Journaling is trending, and you’ve probably heard of it from various people in your life already. The research on the topic and your peers’ feedback confirm that journaling works, for real. Some do it for mental clarity, others to dump their daily load of emotions. Some love the romantic documentarian Jane Austen’s style of journaling, whilst others prefer more modern approaches. You hear about people who can’t start or end their day without writing a few sentences in their journals, and about people finding their weekly playlist to be their go-to journaling technique.
Yes, journaling has range. And yes, regardless of how you define it and what benefits it promises, journaling seems a burden for those who don’t practice it correctly. So, read along to find out the journaling techniques suited for every lifestyle and goal, why you should start journaling, and how to do it to become a healthy habit and not one more task on your to-do list. In the end, journaling may or may not be for you, but it’s better to decide based on facts than on misconceptions and myths.
Journaling is the practice of regularly unloading your inner state of mind onto an external medium. The classic approach to journaling involves writing down your thoughts, feelings, activities, experiences, or observations on paper every day. Many modern journaling techniques still involve writing, including handwriting. A daily entry in the journal is still preferred by many.
However, unloading can be done by drawing, painting, or sketching. It may be done by taking photographs and creating collages, or by putting together playlists, or even writing music. You can journal by recording your voice reciting haikus. Any artistic form of expression that can be recorded and is practiced regularly may serve as a journaling technique. Making an entry every day, every week, every month, or whenever you have time is totally up to you.
The content of your journal, or, in other words, what you choose to unload, also varies. Like Jane Austen, you may choose to record everything that happens to you in a day or within the period that passed since your last journal entry. If you listen to mental health workers, you may choose to unload your feelings, focus on positive or negative ones, or explore your emotions. Also, because we live in a very busy world, you may choose to unload your practical thoughts by journaling as a way to declutter your mind and organize. The content of your journal and the journaling technique should be based on your reasons for reaching out to journaling in the first place.
Journaling is not new; it has been thoroughly researched by psychologists and mental health researchers. Based on their studies, journaling may reduce stress, help you externalize thoughts and feelings, bring mental clarity, and boost your overall mental health. It may improve your introspective and self-reflection skills, reduce anxiety, and help you identify habits and patterns that keep you stuck and unproductive.
In the long term, journaling provides data you can use to base future actions on. By browsing your journal, you can see where your time and money go, understand what makes you happy or unhappy, identify core values, and define your goals. Your journal may be the catalyst for change and growth.
On a more practical level, journaling may help with organization, reducing procrastination, tackling to-do lists, and managing time. It may improve your relationships and better your communication skills. Journaling may be your way to stay motivated, track your progress, and keep going in the right direction of your choice.
As a mental prep, start journaling by believing it can help you achieve your goal and that you can do it effortlessly. It may not seem like that from the beginning, but with a bit of perseverance, it will become second nature not long after starting.
As a practical prep, choose your medium and journaling technique carefully. If you choose something that doesn’t suit you, you’ll either give up or increase your stress instead of decreasing it. So, do your homework and decide what’s best for you:
Because you are new to journaling, you need all the help you can get to build this new habit. Journaling is a practice and, like every practice, it needs consistency and commitment. Use all the tricks in the books to create the trigger for this new activity and reward yourself with a pat on the back every time you accomplish it. If you fail (and you will fail), be kind to yourself. If you identify a failing pattern (e.g., I always seem to skip journaling on Wednesday mornings when it’s my turn to do the school run), adjust your journaling habit to accommodate your lifestyle.
If you struggle to create the content for your journal, you can either use prompts, such as specific questions or topics, or reduce the expectations (e.g., I will write one page a day versus I will write as much as I feel like). You may also want to get creative. Maybe use colored crayons instead of your regular pen, choose to sketch something instead of writing on a particularly hard day, or write anything that comes to mind, regardless of whether it makes sense or not, or whether it is grammatically correct.
A study by University College London found that it takes an average of 66 days to build a new habit, ranging from 18 to 254 days for their pool of participants, which is a very broad range. So, what’s to do when you feel like you’ve made a habit of journaling, but you can’t maintain it?
The best thing you can do is to place the new habit within an existing routine or build a routine around it. For instance, if you prefer to journal in the morning, include it in your morning routine and stack it with something you already do, like having your tea or coffee. The routine will take you from one action to the next smoothly and provide the trigger you need to remember to make time for journaling.
While many people need a trigger to maintain a journaling habit, many others need sustainability. You can maintain a journaling habit by pressuring yourself to put in a lot of effort, but what makes it successful in the long run is sustainability. If you feel that your new habit takes too much time or effort, adjust. Maybe you need to reduce the frequency (e.g., journal every other day), the allocated time (e.g., only write for three minutes), or the volume (e.g., only put in one image a day). Do whatever you find necessary to create a sustainable and enjoyable journaling habit.
The third feature of any successful habit is the reward. What do you get from your journaling practice? Is it enough to justify having this new habit? If you struggle to find the reward satisfactory, you need to adjust the journaling technique (e.g., focus on gratitude rather than on stress relief) or even mix multiple techniques.
You can find many basic journaling techniques, along with many variants of those techniques, which can be confusing and hard to navigate. But regardless of which method you start with, over time, you will end up creating your own; trust us on this one, and don’t worry too much at this point. Instead, go through the following 10 journaling techniques, which we organized into groups to make them easier to comprehend and help you see the myriad variants within each group. Let your intuition decide which one suits you and give it a try, allowing yourself to make changes, switch to a different one, or adjust the habit when necessary.
Free writing is the oldest and still the most popular journaling technique. It allows you to vent, dumping whatever goes through your head onto paper. The stream of consciousness transfers onto the medium, relieving you from stress. Free writing is an open technique: no structure, no required frequency or volume of content, and no imposed medium. You can use paper notebooks or text editors on your phone. You can write one sentence today and two pages tomorrow.
