Journaling is an active approach to mental health that helps you take charge of your well-being. Keeping a mental health journal can help you cope with a host of challenges, including depression, anxiety, stress, and more, in a healthy manner.
What Is Journaling?
Journaling can be as basic as writing down what’s on your mind, as a way to record your inner workings and help you better understand your emotions and thoughts.1 Journaling is a powerful tool for organizing your thoughts and making sense of your feelings. Doing so deepens self-reflection so you can grow past challenges you face.2
While journaling often involves writing your thoughts down on paper, either in a dedicated notebook or more formal guided journal, this wellness activity doesn’t have to be limited to pen and paper or even to the written word.
Here are a few ways to journal:
- Use your computer (a Word doc or a web-based service like Google docs)
- Smartphone apps
- Record your thoughts as an audio journal
- Make a video journal (you might talk to the camera, record your surroundings and objects that represent your thoughts and feelings, or both)
- Create an art journal that focuses more on visual images and design than words
Regardless of format, a mental health journal is an interactive tool that allows you to create order out of what often seems like chaos. It allows you to both manage symptoms of mental health challenges and create new life goals and healthy habits.
Journaling can be helpful when you want to better understand your past and make sense of your experiences. It can also help you become unstuck by providing clarity that leads to specific actions. For example, through journaling you might decide to seek extra support, leave or deepen a relationship, or pursue a dream.
Journaling can also enhance your work with a mental health therapist.3 You can record your thoughts, feelings, and experiences outside of therapy and then take your journal with you to facilitate your discussions with your therapist. You can also take notes during therapy and complete assignments right in your journal, making your therapy experience more thorough and satisfying.
Benefits of Keeping a Mental Health Journal
Journaling can improve your general well-being, and it can also be used to target specific obstacles like depression, anxiety, and stress. When you keep a journal, you are taking control in the present moment to integrate thoughts and feelings across time and space. As you work in your mental health journal, you can tame racing thoughts and roiling emotions.1,3,4,5
Benefits of keeping a journal include:
- Anxiety reduction: Journaling helps you corral runaway worries, what-ifs, and worst-case scenarios. When you can express your fears and anxieties, it becomes easier to work through them. Journaling can be a great first step in reducing anxiety without resorting to medication.
- Relief of depression and other mood disorders: Journaling can help you take control of automatic negative thoughts. You can discover insights about yourself and your life that can help you work through symptoms and thrive.
- Stress management: The act of journaling is calming and helps your body switch out of its automatic stress reaction known as fight-or-flight. As you become calmer and more centered, you can see stressors in a new light which can allow you to better manage them.
- Eating disorder recovery: Journaling is frequently used in the treatment of eating disorders. It’s been found to increase an individual’s sense of control as well as help them share bothersome thoughts and feelings.
- Emotional expression: Inhibiting emotions is linked to both mental and physical health problems. Journaling provides a safe way to explore and express difficult emotions to help improve mood. Journaling can be grounding and centering.
- Improved clarity and problem-solving: Journaling can help lead to new insights about yourself and your life. It can also help you develop new perspectives so you can see problems differently, as specific situations rather than as an integral part of who you are at your core.
- Healthy habit formation: Journaling can help you develop new, healthy habits. Through journaling, you can track current thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to identify unhelpful patterns. Then, you can brainstorm action plans and list small steps toward new habits. Track your successes along the way, and reflect on how the changes are impacting your life.
- Goal setting and vision creation: Journals aren’t limited to expressing negative thoughts, emotions, and problem-solving. You can use them to explore what gives you a sense of meaning and fuels your passions. As you become increasingly aware of what you envision and desire for your life, you can take positive, purposeful action.
Journaling for Depression
Journaling can help you make sense out of symptoms that are interfering in your life, but that isn’t the main benefit of journaling for depression. It can be extremely difficult to see past the darkness of this debilitating mental health disorder. Keeping a journal can help you shift your focus, explore what brings you meaning, and clarify values and priorities.4
Here are four tips to get you started:
- Write about more than negative emotions: In a 2002 study, researchers found that journaling for depression increased understanding and insight when people journaled about thoughts and positive facts about their lives; however, when they just wrote about their troublesome feelings, participants did not experience growth.4
- Start small: Journaling can be overwhelming for anyone, and depression can make it even more so. Begin by establishing a regular time to journal, perhaps first thing in the morning or before bed, and start by writing for five minutes or less.
