Journaling offers numerous benefits, from enhancing wellness to boosting productivity. It’s an easy tool for organizing your life, taking control of your emotions, and figuring out what you want.
The vast possibilities can also be a limitation. With so many options, finding that crucial starting point can present a challenge.
Never fear – we’re here to show you how to start journaling based on your unique needs.
Ready for inspiration to start your journaling habit? Dive in!
Table of Contents
What is Journaling?
Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start – The Sound of Music
Journaling is the act of writing down your thoughts, feelings, and ideas in a notebook. It’s a way to record what you want or need to remember.
Some journals serve as diaries, a reservoir of all your innermost thoughts and feelings. Others target a niche area of your life or revolve around productivity.
What is the Point of Journaling?
Journaling is fundamentally a process of letting things flow from you to the paper. It provides a record, helps you organize your thoughts, provides space to work through complex emotions, and offers a creative outlet.
The point of journaling differs for each person, depending on their needs. Some need it to keep track of their daily habits, while others want an art journal to express themselves.
Benefits of Journaling
Journaling reduces stress, guides your personal growth journal, boosts productivity, improves mental health, and provides a creative outlet.
Don’t take our word for it. We asked mental health experts to share the benefits their clients reaped from journaling, and they delivered. If you’re not sold on journaling yet, check it out, then come back for tips on how to start journaling.
How To Start Journaling
If you want to start journaling, grab a pen and some paper and start writing!
That’s the easy answer, but the truth is far more complex.
Before you start, you must decide why you want to journal.
Here, we explore common reasons people keep journals and offer tips for starting yours.
Self-Discovery
Journaling helps us find ourselves. It forces us to dig into the darkest recesses of our minds and explore what we see.
The best way to start journaling for self-discovery is via a prompt. These journal starters ask targeted questions you must answer on your pages. You’ll have to reflect on your life, your ideas, your goals, and your accomplishments.
We have a set of self-discovery journal prompts available in our store – check them out to get started!
Keeping Track
Many people journal to keep track of crucial information, helping them build better habits or spot patterns.
A food diary can help you see which foods cause adverse reactions, offering crucial information to your medical team if you’re dealing with unknown food allergies. A habit tracker can motivate you to engage in the activity you want to build into a habit.
You can use a journal to keep track of anything, from calories eaten to books read.
To start journaling to keep track of things, decide what you need to track. Explore bullet journal habit tracking spreads to see what works for you.
Self-Care
Journaling is a fantastic activity for self-care. Diving into your thoughts and letting them flow onto paper can help you work through them.
Journaling may help you realize you’ve been holding onto things that you don’t need to hold onto. Releasing those intrusive thoughts from your brain can help you deal with them on your own time and may even give you a better outlook for the rest of your day.
To start journaling for self-care, set aside at least 30 minutes each week as dedicated journaling time. Find a cozy nook, and free write what comes to mind. If that’s too broad, write about your favorite self-care activities and how they refresh your spirit.
Organize Your Thoughts
I journal to organize my thoughts. I have so much stuff floating around in my head that it’s impossible to keep track of everything.
My journal lets me brain dump – that is, transfer all the nonsense in my head onto paper. Seeing it written out helps me decide what to focus on now and what can wait for later.
If you want to journal to organize your thoughts, start with a basic lined journal and free write. Spill everything in your brain onto the journal pages, no matter how irrelevant it might seem.
Once it’s all on paper, you can review it and decide what to let go of and what to focus your energy on.
Productivity
Journaling keeps me on track to meet my goals. It helps me remember essential tasks, stay organized, and manage my projects.
I use daily to-do lists and a weekly priorities list to help me stay on track to accomplish my goals.
Bullet journals are ideal tools for productivity journaling. They offer immeasurable benefits for boosting productivity, and the limitless options for bullet journal spreads make them versatile enough to fit any need.
To get started, take a look at our bullet journal weekly spread ideas. Use them as inspiration to start your own.
Develop Ideas
Journaling can help you turn abstract thoughts into actionable ideas. Use the pages to brainstorm ideas and develop your vision for them.
