How to Journal for Mental Health
Written by A Therapist
Taking care of your mental health and working on it can be confusing. It can be challenging to know where to start. As a therapist, I get it. I work with lovely people struggling with overthinking, worry, stress, anxiety, heartbreak, and pain. Others experience thoughts and emotions about not feeling enough, feeling unloveable, or experiencing challenges with self-confidence. So much happens in life; work, relationships, school, parenting, health concerns, and challenges with emotional wellness. Day in and day out, I help people in my office find solutions to their concerns and help them process what is happening in their lives.
This blog post will share how to journal for your mental health with techniques that I use in my therapy private practice. I will be covering:
What to journal about to gain benefits for mental health
Why it's important to journal about your thoughts
BONUS: Journal prompts to get you started
So, if you are seriously ready to work on and journal for mental health benefits, you are in the right place.
What to Journal about to Gain Benefits for Mental Health
Using your journal can help gain mental health benefits. We experience situations in our life that negatively affect our mental health and life. As a therapist, I support clients tell their stories and make sense of it in a safe space. We dig in a little deeper to work on awareness of their thoughts, triggers, and patterns.
Journaling for mental health consistently can bring you benefits, including clarity, awareness of your patterns, triggers, growth, and many more benefits. Journaling can be therapeutic. Taking the time to reflect on your day, month, year, or life can help you process, decompress, and become aware of what holds you back from living the life you desire.
An organized way to journal for your mental health that I want to share with you today comes from one of the therapies I practice daily with my clients in private practice. We often have thoughts that do not serve us and have thoughts that may be irrational or possibly not likely to happen. Our mind can run amock with thoughts about what might go wrong, the worst-case scenarios, and even images of our worst fears. We may also have thoughts of unworthiness and not-enoughness.
Alright, take out your journal, and if you are like me, you have found or keep a collection of beautiful journals. I have listed the steps for this journal entry below. I recommend that you use this specific guided journal entry as often as you need or can since this will be helpful to awaken awareness of your thought patterns and emotions.
Give your journal entry a title and date.
Situation: Think back to today, this week, or this month to a situation that brought stress or distress. Describe the situation in detail (ex. What happened? When and where did this happen? Who was involved?)
Automatic Thoughts: What were your immediate or automatic thoughts when this situation occurred?
What were you thinking?
Did you imagine something occurring?
Were you expecting anything?
Emotions and Physiological Responses: What emotions and physiological responses did you feel as a reaction to the situation? List all the feelings you had (ex., anger, disappointment, sad).
Describe your emotions.
How intense did they feel?
What physical reactions did you experience?
Did you feel an accelerated heart rate? A pit in your stomach, pressure on your chest, etc.?
If you want an organized space to journal for your mental health, grab my e-journal, " My mental health Journal." Click here!
Why it's Important to Journal about your Thoughts
We have many thoughts daily. Some thoughts are a reaction to situations we encounter every day. Other thoughts can be considered "overthinking" and excessive worry. The fact is that many of our thoughts are incorrect, irrational, and false. You can not conclude that you can not accomplish that one thing you want in life. Just because you think you can't, it does not mean you can't. For example, you are working on enhancing your career, but you keep thinking that you will be fired for that one mistake you made or that you can lose your job because of the economy or restructuring in your workplace. Of course, that can happen, but it does not mean it is true just because you think it. Instead, we need to analyze our thoughts and find actual evidence why that thought is true or false.
We must pay attention to our thoughts because thoughts are directly connected to our emotions and actions. If we have constant "negative, " pessimistic, or self-harmful thoughts that we don't manage, balance, or reframe, it is highly likely that we may feel sad, depressed, anxious, or "crappy."
So what can you do today about this? Practice, practice, being aware of your thoughts daily. Think about your thoughts as something that happens instead of treating them as absolute truths. Once you get good at recognizing your thoughts, go ahead and analyze, evaluate, reframe, and balance them.
Journal Prompts to Get you Started (BONUS)
Here are other ideas about what to journal about for mental health. And by the way, journaling does not have to be in full sentences and paragraphs. Journaling can include random ideas, lists (I love lists), and quick notes.
What is the ideal life I want?
What do you want in your life
Write about your life story
Journal about a painful experience
What you learned about yourself during that experience
What you learned about that experience
How you want to see that experience looking forward
What boundaries do you want to establish with people
How can you look at a situation in a different way
What you want out of life in different areas of your life
Family
Relationships
Career
Education
Financial life
Traveling
Journal about your attachment style
Get the workbook or journals to focus on your mental health:
A.M/P.M Mental Health Journal: Start gaining awareness and discovering your emotions and thoughts.
The Daily Self-Love Journal: Practice the habits that get to self-love.
Control Your Negative Thoughts and Stop Overthinking: Use this workbook to address negative thoughts that interfere with your emotional stability and the life you want.
Collection of Affirmations: Get the affirmations to start your day for various life challenges.
Warmly,
Diana