I try it: Journaling for mental health
What
Journal for five minutes a day
How
With a writing instrument and paper
How Long
30 days
Results
Clarity
New ideas
Helped me find the “friction”
Better execution of ideas and goals
Will I keep doing it
Yes, but not all the time
Details
A popular Tiktok personality who gives advice on living with ADHD once promised her followers “I will never ask you to journal”. Her comments were full of gratitude and praise. I was one of them. Because there are two phrases I hate in a class setting.
“Let’s get into groups”
“Have a pen and paper handy, because we’ll be doing some journaling”
For my entire life, suggestions of journaling have elicited groans to reach the heavens. I cannot and will not. No thank you.
I got my first journal at 8 and my second at 17. I worked on them for years because
I only used them when I was depressed
journaling while depressed turned a mild bad day into a doom spiral
Some of my recorded doom spirals were so bad that I threw away the journal I received at 8 and used through my junior year of high school.
I was skeptical and annoyed every time a self-help course or meditation class encouraged me to “get out my journal”. I’d usually sit and scribble. Or just not do it.
I resisted journaling like every line would take a year off my life.
What we resist makes a great challenge, a great opportunity to change a pattern. So naturally I had to try in my year of new habits.
In February, I committed to writing for just five minutes every day. I’m all about lowering the barrier to actually doing something. Five minutes was totally do-able. I was never so tired that I couldn’t get five minutes in before bed.
Some days I free-wrote, but other days I chose a prompt. I got a number of my prompts from a woman I did a self-help course with in 2020 named Ardas Chandra. She’s the complete opposite of me with journaling - does it all day every day, owns a $200 leather notebook cover and a fountain pen. She’s serious.
She posted some prompts on instagram and on her substack. Using prompts felt so much more comfortable than free-writing.
So I had two habit helpers
low-effort rule (5 minutes of writing)
a prompt
I found these two things made establishing my journaling habit really simple, and I attribute them with the success of this experiment over some of the other habit experiments I’ve tried.
Week 1
Week 1 was a little … weak. I hadn’t figured out that I needed prompts yet, and five minutes felt like not enough time to write much of anything. A lot of the entries were simple logs of the day. However, a couple days in I began to enjoy looking back on my day. It was the perfect format for a little reflection, a little post-mortem/retrospective, if you will. I’d list the things I’d done and decide if I wanted to do those things again or think about what I would do differently.
Week 2
This is where I started to pick up a little steam. I started using prompts, and I even came up with a few of my own prompts. For many of these, I maintained a format from the first week that I really enjoyed: lists. Not conforming to particular grammar or complete sentences felt less “Dear Diary” and more fluid. I answered many of the prompts in long lists for the entirety of the five minutes. I found the prompts below especially inspiring.
Some of the prompts I did this week included
Things I would do if I had free time
Things I want to do that feel silly
What made me feel frustrated today?
What am I doing out of pride or guilt?
That last prompt became particularly important to me in week 3.
Week 3
In week 3, I really hit a breakthrough. While answering “What am I doing out of pride or guilt”, I realized that I’d delayed a particular project by years because of pride. I felt like I had to do something a particular way to prove myself, and because that method involved a lot of extra work, I never really got this project off the ground. Once I realized that during my journaling session, I had the self-awareness I needed to move forward with this too-long delayed project.
Week 3 wasn’t without it’s speed bumps, however. I felt pretty sick by the end of the week, and this led to the only day I missed journaling all month. And what did I do? Well the next day I journaled about it. And that’s how I learned that when I’m sick, I revert to some old and comfortable habits that aren’t serving me well.
Week 4
In week 4 I used a plant-based tarot deck for my prompts! This is a common exercise in many of the aforementioned self-help classes - pulling cards and then journaling about it. Despite some of the fun, this was the week I started a little self-flagellation. Due to the success of my breakthrough in week 3, I began to journal about other ways I could break through the low-productivity barrier around other projects or hobbies and optimize my life and time.
This is a bit of a slippery slope to me, and a lot of it felt like I was hyping myself up to be a BRAND. NEW. ME. That wasn’t the vibe I wanted for this experiment, and I had to do a little bit of course-correcting. I spent a little time writing myself down from some recent anxiety and then as soon as it began… it was over.
Week 5
I started it by saying “It’s March, I don’t have to do this any more”. I wanted to, but I also wanted to move on to other experiments. And it ended there. As bright as it burned, the ending was abrupt and un-precious.
Was journaling good for my mental health?
In this instance, and in this container, yes. I enjoyed the journaling and felt energized and empowered when I did it. I learned a lot, but I’ll need to set some ground rules for future journaling to avoid anxiety spirals while writing.
How successful was journaling?
I only missed one day because I was sick. I learned some new things about myself and created self-awareness to get unblocked in some areas of my life. Journaling has been the most successful habit I’ve tried for personal growth because of the time spent in reflection.
Would I journal again or keep journaling?
Yes, absolutely. I have future plans to make it a more regular part of my life and not just an experiment.
Is it a habit? It easily could be. I don’t know if I’ll do it every day, but I intend to do it regularly.
