Journaling For Mental Health: Benefits, Tips, & Prompts to Get Started

What Is Journaling?

Journaling can be as simple as writing down what’s on your mind 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 the challenges you face.²

What is Positive Affect Journaling?

Journaling can be healing, but studies show that focusing exclusively on negative emotions can actually increase depression and anxiety.⁴ Instead, try positive affect journaling (PAJ) and expand your focus to include thoughts and factual information to help you better understand yourself and your challenges. While addressing negative thoughts, feelings, and situations is okay, incorporating positive aspects about yourself and your life, and learning to practice gratitude is tied to better mental health.⁴

A study published in 2018 examined how positive affect journaling affected 70 adults experiencing anxiety related to various medical conditions. Participants who used PAJ reported less anxiety and depression, greater resilience, and a heightened sense of well-being compared to those who did not use PAJ but only received their standard medical treatment.⁶

How to Journal for Mental Health in 7 Steps

A mental health journal is an interactive tool that allows you to create order out of what seems like chaos. It allows you to manage symptoms of mental health challenges and create new life goals and healthy habits.

Here are seven tips to help you get started with a journaling practice to improve your mental health:

1. Forget About Rules

There is no wrong way to journal. This is your own experience, and there is no way to mess it up. Also, don’t worry about things like grammar and spelling. Focusing on these things will block your flow.

2. Drop Judgments

This is similar to forgetting rules, but it’s so important it warrants its 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 various journaling types (a blank notebook, a guided journal, computer or internet-based journaling, print-outs, smartphone apps, art journals, etc.) Start with something that seems appealing and give it a fair chance, tossing it aside and trying something else if you do not like it. Or use different journaling styles to fit your fancy on any given day.

While journaling often involves writing your thoughts down on paper in a dedicated notebook or a more formal guided journal, this wellness activity doesn’t have to be limited to pen and paper or written word.

Here are a few ways to journal:

• Use your computer (a Word doc or a web-based service like Google Docs)
• Purchase a ready-made journal with or without journaling prompts
• Print journaling prompts or templates
• Smartphone journaling 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

4. Set a Time Limit If Needed

Don’t feel you must journal for lengthy periods because this can be intimidating. Further, if you’re strapped for time, journaling for just a few minutes (or even less, jotting down a single thought) is still helpful. Worrying about the time or pressuring yourself to write for a long time can block your flow.

5. Know Your Purpose

Knowing why you journal can help streamline the process and make writing easier. Why 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 ambiance (perhaps light a candle or diffuse a pleasantly 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 in your brain and flood your system with dopamine for an even deeper mental health boost.

How to Journal Regularly

Some experts recommend journaling daily, but this can feel overwhelming at first.^{1, 4} Feel free to ease into the experience. Dedicating a few days per week to your journal is a good start. The key is to make this a regular habit.

Begin by deciding when you will journal with 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 want 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 midday so you do not start or end your day with a task on your mind. Choose the days you will journal, whether every day or a few days per week. Schedule this into your calendar as a regular commitment to yourself.

What to Write in a Journal 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 are unsure what to write in a journal, prompts can help you focus your thoughts.

Here are some journaling prompts for mental health journaling:

• 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 everything they have done to help you grow. You can also write to reveal all the amazing things they will do.
• Write a letter to someone who has hurt you. Express things 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 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 emotions and reflect on what happened when you felt this way.
• 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 your challenges are gone?
• Look back on previous entries in your journal. Describe the progress you’ve made so far.

Benefits of Keeping a Mental Health Journal

Journaling can improve your general well-being and target specific obstacles like depression, anxiety, and stress. When you keep a journal, you take control of 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}

Journaling can also enhance your work with a mental health therapist.³ You can record your thoughts, feelings, and experiences outside of therapy and 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 journal include:

• Anxiety reduction: Journaling for anxiety helps 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 first step in reducing anxiety without resorting to medication.
• Relief of depression and other mood disorders: Journaling for depression 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: Journaling is calming and helps your body switch out of its automatic stress reaction known as fight-or-flight. You can see stressors in a new light as you become calmer and more centered, allowing you to manage anxiety.
• Eating disorder recovery: Journaling is frequently used in eating disorder treatment. Journaling has been found to increase an individual’s sense of control and help them share bothersome thoughts and feelings.
• Emotional expression: Inhibiting emotions is linked to mental and physical health problems. Journaling provides a safe way to explore and express difficult feelings 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 to 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. 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 and reflect on how the changes impact 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 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, you might decide to seek extra support, leave or deepen a relationship, or pursue a dream.