How to Journal for Mental Health, According to a Therapist

Journaling is one of the easiest and most widely accessible tools for mental health. It only requires the ability to write and something to write with. You really don’t even know how to write well. Just go for it!

While journaling doesn’t take the place of therapy with a licensed professional, it is a wonderful tool that can have profound mental health benefits.

The benefits of journaling are often immediate and absolutely plentiful. Journaling has the instant benefit of catharsis (defined below) and the long-term reward of self-discovery and lasting insight. It’s essentially putting motion to mindfulness in a tangible fashion.

*Catharsis is the process of getting out strong or repressed emotions, thereby providing relief.

And there are other mental and emotional benefits of journaling.

Research backs up the benefits of journaling. Numerous studies support the mental, emotional, and overall health benefits of journaling. So, we know that journaling is beneficial for stress, anxiety, depression, and burnout, among other issues.

Read on to learn more about the benefits of journaling as a mental health tool, and get therapist tips for a powerful journaling practice.

Reasons to Start Journaling

Journaling can help improve relationships.

One of the most powerful benefits of journaling is that it can be used as a coping strategy for minimizing conflict in our relationships.

Disagreements and misunderstandings are inherent in relationships. When we become emotionally flooded, we don’t always handle emotional conversations as well as we like. Journaling provides a way to gain clarity and objectivity. This is because journaling helps us access the analytical and rational parts of our brain that we need for objectivity and problem-solving. We are, in effect, regulating our emotions.

When we can self-regulate our emotions and view situations more objectively, we tend to have more productive conversations and less internal and relational conflict.

Journaling is like the next best thing to therapy.

Journaling does not take the place of therapy, but in my opinion, it’s like the next best thing to therapy. Here’s why:

Therapy and journaling are both ways in which we can explore our inner worlds and the narratives that we create.

Journaling has the immediate benefit of catharsis, which is the process of releasing strong emotions. The act of releasing strong emotions can help relieve stress and is essential for healing.

Writing our thoughts down is a great way to access problematic thinking styles or distorted thinking patterns that exacerbate symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. When negative thoughts are identified, they can be challenged. And challenging negative thoughts is how we treat many mental health issues.

Unsure if your thoughts are distorted or if you’re addressing problematic thinking patterns in the most beneficial way? That’s really where therapy comes in.

Engaging in therapy and incorporating a journaling practice as an adjunct to your work in therapy will benefit you the most. Clients who journal outside of therapy can have more productive therapy sessions, as they’re often better able to bring more insight and intention into the therapy room (or zoom).

3 Powerful Journaling Strategies

A common concern about journaling is the fear that writing about a stressful situation can make you feel worse. And this makes sense! In fact, journaling may not make you feel better in the moment. But moving through the pain is how we heal the pain. Facing our feelings may not make us feel better in the present moment, but we’re more inclined to heal when we “feel the feels.”

That said, research shows that we gain the most benefit from journaling when we write about our cognitions and emotions regarding stressful situations rather than just the events themselves. So go ahead and share the events, but don’t spare the emotions.

Morning Pages

My favorite strategy for journaling is called Morning Pages. It consists of writing three pages in a stream of consciousness first thing in the morning. It’s like purging your thoughts out on paper, and it can leave you feeling as though your mind is more clear and rested.

This journaling strategy was developed by Julia Cameron and became popular among writers and other artists to unlock creativity. I have found it, personally, to be incredibly powerful, as have many of my clients. Morning Pages can feel like a mini-therapy session. It’s one of the most calming strategies I know.

Rage Writing

Rage Writing is a powerful tool when feeling flooded with strong emotions such as anger or rage. And it’s so simple! Rage writing simply involves writing down your angry thoughts and feelings on paper (but definitely NOT on the internet.)

You don’t have to hold anything back; you can let it all out. It can feel cathartic and clarifying. We often find that our anger responses can be disproportionate to the offense once we see it all laid out before us in writing.

You’ll feel so much better in the long run by getting your anger out on paper rather than on someone else or even on yourself. Don’t let anger build up and boil over. Feel it, write it, process through it. Get it out so that you can move on.

Feelings Wheel

Not sure what to journal about? Using a feelings wheel can help you access feelings in a pretty profound way. Why? We don’t always know the degree to which we feel something in any given moment. We may just feel “good,” “bad,” or “weird.” Using a feelings wheel can help us hone in on the subtleties and nuances of our emotions. This is important for at least two reasons: 1) Knowing how we feel helps us understand our inner worlds; 2) Knowing how we feel gives us the ability to process our feelings, the associated thoughts, and resulting behaviors.

Using a feelings wheel to journal is simple (but admittedly not always easy). Here’s how to do it.

1. Pick any feeling on the wheel.

2. What comes up for you around that feeling?

3. Write that down. 

For example, if you land on the feeling of disappointment, you may write about a recent disappointment you’ve faced. A string of thoughts and memories may follow. You may want to write about feeling disappointed as a child, feeling disappointment in your current relationship, or even concerns about when you may have disappointed others. Keep going and see how far you can get with that feeling. Sometimes, writing about a single feeling can bring about more questions, or a few answers, more clarity, and even reconciliation of personal thoughts and feelings.