The unstructured approach may be a blessing in disguise. If writing is not particularly enjoyable or dumping is not particularly easy, you can get lazy and skip adding entries to your journal. However, it also allows you to write anything you want, from dreams to describing a meeting with a client, from feelings to to-do lists, from ideas to thank you notes. In case you need a few prompts to get your free writing journal started, you can use one of these:
Gratitude journaling has become increasingly popular in recent years because it helps us focus on what we have instead of what we want. The economy is built on making us feel we don’t have enough or aren’t enough. It teaches us from a very young age that happiness is in having lots of things, money, power, status, accomplishments, and so on. As a result, we are unhappier than ever, always chasing the next thing to own, hoping it will bring us happiness. Gratitude journaling is a technique meant to redirect your attention to what you have and are grateful for. You can log a specific number of items you are grateful for each day or explore this theme in various ways. The prompts that might help you are:
Reflective journaling allows you to look back on the day that just passed and record your observations, feelings, experiences, and so on. To be effective, reflective journaling must be practiced in the evening, often just before going to bed. It may be a chronicle of your day, written on paper in detail, a meditation accompanied by a full-body scan, a drawing, a mood board, a playlist you put together and listen to whilst falling asleep, and so forth. You are free to choose the medium and content that works for you and direct your reflections on a particular topic, follow a theme, or let it flow freely. Some prompts for reflective journaling are:
For many people, it’s easier to write to someone, such as in a letter, or imagine having a conversation with someone. Dialogue journaling invites you to write unsent letters or make your journal entry look like a dialogue. For instance, you can write letters to your past or future self, to someone you loved but didn’t have the chance to tell them, to the stranger who impressed/angered/annoyed/helped/etc. you today, and so on. As you don’t send the letters, you can write as much as you want and let everything out. Psychologists say this can be a cathartic experience, unloading past traumas, helping you to deal with emotions, and bringing forgiveness and healing. Instead of writing letters, you can record voice messages. You can use some of the following prompts for your unsent letter journal:
Organizational journaling suits people who love lists and have a task-oriented approach. This journaling technique involves dumping your content in bullet lists. Instead of creating an entire narrative to describe your day or share your emotions, you list everything. It’s a structured system that helps you stay on point and put your thoughts in order. You can customize the bullet list as you like, using trackers, colored pencils, Excel spreadsheets, or apps. This journaling technique may also be used for reducing rumination and anxiety. Instead of focusing on what has passed, focus on what you have to do. It’s proven that writing down what you have to do brings mental clarity, declutters your mind, calms it, helps you sleep better, and reduces stress and anxiety. You can use one of the following themes as prompts:
In a goal-oriented world, goal-oriented journals have arisen naturally. People keep journals to monitor their habits (e.g., exercising and eating healthily), increase their productivity, manage their emotions, learn new things, and so forth. The journaling form matters less than the result. Each journal entry is meant to track progress, recording the ups and downs of the goal-oriented journey. Here, apps and statistics help a lot, so rely on them in a healthy, responsible way. Most importantly, treat yourself with kindness and celebrate progress without beating yourself up for falling behind the schedule or falling off the wagon. In this scenario, prompts may be:
While having a theme, goal, and preferred journaling technique provides structure and helps a lot with maintaining the habit of journaling, many people prefer a frequency-based approach over a content-based one. For instance, they may commit to writing something every morning, creating one journal entry per day, regardless of whether it is a note on a piece of paper, a bullet list in an app, a drawing, or a photograph. Often, frequency-based journaling takes a what-is-going-on approach, meaning the owner uses whatever means they have at hand to note what’s going on during a given period (e.g., day, week, month, etc.). Make sure you observe both the positive and the negative aspects of your life. Psychologists say we tend to focus on the latter. Prompts for frequency-based journaling:
Visual journaling replaces writing with any form of visual art. You may want to draw, paint, take photos, create collages, put together mood boards, gather illustrations, mix images and text, and many more. The visual form of self-expression is so relaxing. There are no tasks or restrictions, and you focus on enjoying the process rather than reaching a goal or result. It also boosts creativity and problem-solving and puts you in a good mood. You can also use visual cues to create a mind-mapping journal that organizes your ideas and thoughts visually. Think of a diagram or a spider web, one thing leading to another. Themes for visual journaling may be:
For those who struggle to maintain a new habit, like journaling, or to get things done, a volume-based approach may come in handy. Instead of focusing on what you put in your journal, focus on how much you put in and let things flow freely. Examples of volume-based journaling include writing one page every week, one-line-a-day journaling, five-item lists, one-photo-a-day journaling, and three songs in a playlist. It doesn’t matter how long it takes you, as long as you reach the volume you agree upon. Of course, you can adjust the volume in the beginning to ensure you create a sustainable habit. Volume-based journaling may be:
Prompted journaling or guided journaling is a step-by-step approach to journaling. It relies on prompts or some form of structured guidance to get through each journal entry. You may be asked to answer a set of questions (the same each time or not), complete a workbook, fill forms, stay within time limits or volume boundaries, and so on. There are plenty of apps and platforms designed to help you get into the habit of journaling, follow a goal, or stay centered on a particular topic. Prompted journaling includes the following:
Conclusion
As you can see, journaling provides a variety of techniques tailored to different needs and preferences. Each method serves a purpose, empowering individuals to document, reflect, and develop in ways that best suit their lifestyle and goals. From mental health to travelling, from meditation to tackling procrastination, from daily decluttering to emotion inquiring, journaling may be the tool you need to heal, grow, and become a better version of yourself.
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