How to start a mental health journal in 5 easy steps.

How to Start a Journal

Starting a mental health journal can be one of the best ways to improve your mental health. Unfortunately, this can seem like an annoying task in the beginning. There never seems to be enough time in the day, and even if there is time, using that time to write about yourself may seem ridiculous.

How could wasting time writing down my thoughts and feelings help with anything?

That’s a fair question. Taking the time to start journaling seems counterintuitive to what we are trying to accomplish, doesn’t it? The crazy part is, it works. You can read more about why journaling works so well here. Still, the simple act of working through complicated situations both emotionally and mentally helps us get those ideas out of our mental space. Our brain then switches these issues to problem-solved and moves on to the next problem. Our mind is an amazing calculation machine. Think of it as a calculator, it can only work out the inputs we enter. If we are stuck entering the same input over and over, there will never be a different result. Starting a dedicated mental health journal will allow you to give your “internal calculator” time to experience the “ins and outs” of the issue. Once that is done, you will be surprised at how different you start to feel.

“Alright, I am interested,” you might say, “How do I get started?” Good news! You already are. By landing here, you have already taken your first step to learning how to start a mental health journal!

Let’s get started!

1. Just Press Go.

This is the absolute most important part of learning how to start journaling. Just get started. The longer you spend thinking about how to do it and what you are supposed to be talking about, the more frustrated you are likely to become. Take control and start. Write about what is going on in your head. What have you been thinking about that just keeps coming back? Where have you been emotionally for the last few days? What are you feeling and thinking about right now? Give yourself 20 minutes to work through what is going on internally. Don’t go over the 20-minute mark; there is research that suggests that if you do, continuing to focus on an issue longer than that can start to work against you. Remember, the mind as a calculator simile? (It is one. Look it up here if, like me, you didn’t remember which is which.) Your mind can only work with the inputs you give it. If I look too long, I can move past working through it and start a new cycle about the same problem. At first stick with the 20-minute rule. Take your time learning how to use journaling as a skill for you. When that is done, you can use it, however, works best for you!

When you sit down and start your mental health journal, you are beginning to take control back from your internal chaos. The more you practice, the more you will find that the way to use this tool will find you.

2. Write it down.

I am going to tell you to do something unpopular.

Write it down.

Conventional internet wisdom is going to tell you that you can “journal”, however, you want. You can paint, sing, talk into a voice recorder, or whatever else is out there.

There is some truth to this. The act of naming an emotion and labeling how you feel will reduce the response of the amygdala. When the amygdala gets fired up you are going to be experiencing stress and even possibly entering into a fight, flight, or freeze response. By consciously thinking about and naming the emotion you are feeling, it is possible to reduce the amygdala’s response. Science Daily did a write-up on this cool study that explains the how and why of this. (You can read the whole thing here.).

So if that is true, why am I telling you to write? Because while all those other things can help, writing everything down is going to do even more. You can sing about your problems, but if you aren’t singing about how to fix them. What good is it doing?

When you write things down you are quieting your mind by focusing on balancing, putting pen to paper, and allowing thoughts, feelings, and emotions to flow. Not only that, but you are also naming emotions and receiving the visual feedback of this process. When you write things down it is easier to go back and reference your previous writings to find patterns.

Patterns help us find out what is getting in the way on repeat. Then we can do something about it.

3. Give it a date.

When you first start writing, make sure you note the date. This is your starting point. This is the day that you decided to give this a try. Good for you! You have joined the legions of people throughout history who have used journaling as a way to annotate their lives and make sense of their inner chaos. Names like Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, and Marcus Aurelius. You might have heard of them...

After you have written down the date, start writing. This may seem oversimplified but it is that simple. Start with whatever is on your mind and let the words flow. Since our goal is to increase our cognitive skills, try out what you are thinking as you started writing.

Here is an example:

“Journaling is stupid. I don’t know why I am doing this. What difference is writing this down going to make in my life.”

Let’s look at this example. What can we learn from this statement? If we are using this to make ourselves sharper, more mentally resilient people, quite a lot.

1. The overall tone is negative and defeatist.

2. I am admitting that something is going on that I don’t like.

3. I am avoiding thinking about that thing.

If you had written that down, I am willing to make it rain $1,000 bills on a bet that you were feeling pretty bad. There are 23 words in that statement. In those 23 words, you could have learned more about yourself and where you are emotionally/mentally than in an entire day’s worth.

4. Review.

This is one reason you make sure you date each entry. You need to go back and review what you have written down previously or even at the end of each session.

Looking at 1-3 above, we can see how that statement echoed how we were feeling as it was written down. When you review your writing these patterns will start to jump out at you. You will start to be able to see how your mood fluctuated around these entries and begin to note the same patterns in your daily life.

Taking the time to review allows you to engage critical thinking skills directed at discerning patterns and creating solutions. You start to see problems. Now all you have to do is allow the amazing calculator inside your head to start to work out solutions.

5. Turn off the judgment.

Reviewing each entry is going to tell you a lot about yourself. Not all of it is going to be good. If you were a perfect human, there would not be a need to do a mental health journal at all. Be we aren’t. Not one of us. Judgment gets thrown around as a way to free yourself. It can be, but we aren’t talking about that kind of judgment. We are talking about sitting down to read some hard-to-hear stuff about you and using that to make you a better human.

We won’t get anywhere doing this if you use this time as a beat-up-on-myself session, and if you keep judging every decision, thought, or feeling you have, progress will never find you. Identify your desired outcome and use this information to lead you in that direction. You didn’t come with a manual. But guess what, if you are willing to start this. You are creating one. You are learning how to troubleshoot yourself.

I can’t think of a better reason to start than that.

There you have it! How to start a mental health journal in 5 steps! I know it says easy in the title, but I am leaving it out here. When I got to the end of this, those steps didn’t seem easy anymore. That seemed like work. That’s the thing with making ourselves better. It takes a lot of work. It takes trying things that are unusual, or daunting, and learning how to make them work for you. The best part of writing your own manual is… you get to choose what to do with it. It may not be easy, but it is worth it.

I am counseling Amarillo on how to heal from the inside out. I want to help you too. Schedule today to start writing a manual on your life.

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