Tips for Starting a Journaling Practice

We have published a few short posts about benefits of journaling. Done regularly, this practice has physical benefits—for example, it really helps strengthen the immune system. Emotionally, it helps us to organize our thoughts, explore and articulate our emotions, and better appreciate our lives by helping us focus on positive experiences and attitudes.

You may ask, What parent has time to spend on journaling? With any regular practice—as with yoga, exercise, meditation—it can be hard to overcome the idea that we don’t have time to do what may be good for us. There are some effective strategies that can get you started, and you may wind up asking yourself how you’d for so long overlooked the pleasures of this way of spending a few minutes with yourself every day.

Pick out a journal that’s right for you

Make the experience enjoyable from the start by lingering over your choice of journal. There are so many different styles to choose from, and you don’t have to try just one. Maybe you’d like to use paper and pen—here are some super fun journals, or you can even make your own. Or maybe you prefer to journal with your phone or tablet—if so, find a cool app.

There are journals designed for specific purposes, such as gratitude journals and mood journals. As you make your selection, think about the goals you’d like to achieve in your journaling practice. For example, do you want to reduce your stress, manage your anger, or list meaningful moments of your life? Thinking about your purposes can help you choose a journal that supports you. If you have trouble blocking out a certain “writing time” in your day, find a journal that includes electronic notifications.

Find ways to work through negative emotions that come up during journaling

One of the biggest barriers to journaling is focusing too much on our negative emotions. If we don’t have strategies to work through these emotions, journaling might make us feel even more upset. Here are some strategies:

  1. Look at your thoughts in a more objective way. Journaling can help you recognize your irrational and distorted thoughts. As you journal, identify these thoughts, then try replacing them by writing more objective ones. Replacing means not repressing them but putting them in context. Gratitude journals are particularly good at countering depressive thoughts by reminding us how much we appreciate all we have—and according to this article, they’re best when we write them not every day but every few days, so don’t feel like you have to be perfect in your practice.
    Journals can also change our attitudes about relationships. For example, after having an argument with your daughter, you might fume in your journal, “I think she obviously does not care about my feelings at all!” But as journaling helps you calm down, you may try to look at evidence about that first feeling: “Well, she stuck around and kept talking even after we started arguing.” The evidence may change your mind: “Maybe she does care about me.”
  2. Learn to see nuances in your emotions. Have you ever felt totally annoyed by someone you deeply love? That’s nuance: being able to hold seemingly conflicting feelings at the same time. For example, when your child lies to you, you may feel a burst of anger, and you may also feel disappointed and hurt, and also great love and longing to know your child better. It’s helpful to be able to understand that we’re complicated beings whose feelings are not always as black-and-white as they are in the movies.
  3. Try to end your journal entries on a positive note. The only attitudes and behavior we can change is our own. Think about tough moments as learning experiences, and contemplate which of your own attitudes and behaviors you might change to make life better next time. For example, after losing your temper with your child, you may wind up criticizing yourself in your journal—and then, as you continue journaling, you could strategize about improving your interactions next time by recording how you’d like to resolve a conflict. The past can’t be changed, but journaling about our attitudes towards the past can help us write new stories for our future.

Talk about your journal with your therapist or someone else you trust.

One of the best things parents of children with mental illness can do is to get help for themselves. And journaling can be a valuable tool to help both you and your therapist better understand your approaches toward life. Through talking about your journal with your therapist, you may improve your ability to recognize patterns in your emotions. Sharing your journal with trusted advisors can help you identify triggers of negative feelings and experiences and create ways to approach them more effectively in the future. Strengthening your relationship with your therapist can help model how to strengthen all your relationships.

What kinds of journaling experiences have you had? What challenges have you encountered, and how did you approach them? Share your experiences, stories, and strategies in the comments.

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