- Use prompts: Depression can make it hard to think, and a blank page can feel intimidating. Use journal prompts such as the ones below to guide your explorations.
- Pair it with something pleasant: Use journaling to help reclaim feelings of enjoyment by combining the activity with a small reward involving something you find pleasurable (or used to find pleasurable). Have a favorite healthy snack or drink after you journal, or listen to a favorite song, for example.
Journaling for Anxiety
Rumination, repeatedly thinking about a worry or fear, is a hallmark of anxiety. Left unchecked, anxious, negative thoughts can come to dominate your thoughts. Journaling can remove these thoughts from your mind and plop them in front of you so you can consider them objectively. It also frees your mind so you can replace those worries with other thoughts.
Here are four tips to journal for anxiety:
- Journal wherever you are, whenever you need to: Anxiety doesn’t strike at convenient times or wait patiently until you’re sitting down with your journal. Using a portable journal or even entering them into your phone or an app can help you write down anxious thoughts when you have them. Then, you can return to them later when you have time to explore them in more detail.
- Re-read your entries to look for patterns: As you write down anxious thoughts and feelings, study them to identify how they’re connected to your actions. You can notice when they happen (e.g., maybe you have more anxiety in the morning), when they’re most bothersome, and how they’re interfering in your life. That positions you to create specific plans and goals to beat anxiety.
- Use your journal as a reality-check: Anxious thoughts aren’t always factual and reliable. Track your anxious thoughts by listing them in your journal, and then one by one write down facts and truths that prove anxiety wrong.
- Write about what you can control: Anxiety makes it seem that so many things are out of your control. Your journal can help you explore options to address your fears.
Journaling for Stress
Journaling is a great stress-management tool. In gifting yourself journaling time, you pause and step away from the chaos of daily life. This helps slow down your nervous system, switching off your sympathetic nervous system responsible for fight-or-flight and activating your parasympathetic nervous system in charge of the rest-and-digest response. Also, journaling helps you work through problems and find solutions to keep stress at bay.
Here are three tips to journal for stress:
- Commit to doing it regularly: It will likely feel as though you don’t have time to add yet another task to your to-do list. Instead, think of it as a promise to yourself, an opportunity to reduce stress that will ultimately make you feel lighter and more productive.
- Do it in small chunks: The more stressed you are, the more difficult it might be to reserve a block of time to journal. Make it more manageable by journaling a few times a day for short periods of time. For example, journal for a few minutes before and after work to help you transition and prepare for what lies ahead.
- Focus on solutions rather than problems: Writing exclusively about what is stressing you out can serve to keep your attention on those problems. Instead, write about what is going well, things you’re doing right, or things that give you a sense of meaning.
7 Journaling Tips
Journaling can be healing, but studies show that focusing exclusively on negative emotions can actually increase depression and anxiety.4 For best results, expand your focus to include thoughts and factual information to help you better understand yourself and the challenges you’re facing. While it’s OK to address negative thoughts, feelings, and situations, incorporating positive aspects about yourself and your life is tied to better mental health.4
A study published in 2018 examined a type of journaling known as positive affect journaling (PAJ) that involves positive-focused writing and reflecting on the good in your life. Researchers recruited 70 adults who experienced anxiety related to a variety of medical conditions. Participants who used PAJ experienced less anxiety and depression, greater resilience, and a heightened sense of wellbeing compared to those who did not use PAJ but only received their standard medical treatment.6
Here are seven other tips to help you get started with a journal practice:
1. Forget About Rules
There is no wrong way to journal. This is your own personal experience, and there is absolutely no way to mess it up. Also, don’t worry about things like grammar and spelling. That will just block your flow.
2. Drop Judgments
This is similar to forgetting rules, but it’s so important it warrants its own category. Sometimes, people feel guilty about the feelings they’re expressing or even for taking time for themselves to journal at all. Other times, people worry about creating a journal that meets a certain standard or is profound. This isn’t an assignment, and you’re not being graded. Think of this as an opportunity for free-form flow.
