15 Journal Prompts to Bolster Your Mental-Health
May is Mental Health Awareness month. When you are struggling with your mental-health, it can be easy to think that you need to start an elaborate wellness plan to get back on track and begin feeling better. The truth of the matter is that whenever you are really struggling, the care you need doesn’t need to be complicated, rather it needs to be really, really simple. This ensures that you will be able to start caring for yourself in uncomplicated, tangible, and bite sized ways.
Whether you’re struggling with depression, anxiety, trauma, or hurt relationships, we want to highlight one thing that is simple, affordable, backed by research as beneficial for your mental-health, and easy to begin…
It’s putting pen to paper and writing. Some call it journaling, I like to refer to it as a brave act of caring for your story, your emotions, and your body.
Every time you open up your journal and write down anything, you are declaring that your life matters, that it has substance, and that the things that happen to you are worth exploring. While that might sound overly dramatic, in a world of noisy distraction, quick fixes, and this pressure to be constantly reachable, setting aside time and marking it for slowness, wonder, and curiosity is pretty revolutionary.
Journaling is an incredible companion on your therapy journey because like therapy, it’s a space that is not for public consumption and is completely private. There’s no editing, no worrying about how many likes it did or didn’t get…it’s just for you and you alone and if you do want to share, you have total agency and choice over that decision. This kind of safe space is necessary to foster growth and healing.
Something I get asked a lot by clients when I suggest they pick up journaling is whether or not it matters if they have a physical journal or if it’s okay if they just use a digital journal. While I do love my notes app and use it to jot down important things I want to return to, there are mental-health benefits that come from actually writing with pen on actual paper. And to that a common pushback is “But I think faster than I write!” to which I often remark, “Exactly why it’s so important to write…it’s a chance for you to slow down.” Slowing down to notice what’s happening in your body is something that happens very frequently in a therapy session and is also something that is so helpful to notice while your journaling…your body is always wanting to offer you wisdom and data on what it is like to be you.
When you’re writing about trauma, hard questions you’re holding, experiences you feel confused on, or even just the fact that you don’t know what to write about and you feel blank…these are all things that often need integration. Research shows that writing by hand helps you to integrate new information and synthesize what you’re thinking about. Handwriting increases neural activity in similar ways that meditating does. You can even think of journaling as a kind of meditation, just one that involves a little more movement.
Journaling for Anxiety
If you’re someone that can easily go to worst case scenario, journaling is going to be really helpful for you. The clinical term for this uncomfy experience is called catastrophizing. It’s a pretty genius thing your brain does when it scans things for potential danger. It just becomes not so genius and more of a road block when your brain flags anything and everything as potentially dangerous. Journaling can slow down those ruminations and help you get some distance from them to see them from a different perspective on a page verses running rampant in your mind.
Journaling for Trauma
It is incredibly brave to come to therapy to start unpacking some of the harmful parts of your story and your past. More often than not, this means looking at your stories of abuse, harm, and emotional neglect. Trauma steals your inherent sense of safety, of worth, of belonging and reclaiming those things take time, kindness, and space. Beginning to put words to what happened to you is both brave and hard. Writing them down can sometimes be a more palatable and tolerable way to begin facing the abuse and harm that happened to you. In the incredible book Writing Ourselves Whole by Jenn Cross, she writes, “The longer we tell the story that our voices were lost or stolen, the longer we believe that story, the longer some part of us remains silent. Writing down our story undermines that narrative, fissures it, creates the space for real stories to emerge.”
Every time you explore your own stories of trauma by journaling about them, you are playing with language and meaning, you are opening up and expanding your story to hold greater depth and meaning, and you are honoring the harm that you had to bear and the resilience that continues to show up.
Journaling for Relationship Issues
Can we just be honest and name that relationships can incredible and beautiful and when you find yourself in therapy, it’s often because the relationships that ought to be so good are actually hard and messy and hurtful. I specialize in friendships and for women in particular, having friendship problems can feel tender and even embarrassing to admit. It’s also easy to fall into a shame spiral and get lost in replaying the same stories over and over leading to a big feeling of stuckness. Remember how I named that lots of folks find that journaling is annoying because it takes a long time and slows you down…in these cases, the annoying thing is also the most helpful and healing thing.
