Change Your Life with Therapeutic Journaling
20 Therapeutic Journaling Prompts to Change Your Life!
Written by a therapist to discover what really matters: your true self. Building a better life starts now!
Learn How to Start Therapeutic Journaling
In this article I show you how to start therapeutic journaling, and outline 8 ways journaling can improve your mental health and wellbeing.
I share tips and simple journaling questions to get you started. You can also download 20 Journaling Prompts to Change Your Life Free PDF here.
I’m Kate, a counsellor, psychotherapist and course creator, and I LOVE using journaling for therapy. I use journaling as a big part of the Therapy Toolbox Course, as it is such a useful medium to explore and discover yourself. Let’s get into it!
How does Therapeutic Journaling Help?
Develop a Better Relationship with Yourself
Think of the journal page as your therapeutic space. A place of reflection and insight shared only between you and the page. You are free! 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, giving them space to breathe and play. The spaces around the words are like new breath around your thoughts. The self acceptance that comes with allowing your thoughts space on the page gives you an improved relationship with yourself. You give yourself permission, you give yourself time, space and acceptance. Because you deserve it! This in turn can shift how others see you too.
Journaling Helps you Seek Help from Others
Studies show that the act of writing increases the likelihood that you will seek help when needed from others. Once you see the words on the page, they are normalised and held, given order and a place in the world. This makes you realise that you’ve nothing to be ashamed of, and more able to confide in others.
Journaling Increases Creativity
Giving your thoughts form and order by writing them down, in a way no-one else can is a creative process. You take your thoughts and feelings and turn them into something new. Therapeutic writing taps in to your natural creative energy to bring healing, integration and insight.
How Does Journaling Increase Self Awareness?
By writing around an experience, journaling gives deeper exploration of what's happening both within us and the situation. By making yourself slow down and focus on the thoughts and feelings that arise, you give them voice and validity. This increases self awareness of events and your own thoughts and feelings around it, bringing insight and choice. Ie, journaling can open and shift new neural pathways and make connections that weren’t there before. More awareness of feelings leads to psychological shifts, motivation and better communication with others.
How Does Journaling Help with Mental Health and Depression?
Journaling can release pent up feelings that otherwise may turn into depression. By channelling your feelings through the pen, you gain insight into the causes of painful feelings, and control over your emotions as you explore them.
For most of us, when we become depressed it happened for a reason, or a culmination of different reasons that build up without our knowing, if unaddressed. Our mind can then get into a loop and keep us feeling that way. Alternatively the depression is sometimes a protective shield, while we process difficult life events unconsciously, in the depths of our psyche, until we are ready to move on.
Journaling can speed up this integration of difficult experiences by making the unconscious conscious. It can break outdated depressive thought patterns giving an outlet and insights. By writing it out you can release pent up emotions, harness feelings and get closer to your 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.
How does Journaling Help with Anxiety? Journaling can Lead to a Calmer Mind
Studies show that 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,’ our deeper bodily 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 and understanding of our feelings that otherwise stay locked inside and turn into anxiety.
Is Journaling Therapeutic? Journaling for Mental Clarity
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 those confusing, messy thoughts, a little like combing through tangled hair. The natural result of this reflection journaling is greater mental clarity and insight.
Download 20 Journaling Prompts to Change Your Life Here
Join us on The Therapy Toolbox Course with 300+ journaling prompts, 9 workbooks, exercises and presentations to become YOU!
Therapeutic Journaling Tips
How to Write a Reflective Journal
Creating a daily journaling routine helps with starting new habits like journaling. It means you don't have to keep thinking about when or how you will do it, it’s just automatic. If you make a commitment to journal each day or week, the routine will form and it will become natural.
Dedicate 10-15 minutes to your practice.
A pen and paper is best. There is something about the liveliness of the pen against the paper, and the mind connected to the hand. There is an innocent quality of the channel from the mind through the arm and hand, to the nib and onto the paper. Many of us don’t write much since we grew up, and associate typing on a laptop or phone with many other things. Pen and paper links with our inner child, and even allows for doodling, underlining and circling etc, 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 on your phone notes if you don’t have a pen and paper to hand!
How to Journal: Free Writing for Therapy
This method allows your mind to wander freely on the page. Write whatever comes up 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, your mind given the chance to explore and express, rather like lying on the psychoanalysts couch. Writing a journal for 15 minutes is shown to help with mental wellbeing. I suggest writing in the morning, before the clutter of the day fills your mind, but any time is fine. . It is worth setting your alarm 15 minutes early.
How to Journal: Writing for Therapy with 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. See below for suggestions.
Beginners Journaling Prompts
These are simple questions to get you started. Next, download 20 journaling prompts to change your life here. When answering these questions, write whatever comes into your head, then write a bit more. and for another minute more. The further you tap into something, the more you will find.
Remember that no one is going to read it so be honest. Pay attention to your thoughts as they arise and catch the elusive ones!
It doesn’t have to be good, or neat.
Allow your mind and hand to take over, without judgement or shame.
Notice and document your feelings to give them expression and recognition from yourself and the page.
If you’re not yet comfortable with free writing you can start with these prompts (for my 20 life changing journaling prompts Download here
How do you feel this morning?
What is your intention for today?
What is bothering you the most?
What is making your happy at the moment?
Write yourself a pep talk for today
When you have finished, free write for a while to see what else is inside your mind right now.
Conclude on a positive note, such as your intention for the day, a goal, or summary of what you learned while journaling.
“I am grateful that I found your course! I feel so much better about myself and accepting me for me. Thank you”
20 Journaling Prompts to Change Your Life Today!
Therapeutic journaling prompts to reclaim your true self and thrive. Building a better life starts now!