While cleaning out a drawer during a recent house move, I found the diary I kept in high school. Obviously, I couldn’t resist the temptation of reading the things 14-year-old me had seen fit to document – friendship dramas and getting braces featured heavily – and while a lot of it made me cringe, it also made me wonder why I’ve never kept a diary since then. In stressful times – career crossroads or COVID lockdowns – adult me has turned to pen and paper to vent my feelings, but it’s not a regular part of my routine.
Maybe it should be. If writing can make me feel better when times are tough, might it not also work to help prevent stress and anxiety? Should we all be journaling?
What actually is journaling?
“Journaling” is a fancy word for a very simple concept – it just means documenting your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. People have been doing this for centuries – from famous diarists like Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank, to that LiveJournal page you hope never resurfaces from the internet doldrums.
There’s no wrong way to keep a journal. You might prefer recording your life through Instagram stories, voice notes, songs, or drawings. But many of the most popular journaling practices involve writing, so that’s what we’re going to focus on.
One example is gratitude journaling, documenting things that you are thankful for. You could incorporate this into your daily diary if you keep one, or if you’re really unsure where to begin you can buy ready-made gratitude journals with prompts.
Bullet journaling is another popular option. Pinterest abounds with beautifully curated bullet journal layouts – users commonly favor dotted paper and customize their journals with decorative flourishes. The beauty of this is that your journal can be adapted to become anything you want it to be.
You might keep a travel journal, or nature journal if you’re not venturing too far afield. If you’re on a fitness journey, or undergoing lengthy medical treatment, you might keep a written log of your progress, even if you don’t think of this as a “journal”.
Some people also keep a dream journal, habitually recording their minds’ nighttime wanderings each morning. As well as helping you to remember elusive details of your dreams, proponents claim the practice can help spark creative ideas and even be a useful tool if you’re trying to learn how to lucid dream.
All of these have slightly different purposes, but to stress again, there’s no wrong way. And when it comes to using journaling as a wellbeing tool, sometimes the most effective approach is the simplest.
“Just write”
In 1992, teacher and author Julia Cameron released The Artist’s Way, a book that aimed to provide “a spiritual path to higher creativity.” You might assume such a text would be mostly used by creative professionals, but the New York Times recently included it on a list of six books that therapists read themselves.
I spoke to chartered clinical psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society Linda Blair, who told me about one aspect of Cameron’s framework that she returns to time and again in her work.
You sit up in bed, and before you do another thing, you write three pages of anything, whatever’s on your mind, your dream. Why am I writing? This doesn’t matter. Just write.
Linda Blair
“[Cameron] gets [her students] to do something called morning pages,” Blair told IFLScience. “You sit up in bed, and before you do another thing, you write three pages of anything, whatever’s on your mind, your dream. Why am I writing? This doesn’t matter. Just write.”
Blair explained to me that this practice of writing freely, before you’re even fully awake, can be the time when issues you might need to work through will reveal themselves.
“It makes sense. It’s not floating around your unconscious, just making you sort of agitated […] You have to put a sentence down when you write, so it has to be logical and you begin to get a form to your problems, which is the first step in solving them.”
She likened it to having a therapy session with “someone you really trust that knows you well” – yourself.
“I couldn’t say stronger how important it is”
When I asked Blair if she recommends journaling to her therapy clients, she was unequivocal: “I couldn’t say stronger how important it is and how possibly money-saving and timesaving it is as well.”
That discipline of taking the chaos that is our stream of consciousness and giving it a form and a shape and a direction is just so valuable.
Linda Blair
Even for a patient experiencing psychosis, documenting their reality – however different from our own – can help them. “That discipline of taking the chaos that is our stream of consciousness and giving it a form and a shape and a direction is just so valuable,” she added.
Blair is not alone in her praise. Gratitude journaling is one method that’s increased in popularity in recent years, partly down to the work of influential American psychologist Dr Martin Seligman. Seligman developed a technique called “Three Good Things”. It’s pretty simple: at the end of each day, you write down three positive things that happened to you, and reflect on why they made you feel good.
If the last thing at night you think about before you go to [sleep] is positive, you’re more likely to wake up in a better mood, right?
Linda Blair
“Gratitude provides many advantages throughout development,” begins a 2018 review entitled How Gratitude Connects Humans to the Best in Themselves and in Others. From their research, the authors concluded that engaging in practices that “elicit positive appraisals of one’s daily life” – like gratitude journaling – could help promote wellbeing and more positive interactions with others.
Blair explained how this practice can be particularly helpful for people experiencing depression: “If the last thing at night you think about before you go to [sleep] is positive, you’re more likely to wake up in a better mood, right?”
A recent study even found that feelings of gratitude were associated with a longer lifespan in a group of older adults. While the authors cautioned that their results could not be interpreted as a definitive causal link, it’s food for thought at least.
But if all this sounds too prescriptive or unachievable for you, don’t worry. You don’t have to follow a set method to reap the benefits of journaling.
“Getting your thoughts down is the key, however it works for you,” Blair said. “It’s like exercise – if you’ll do it again and again, then do it that way.”
As well as promoting mental wellbeing, the very act of writing every day can be good for you. Some research suggests that hand writing helps learning, information processing, and memory. One recent study concluded that hand writing from a young age is essential to “provide the brain with optimal conditions for learning.”
In our increasingly tech-reliant world, taking a few minutes each day with just a pen and blank piece of paper might provide some welcome respite. “We’re not so good at communicating nowadays,” laments Blair, who also holds qualifications in creative writing. With electronic communication, “we don’t need the discipline of writing it down in an order and in a way that is communicable to others.”
It’s not difficult, it’s not magical, you don’t have to pay for a therapist to learn it – that’s all you do.
Linda Blair
The case for journaling looks pretty strong from where I’m standing. Fourteen-year-old me was clearly onto something – perhaps I should take my cue from her.
As our conversation draws to a close, Blair is also fulsome in her recommendation: “It’s not difficult, it’s not magical, you don’t have to pay for a therapist to learn it – that’s all you do.”
Hold that thought – I’m off to buy a notebook.
This article first appeared in Issue 26 of our digital magazine CURIOUS. Subscribe and never miss an issue.
