Are you feeling overwhelmed, stuck, or just ‘off'?

If journaling has not been part of your daily routine yet, it's time to give it a go. Journaling is beneficial for both mental and physical health.

Journaling has been a beneficial activity for centuries, from ancient scholars to modern diarists. The practice can be traced back to ancient cultures such as Babylonia, where it was used as a way to record history.

The practice of journaling has proven benefits, and our counselors recommend it for these 10 reasons:

1. Journaling can encourage you to better explore your thoughts and feelings.

It gives you a judgement free place to express your feelings (the good, bad, and ugly) and explore more intimately the core reasons for those feelings. When journaling is done at the end of a day or soon after an upsetting experience, it helps you to process thoughts and emotions to see things more clearly.

2. Journaling helps you be more goal-oriented.

Journaling about your goals can give you an incredible sense of achievement because it helps you make plans, set tasks, and organize the steps to get you where you want to be.

Journaling enables you to keep track of your progress while keeping yourself accountable for the work that needs to be done to achieve your goals & succeed. This can be an incredibly effective way of ensuring that you act on them before they're forgotten about. Just simply writing down your goals increases you chances of reaching them and succeeding.

3. Journaling is an easy way to relieve stress or anxiety. 

It is useful in gaining clarity with important decisions that need to be made, especially when there is more than one difficult option to choose from or a complicated path to take. Journaling helps us see what's working for you and what isn't!

Journaling can also create a sense of calm within yourself because writing down your thoughts gives you the opportunity to slow down, focus, and process your day or experiences. It increases mindfulness, decreases depression, and lowers anxiety.

Here are some steps you can take to reduce anxiety: (1) write down your worries; (2) review what you have written; (3) with each worry you have written about, write down how you could think of it differently (reframe it); (4) recall past experiences and list the strengths you have that helped you through those experiences; and (5) come up with a plan if that worry did actually happen.

4. Journaling enhances memory.

It helps you to track and record events that happened throughout your day to help solidify them to memory. Journaling to enhance memory is the same as note taking to study and remember facts. The physical act of writing forces you to think more deeply about what your writing, thereby helping you to make connections with your thoughts, memories, and feelings.

5. Journaling increases self-awareness.

Writing out your thoughts and feelings can help you learn to better communicate with yourself by understanding what triggers certain feelings within you. Writing about the negative things or things that bother you, helps you gain more self-awareness. Journaling helps you process your feelings and express them before you start acting on them. And when you have insight on your feelings, triggers, and weaknesses, you can use this to help figure out your needs. 

When journaling to increase self-awareness, try to include these: (1) your mood and energy level that day; (2) what you got completed that day; (3) how much you have slept; and (4) did you engage in any self-care activities and the feelings associated with them.

6. Journaling can help you focus on mental health.

Sitting down and journaling gives you space to concentrate and focus on your priorities, more importantly, yourself and your mental health. Guess what? You have mental health just as you do physical health. In counseling you will learn about identifying negative thoughts. Journaling helps solidify the skill of identifying negative thoughts and gives you the opportunity to stop thinking them before the cycle starts. 

Additionally, journaling is used for improving mood, sleep, self-esteem, and relationships.

Want to try journaling to focus on your mental health? Try writing about these: (1) identify your stressors; (2) prioritize your fears or problems—determine what you need to tackle first; (3) recognize triggers; (4) track symptoms of when you experience these triggers; (5) make a plan for the next time you experience a trigger; (6) come up with one or two affirmations you can repeat to yourself when you are anxious.

7. Journaling helps with coping skills.

Journaling is a healthy coping skill in itself, because it is a form of mindfulness. Journaling is one of the easiest ways to begin implementing mindfulness into your daily life. Just as mindfulness does, journaling helps to sharpen focus, turns your attention inward, increases positive thoughts, decreases negative thoughts, and can be done anytime or anywhere.

Writing about life experiences is a helpful coping skill. It allows you to see things from a different perspective and more clearly. Often just finding the right words to use to express your thoughts, feelings, and view point forces you to see things from a new perspective. 

Additionally, writing down what you are grateful for everyday helps you focus on the positive things in life, which can also give you a new perspective.

8. Journaling helps you reflect on and process what happened during your day and life.

It helps you to track progress of goals you are trying to reach or habits you are trying to change.

Journaling at night enables you to gain a different perspective on your thoughts during a time when your mind is clear and capable of processing information better. Also writing down your thoughts at the end of your day sends a signal to the brain that a thought is important and needs to be taken seriously. It allows you to empty your mind and put your thoughts to bed. Journaling has been scientifically proven to improve sleep.

9. It provides an outlet for self-expression and creativity.

Your own private journal gives you the space to think through and make plans for dreams or ideas. Some of our greatest influencers, inventors, and scientists use journaling to brainstorm and document ideas.

Some people even choose to doodle and draw to help them express themselves. Self-expression and creativity are limitless when it comes to journaling! 

10. Journaling is convenient and inexpensive.

You can journal anywhere or anytime. Journaling doesn’t have to take a long time. Just a quick sentence or two about what’s on your mind, what’s happening right then, or jotting some feelings words down on your break is all it has to take.

Need a journal? Journals are often given away for free by some businesses and churches or just find a cheap spiral at a discount store.

Looking for a variation to your journaling? There are many different journaling styles. Here are a few examples:

1. Prayer Journaling

In Prayer Journaling, each journal entry is just your conversation with God, your prayers written down. Make sure you date each entry, because its really cool and interesting to go back to old journal entries and see how God worked things out over time. 

2. Gratitude Journaling

Gratitude Journaling can be as simple as writing down one thing you are grateful for every day to writing down multiple things everyday and explaining why you are grateful. Beginners or those looking for a quicker way to accomplish their journaling goals find it easier to start with a simple bullet list format when beginning their gratitude journals. Expressing gratitude has many benefits such as gaining new perspectives, improving mood, improving sleep, improving self-esteem, improving relationships, and increasing optimism.

3. Plus, Minus, Moving Forward Journaling

Turn your journal sideways, draw two lines down the paper, making three columns. Title the first column with a plus sign (+), title the second column with a minus sign (-), and the third column with an arrow pointing to the right (—>). In the (+) column write one to three things that are going well or positive things. In the (-) column write one to three things that didn’t go well or aren’t going well. In the (—>) column write one to three ways you are going to move forward. 

Journaling can be difficult sometimes because feelings are sometimes hard to express. Plus, Minus, Moving Forward Journaling is a good way to get started and it doesn’t have to take up much time. 

4. Mind Flow Journaling (also known as mind dumping or stream of consciousness journaling)

Essentially you write whatever comes to mind when you sit down to journal. This can be how your body physically feels, a to-do list, what you observe around you, what you are hearing, an experience that pops into your mind, etc. You are just going to literally write down whatever pops into your brain. Don't worry if it's messy, has crossed out words, or is grammatically incorrect. If you find it difficult, just write one sentence. Then the next day write two sentences and increase it everyday. This is a great mindfulness tool we encourage as well.

Feeling stuck and don’t know what to write about?

Head over to our Instagram page for journal prompts to get some inspiration on what to write about at instagram.com/harvestcounselingandwellness/

We hope you find this helpful. If you need any additional help, please feel free to contact us.

Harvest Counseling & Wellness is a mental health counseling practice in Argyle, Texas. We provide therapy for couples, individuals, and families are struggling with issues related to codependency, anxiety, depression, abuse, and grief. Our office is located near Denton, Highland Village, Flower Mound, Lantana, Roanoke, & Justin. If you are looking for a therapist in Denton or surrounding areas, contact us today for a complimentary phone consultation, 940-294-7061.