How to Journal

What does it mean to journal? Google defines to journal as “to regularly record your thoughts, feelings, daily experiences, or ideas in written or digital form.” But how do you do that in a way that helps your mental health? I think the question to ask yourself is, what are you hoping to get out of journaling? Are you trying to record your daily experiences along with your thoughts and emotions or are you trying to process and understand your emotions. Because while it sounds similar they would require a completely different process. 

If your goal is to have a record of your daily experience, then journaling would entail regular entries that include what happened, your thoughts and emotions about the situations and experiences. Pretty straightforward.

But if you want to use journaling to help understand and process your emotions, there’s a different more beneficial process. What I have found both professionally and personally, is to write without an audience. From the moment we are taught to write, we are taught to write for an audience, someone else who will read what we write, a parent, a teacher, someone else. Because of this we filter what we write, but this is not helpful when it comes to processing emotions, because our emotions have no filter. So the idea behind this is to write without a filter, whatever thought or emotion comes to mind. Don’t go back and read it, it’s for the present moment. If I even tried to go back and read it, I probably couldn’t, my handwriting is that bad. If you’ll think you’ll be tempted, you can always tear the pages up and throw them away. What happens when you do this is that you become more in tune with your present thoughts and emotions. It helps you gain clarity of your thoughts and emotions. It always helps you process them. I have used this technique when I’m unsure of why I’m feeling a specific why and it always helps me understand a trigger. I usually uncover a negative belief having been triggered, such as "I'm unloveable.” Sometimes the hardest part is starting, so try starting with “I feel…”. 

Another way to journal is with prompts. Prompts are questions which you answer. The purpose of the prompts are to guide your thinking and to get you to think about yourself, your emotions, your future, or a topic in a deeper way. There are unlimited prompts out there and google can be your best friend when coming up with them.

There are no right or wrong ways when it comes to journaling. It really boils down to what you are hoping to accomplish with journaling. Here are just a few ideas in different ways to utilize journaling. Journaling and writing is a wonderful coping skill and it also connects you to another side of your brain that you might not always use.