Journaling is more than putting pen to paper; it’s a useful tool that can enhance your emotional wellbeing and provide clarity in your life. Regular journaling can help to reduce stress, boost mood, and even improve sleep. It serves as a constructive outlet for processing challenging experiences and encouraging self-awareness.
If you’re seeking an effective way to enhance your emotional wellbeing, consider giving journaling a try. Here’s a brief guide to get you started.
What is journaling?
Journaling is like a moment of calm amid life’s busyness and chaos. It allows you to hit the pause button and identify and understand your inner thoughts and feelings. By capturing these thoughts, you can unravel the complexities of your emotions to help you gain clarity about your situation.
Why does journaling help?
Journaling can contribute to your mental health and emotional wellbeing. Here’s how it may help you:
Name it to tame it: Recognising and labelling your emotions reduces their power. By expressing feelings, you engage the thinking brain, lessening the intensity of strong emotions. Naming it allows you to step back and observe what you are feeling.
Gain insight: Regular journaling helps you recognise and name emotions as they occur, enabling you to identify patterns and gain insights into your thoughts and feelings. Once you spot the patterns between what is happening and how it makes you feel, you can start to take steps to address the issue.
Improve relationships: By capturing your thoughts and feelings, you are better equipped to describe how you are feeling. Clearly communicating your thoughts and feelings reduces misunderstandings, promotes empathy, builds trust, and minimises conflicts in relationships.
How to capture your thoughts and feelings
Journaling might feel unfamiliar initially, but capturing your thoughts and feelings doesn’t need to be complicated. An important aspect is consistency, not whether it looks beautiful or is super detailed. You can write down your thoughts in a notebook, in a digital app on your phone, or even on a scrap of paper. Alternatively, you can vocalise your thoughts using a voice recording app. It doesn’t matter how you do it; choose a method that feels natural to you.
Journal prompts to get you started
When you start to journal, asking yourself some questions can be helpful.
Questions for when you are feeling overwhelmed or anxious:
- What am I feeling right now? Can I name these emotions?
- What physical sensations am I experiencing?
- What thoughts or beliefs are driving these emotions?
- What evidence supports or contradicts these thoughts?
- What would my biggest supporter tell me right now?
- What coping strategies or grounding techniques can I use?
Questions for when you are feeling low:
- What am I feeling right now? Can I name these emotions?
- What physical sensations am I experiencing?
- What thoughts or beliefs are driving these emotions?
- What evidence supports or contradicts these thoughts?
- When have I felt this way before?
- What can I do to improve my current mood?
- Where can I go to for support?
Questions after a conflict or stressful situation:
- What am I feeling right now? Can I name these emotions?
- What physical sensations am I experiencing?
- What thoughts or beliefs are driving these emotions?
- What do I want to communicate to the other person?
- What assumptions am I making, and what is objectively true?
- What are my values and boundaries in this situation?
- What is the other person’s perspective?
- How can I move towards a constructive resolution?
By regularly exploring these questions through journaling, you can gain valuable insights into your thoughts and feelings, identify patterns, and discover new ways to manage difficult emotions.
If you are struggling and need to reach out to a mental health professional, our CAREinMIND counsellors are here to help 24/7. Call 1300 096 269 or click the floating chat button on the right. The service is free for people in north, western and central Melbourne.
The CAREinMIND blog is delivered by Lifeline. The views in each post do not necessarily reflect those of North Western Melbourne Primary Health Network.