How to Journal for Mental Health: Tips and Benefits
Journaling is more than just a way to record daily events—it's a transformative tool that can significantly enhance your mental health. Whether you're a seasoned journaler or just beginning to explore this practice, understanding how to journal effectively can open the door to deeper self-awareness and emotional resilience. In this post, we delve into why journaling helps for mental health and offer practical journaling tips to help you harness its full potential.
From processing complex emotions to crystallizing thoughts and intentions, journaling offers a unique conduit for exploration and expression. If you've ever wondered how jotting down your thoughts could possibly make a difference, you'll find that the act of writing can serve as both a mirror and a map—reflecting your internal state and guiding you toward personal growth and recovery.
Journaling for Mental Health
Journalling can be a helpful tool for supporting mental health. As an online counsellor in Vancouver, I always tell clients that there are no rules to journalling and to express themselves in whatever way feels best.
I started journalling as a pre-teen. I have always enjoyed putting pen to paper, reflecting on things, and writing down goals, feelings, and thoughts. I don’t tend to write so much about specific situations, more so the things that come up for me around them.
I got back into journaling after my dad died several years ago. I felt like I had a lot to process and I needed an outlet. Sometimes it was stream-of-consciousness writing, other times it was drawing pictures, sometimes it was using some prompts about grief, etc. It evolved into reflection around things in my life, writing out my intentions and goals as things started to shift from acute grief to re-evaluation of what I wanted in my life. I find journalling is unique to each person and their needs and goals.
How can journaling support your mental health?
Journaling helps us reflect and in doing so brings awareness to your emotions. It helps you process your feelings and take notice of what you’re thinking and how you’re reacting to things. It can help you track your mood and notice when you have difficult days, allowing you to see patterns that may be going on in your life. It can help you to prioritize tasks by writing intentions and goals, and even work through fears. Self-reflection and self-awareness often go hand in hand. To start to change something, we need to become aware of it.
Journalling can help you process grief by offering an outlet for your feelings and allowing you to process your experience. Studies have shown; that people who write down their feelings can emotionally regulate more easily than those who don’t.
The benefits associated with a regular journaling practice are:
Brings awareness of the present moment, and offers clarity.
Offers empowerment and self-reflection.
Boosts self-esteem.
Acceptance and processing of our emotions.
Allows for self-care in our daily or weekly routine for wellness.
Supports us in having self-compassion and practicing gratitude.
Journaling as a self-care practice
Journalling goes well with other self-care practices. For example, I like to meditate after journalling. Or perhaps you have a lot on your mind and you’d like to enjoy your run so you journal beforehand and come up with some possible solutions to some of the issues that you are facing before you run and it frees up some of your mental energy so you can feel more present.
It’s important to set aside time to reflect, even for a few minutes. This process does not have to be long or overwhelming. If you already have a self-care practice journaling can easily be added to your routine.
What kind of journaling is best for me?
You can journal however you want! Explore what works for you. Maybe you will want to try a variety of ways to journal or stick with one that you enjoy. You can use the computer, note function on your phone, on paper, through voice memos, draw pictures, paint, scrapbook, etc.
If you're wondering how to journal effectively, here are some suggestions to help get you started:
Stream of consciousness: Just put pen to paper and see what happens. What is present for you in that moment that you want to express?
Journal prompts: Choose prompts specific to you or your current life goals or situation. Maybe you want to boost your self-esteem and writing uplifting thoughts or mantras about yourself is the goal.
There are some journals that you can buy that already have prompts in them. You can look up journal prompts easily on Google and find lots of great lists or even work with your therapist or coach to see if they have some suggestions.
Self-check-ins for mood tracking: Rating your mood on a scale from 1-10 every day and seeing how it changes over time. This could be used to rate your anxiety or depression as well and reflect on what you are noticing in your thoughts. This can help you notice when it may be a good time to reach out for support from a trusted friend or a therapist.
Grief journaling: This can offer us a safe place to process our feelings if we aren’t ready to talk yet, or perhaps; we want to process what happens between online grief therapy or grief group sessions.
Some ways grievers may want to journal to help process are scrapbooking (visual journaling), drawing, writing a love letter to our person, love letters to ourselves saying the things we need to hear, writing a mantra to help us when times are difficult, writing your story. etc.
Somatic journaling: Soma comes from the Greek word for the body. Somatic means feeling physically present at the moment to process emotions by stopping and noticing how you feel and noticing physical sensations.
For instance, if you are writing a gratitude list, stopping to truly feel how grateful you are, putting your hand on your heart and tapping into that feeling of gratitude, or perhaps sitting with a beautiful memory and taking time to write it out as well as feeling all the emotional sensations that you can notice in your body. This supports you to process your feelings not just cognitively but emotionally and physically as well.
Journalling is personal, your experience with it will be personal too. Now that you know how to journal and why journaling helps for mental health, it’s time to grab a pen and start your own journal today.
Written by: Corinna Killeen
Corinna is a Registered Therapeutic Counsellor (RTC) at Adventuring Loss with a focus on grief, anxiety and relationship counselling. She's currently accepting clients on Sundays & Tuesdays.
Get motivation, supportive insights and helpful quotes by following us on Instagram. Click below to book a session with one of our counsellors at Adventuring Loss.