied, so are the internal circuits mapped to these words in the brain. But we can all agree on writing the “good” things in the day, as that “good” can mean different things for everyone. I write about my good things and you write about yours.

The other strong concept this method is based on is the fact that we notice and remember only a limited part of our days. Unfairly, we do remember a lot of the dark negative moments from the past. Writing things from the day, rather than only saying them or thinking of them, can change these dynamics (see the science page).

Framing the world negatively may only be a choice, for despite all the hardship in the world we see people at both ends reflecting a different point of view. We see optimism in difficult circumstances, and depression and despair in good ones. Even if you are in prison there is a choice: to see the matter as something that will end and to look at what is good within the prison, or to surrender to its darkness and to the injustice in it. The example of optimism in prison is real — I saw one of the Syrian prisoners who had spent decades in Sednaya prison, and he was intensely optimistic and smiling when he came out.

Optimistic writing falls within the range of methods that help reshape thought through regular, sustained effort founded on creative writing and on a focus on facts. The most similar thing to that is weaving. That is why I called the app Weave. Given the benefit reported by many of the people covered by a preliminary survey about the method in 2025, the idea took shape of turning it, in all its detail, into an organised method inside a site and an app that help members apply it properly.

My work as a data engineer, with a particular expertise in natural language processing, shaped what this site could be. I developed a number of features here that use AI to help people practise the method, and made sure privacy is properly taken care of through five different tiers. The concept of themes matters here too: it is the cassettes from earlier in this story, but for the narratives we often hear from people, or tell ourselves, to make us feel better. The app also includes other methods, such as expressive writing, to help with a heavier state of mind. Advanced features like these cost money to run — servers, AI usage and cloud infrastructure all cost us — so there had to be a minimum subscription, kept as low as we can, because we want to deliver this method to the largest number of people. There is also a free account.