Victor Frankl famously said, “Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”
It’s easy to receive a hurtful text from a friend and want to spout something right back or jump to conclusions when you see a picture of everyone at a party you weren’t invited to…here’s where journaling can help you, especially if you’re in between therapy sessions. Journaling invites you to slow down, to write about where you feel hurt, where you might not be seeing the full picture, and what you really want to say if you weren’t afraid of telling the truth. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone from seeing a situation one way, totally sure of what I was going to do, to spending time journaling about it, and realizing there was so much I was missing. Journaling about it helped me to come back to myself, see where I needed to find my own edges and implement boundaries, and also where I needed to take some responsibility as well.
A few things to help start your journaling practice:
Make a date and pick out a journal that speaks to you.
I’ve found that it’s important that I’m more apt to write in a journal, if I like the feel of the journal, how the journal lays, and the texture of the pages. You might also care about the sensory experience of a journal. It took a few journals, but I’ve landed on the Moleskin Classic Notebook, Hardcover with lined pages as my tried and true journaling companion. At this point, I’ve probably filled up 20 of these journals. They are affordable, come in lots of different colors, and most importantly, lay completely flat when I’m writing. (IYKYK)
Set an intention to write a few days a week at a certain time
It’s easy to burn yourself out on self-care plans that are way too rigorous and rigid. Starting to journal just a few days a week can set you up for success and create a more sustainable habit. If you’re in weekly therapy, it can be helpful to set a time to journal after a session to continue processing what you and your therapist discussed and to journal before your next session. This leaves ample time and space so you can uncover stories, experiences, or thoughts that might need more care and holding. Writing can be so therapeutic and often allows you to go deeper into stories or uncover insights and ask questions that are easier to name on a page before you might be ready to speak them out loud.
Sometimes a blank journal page can feel exciting and invigorating and sometimes it can feel like too much and knowing what to even start writing can create so much anxiety that you don’t even start in the first place. While that experience in and of itself might be juicy material to explore in therapy, having a few simple prompts to serve as gentle pushes to get writing can be really helpful to start a regular journal practice.
Fifteen Journal Prompts to Help Bolster your Mental Health and Care for your Story
What’s bringing you joy and what’s hurting in your life these days?
Where do you feel like you’re holding back? Write about what you’re afraid of…
Write the story of a childhood memory that you sense still affects you today.
Write a letter to your younger self. What did you need to hear then from a loving and empathetic adult?
Write about a relationship that you’re struggling with.
What’s something that you know you want to heal from? How do you hope to show up differently?
What are the parts of your Mom and Dad (or caretakers) that you hope to emulate and what parts of them do you not want to carry on?
What’s a memory that was so good and so pure that you wish you could return to? Write about that memory.
Write about something you wish people would understand about you more that sometimes feels hard to explain?
Pick three important people in your life. If you weren’t afraid of saying exactly how you felt, write what you would say to each of them.
Write about the last time your heart was broken. (Heartbreaks are not confined to romantic relationships. The world, politics, friends, systems, deaths, family, etc can all break your heart)
Write about your relationship to your body.
Write about a regret you have, a story where you wish you showed up differently, but showed up the way you did.
Write about a decision that you made that you are proud of.
Write a letter to your future self in 5 or 10 years. What do you want them to remember and not forget about what it was like to be you at this time? What do you hope to be different by then? What would you be okay with being the same then too?
If anything of these prompts inspired you or piqued on something deep that you sense could be worth exploring with a trauma-informed licensed psychotherapist, reach out to us at Fig Holistic Psychotherapy to schedule a complimentary phone consult to see if doing trauma therapy could be a good fit for you. We have an office for in person counseling sessions in Charlotte, NC and also offer virtual sessions to folks living in North Carolina, South Carolina, or Texas.