How to Write a Journal for Mental Health
How to write a reflective journal and does journaling help?
How Does Journaling Help?
Increase Self Acceptance
Think of the journal page as your therapeutic space. A place of reflection and insight shared only between you and the page. Writing your thoughts and feelings gives them a voice, even if it’s only you that sees it. You welcome their expression into the world. You can gain clarity and emotional release. A kind of intimacy with yourself that is different to just being in your own head. The page is a container for the swirling mass of thoughts and feelings inside. The spaces around the words are like new breath around your thoughts.
Journaling Helps you Seek Help
The act of writing also increases the likelihood that you will seek help when needed from others, studies have shown. Once you see the words on the page, they are normalised and held, given order and a place in the world.
Journaling Can Release Creativity
The act of writing your thoughts, giving them form and order in a way no-one else can is a creative process. You take something, your thoughts and feelings, and turn them into something new. Tap in to your natural creative energy to bring healing, integration and insight with therapeutic journaling. Not only by increasing your capacity for creativity and insight, journaling helps your mental health in many other ways I outline below. There are different kinds of journaling which I will get to later.
Journaling Improves Self Awareness
By writing around an experience, journaling gives deeper exploration of what's happening both within us and the situation. This increases awareness of events and your own thoughts and feelings around it, bringing insight and choice. Ie, journalling opens up new neural pathways and makes connections that weren’t there before. More awareness of feelings leads to better communication with others.
Does Journaling Improve Mental Health?
Journaling Releases Unconscious Feelings
By channelling your feelings through the pen you gain insight into and control over your emotions and greater insight into its causes. For most of us, when we become depressed it happened for a reason, or from a culmination of different reasons that build up. Our mind can get into a loop and keep us feeling that way. Alternatively the depression is sometimes a protective shield, while we process difficult life events in the depths of our psyche until we are ready to move on. Journaling can speed up this integration. It can break outdated depressive thought patterns giving an outlet to the events in your mind and opening up other ideas. By writing it out you can release pent up emotions, harness feelings and get closer to the truth. Journaling helps you see things in a new way.
Some evidence shows that journaling can be as effective as CBT for depression. Writing it out helps process difficult things and combats the negative thinking cycle and rumination that people with depression sometimes have.
See the Therapy Toolbox Course with 300 Journaling Prompts
Journaling for Anxiety
Studies have shown but people with anxiety wrote for 15 minutes three days a week for 12 weeks had increased feelings of wellbeing after just one month, which continued to improve over 12 weeks. Anxiety tends to happen when our ability to regulate ‘affect’ which is a little like our deeper feeling state, is out of kilter. by writing things out we can gain greater insight and control over our emotional regulation and affective state. We can see what sets it off and what soothes it. We have an outlet for feelings that otherwise stay locked inside and turn into anxiety.
Confusing thoughts working around your head can take up energy in space and time, not to mention fuelling anxiety and depression. Getting them down on the page orders confusing, messy thoughts, a little like combing through tangled hair. The natural result of this reflection journaling is greater clarity and insight.
Therapeutic Journaling
Starting new habits by making a daily routine helps. It means you don't have to keep thinking about it making a time for it. I journal when I wake up in the morning most days, and write freely. Make a commitment to journal each day.
Dedicate 10-15 minutes to your practice - more when it feels more habitual.
A pen and paper is best, something about the liveliness of the pen against the paper, and the mind connected to the hand. There is an innocent quality to the pen in the hand - many of us don’t write much since we grew up, and associate typing on a laptop or phone with many other things. There is something lovely about the channel from the mind through the arm and hand, to the nib and onto the paper. Pen and paper also allows for doodling which also opens the creative channels. The pen brings your words to life on the page in a way that's absent on your phone or laptop. Having said that, doing it is the main thing so go ahead if you don’t have a pen and paper to hand.
See the Therapy Toolbox Course with 300+ Journaling Prompts
Free Writing
This method allows your mind to wander freely on the page. Write for 10-15 minutes and see where it takes you. You may be surprised how helpful this process is, tapping in to your unconscious and truth.
Journaling Prompts
If you are writing about something in particular it can be helpful to follow prompts, or write your own, to keep you more focussed on an outcome.
Let me know how your journalling helps you. Please share this post if you think journaling could benefit someone you know.
