Starter journal
Why bother journaling? Already its hard to find time to do anything, life is spent running around catching up on everything and then when you do finally get to sit down what do you do? Tv, A hobby, nothing?
Its fine and well ensuring that you have some chill out time, but are you using this time to process anything that has happened in your day or are you spending the time ignoring the stress and trying as hard as possible to get away from it all.
If you find yourself stuck with brain fog and moments of nothingness, it may be a sign that you are not actually having time to process life, especially if you have anxiety and spend time in fight or flight mode. Even if you are feeling good and coping with life then its still a great idea to write it all down. This gives you a timeline of your emotions and something to look back on. Its the exact same reason as to why we take pictures. You want to preserve and remember a moment in time.
Anyway, its not always the easiest thing to start, in fact you may not have the faintest idea as to what you would write about.
To make things easy, here is a basic starter list. There is some questions to answer and you don’t have to write them down, just answer them and continue writing with the next question. The idea is that after time you wont need the questions and you will naturally be able to get anything and everything out of your head.
- Date, day and time
- How did your day begin (what did you do? who with? and what went through your mind at that time?) Continue this in chronological order of your day. (morning, afternoon,evening)
- What made you smile the most?
- What did you achieve? (what made you proud? small or large its all progress.)
- What made you annoyed? Why did you get angry?
- What are you grateful for?
- What was the general feeling of today? and why?
- What is something you want to do for tomorrow? (write a plan of how you will achieve it)
You can do this on a daily basis for that day only or as I prefer, do for a couple of days (that way I have time to fit it in and reflect on things that weren’t such a big issue as I immediately thought)
For a start it is ideal to do everyday, even if you only answer one question. In a months time you can look back and reflect and remember the things you have achieved or not and the reason as to why.
This is for you and judge yourself as you, not compared to anyone else and forgive yourself in such a way to.
Feel free to post any success you have had!
Happy journaling!