3. Experiment to Find What Fits You
Try a variety of journaling types (a blank notebook, a guided journal, computer or internet-based journaling, smartphone apps, art journals, etc.) Start with something that seems appealing to you, give it a fair chance, and if you don’t like it, toss it aside and try something else. Or use a variety of journaling styles to fit your fancy on any given day.
4. Set a Time Limit If Needed
Don’t feel as though you have to journal for lengthy stretches of time. This can be intimidating. Further, if you’re strapped for time, know that it’s OK to journal for just a few minutes (or even less, jotting down a single thought). Worrying about the time or pressuring yourself to write for a long time can block your flow.
5. Know Your Purpose
Knowing why you are journaling can help streamline the process and make it easier to know what to write about. Why, specifically, are you journaling? Do you want to develop healthy life habits, overcome certain obstacles, find meaning, discover more about your true self, or something else that is uniquely you?
6. Make It a Pleasant, Mindful Ritual
Turn your journaling experience into something you look forward to doing. Pick a dedicated space in your home and add ambience (perhaps light a candle or diffuse a pleasant scented oil for aromatherapy). If you love music, set the mood with your favorite tunes. Sip a favorite healthy beverage while you journal. Also, choose a journal that makes you smile, and use a special pen. Practice mindfulness by removing distractions while you journal so you can be fully present.
7. Celebrate
Embrace journaling as a strength, and see it as an action step. You are taking charge of your mental health. Reinforce this positive action by adding something pleasant to your experience as a celebration. It will activate the reward center of your brain and flood your system with dopamine for an even deeper mental health boost.
How to Journal Regularly
Some experts recommend journaling every day, but this can feel overwhelming at first.1,4 Feel free to ease into the experience. It’s OK to dedicate a few days per week to your journal. The key is to make it a regular habit.
Begin by deciding when you are going to journal, and choose a time that works best for you. Do you want to get your day off to an inspired start by journaling first thing in the morning? Or perhaps you’d like to reflect on the positive aspects of your day by journaling before bed. If you are tackling specific problems, you might find that it works best as a break in your day so you don’t start or end your day with a challenge on your mind.
Choose the days you will be journaling, whether that’s every day or a few days per week. Schedule it into your calendar as a regular commitment to yourself.
12 Journaling Prompts For Mental Health
While some people love the promise of a blank page and enjoy writing whatever fits their mood at the time, others loathe this approach. If you’re not sure what to write in a journal, prompts can help you focus your thoughts.
Here are twelve prompts for anyone interested in journaling for mental health:
- Who has inspired you to be the person you want to be? What qualities do they have that you want to emulate? (This can be someone you know well or someone you’ve never met in person.)
- Write a letter to your past self highlighting all the things he/she has done to help you grow. You can also write to reveal to them all the amazing things that they’ll be doing.
- Write a letter to someone who has hurt you. Express things that you couldn’t say to them in person. You don’t have to send it.
- Write a letter of forgiveness (to someone who has hurt you or to yourself for something you feel guilty about). You don’t have to send it.
- Write about your strengths and how you can use them to overcome a specific obstacle.
- Record feelings of gratitude. List three things about today for which you are grateful.
- Track your moods. Describe your moods and reflect on what was happening when you felt the way you did.
- Make a list of things that make you feel alive. Brainstorm ways to add them to your life.
- What is one thing that will make today great? (Or, what is one thing that was great about today?)
- Write down five things that make you feel anxious or upset, five things that you can control, five things that you can’t control and how you will accept them and move forward, five actions you can take this week to create joy, and five things you appreciate about yourself.
- What will your life be like when the challenge you’re facing is gone?
- Look back on previous entries. Describe the progress you’ve made so far.
Final Thoughts on Journaling for Mental Health
Journaling for mental health can help you take charge of your life. It can help you better deal with a wide variety of stressors and mental health challenges, hone your focus, and clarify positive action steps. It’s a great way to get to know yourself and embrace who you are. Make the experience uniquely yours.