Creatives can use the pages to decide what to write about or create. Artists might want to sketch their masterpieces on journal pages before transferring them to canvas, while authors can map out their storyboards.
Entrepreneurs can use their journals to develop a business plan, while event planners can visualize the perfect party.
Work Out Your Feelings
Our emotions are often complex and finicky, and we struggle to understand them. We don’t always know why we feel jealous, angry, or sad in certain circumstances, and sometimes, we have so many different emotions flowing through us that we don’t even know how to identify what we’re feeling.
Journaling can help.
Start writing down your emotions, and use the pages to brainstorm why you feel that way. Don’t shy away from negative thoughts or emotions. Reflecting on all our feelings, regardless of how painful, can help us heal, forgive ourselves, and move forward from difficult situations.
Journaling about our emotions can also help us understand them, learn our triggers, and prevent ourselves from reacting poorly in similar situations. It’s an essential aspect of understanding our inner selves.
When you start expressing your feelings on paper, you will be shocked at how naturally it starts flowing.
At the very least, expressing yourself can be cathartic, and you might be surprised to discover how you truly feel about certain things.
Remember Important Things
Journaling can serve as a scrapbook of the mind, helping you remember the most important things in your life.
We often think we’ll remember meaningful things, but our brains aren’t always reliable. Journals help us safely store those valuable memories even when our brains don’t behave.
Record the most memorable events of your life. Include dates, times, the people you were with, and how you felt. Don’t spare the details; you may not think the bright pink hat you wore mattered at the time, but when you look back on the pages from ten years, you’ll smile as it helps you recall the scene.
10 Journaling Tips to Help You Get Started
Now that you have your “why” and a general idea of how to start journaling, let’s explore some tips to make the process easier.
These tips work for every journaling style.
Stop Overthinking It
Stop worrying and start doing. Don’t make it harder on yourself than it has to be.
Grab a pen and paper and start writing.
It doesn’t matter if your writing is grammatically correct or has any real meaning. All that matters is that you start.
Start Small
Don’t fill your head with expectations that you will fill a three-hundred-page notebook in a journaling session or two.
You don’t even need to fill a page.
When you first start, developing journaling ideas seems challenging. You might experience writer’s block, unable to express yourself.
Part of the feeling comes from the pressure to make journaling an epic experience. It doesn’t have to be. A journal entry can be as little as a sentence or a few phrases.
The more you build your journaling habit, the easier it will be to write longer, more complex entries.
Let it Flow Through You
You might be surprised at how much comes out when you start writing.
Let it flow.
Don’t stop and think what you are writing is stupid or irrelevant. Write out whatever pops into your mind.
Letting everything flow from your brain to the pages is called “freewriting.” It’s like a brainstorming session, but you record complete sentences rather than writing in phrases and disjointed lists.
Don’t worry about grammar, and don’t police your thoughts. Keep the pen moving. Write that sentence, no matter how silly it appears at first glance. It’s a stream-of-consciousness activity.
You might be surprised at what you come up with when letting your inner ideas out!
Give Yourself Time
You cannot journal in a spare minute or two, especially if you are new to it.
Give yourself time to commit to it.
Schedule 15-30 minutes of uninterrupted time dedicated to journaling. Go to a quiet space where you won’t be interrupted. Put your phone down unless you are using a journaling app.
The ideas will flow when all the distractions are gone, leaving you with your pen and a journal.
Get Inspired
Sometimes, it’s hard to find inspiration at home. Go for a walk, stroll through a garden, sit in the sunlight—find inspiration in nature.
Inspiration surrounds us. It might be as simple as the birds chirping outside the window or the blades of grass dancing in the sun. Maybe you’ll find a fun shape in the clouds that inspires you to write a story.
Permit yourself to be present in nature and find inspiration for your journal.
Bring it With You
You never know when inspiration will strike.
Bring your journal with you wherever you go!
Bring it on strolls in the garden, to the bookstore, out to dinner.
You never know when your brain will have the perfect thought or idea, so you need to be ready to record it.
Use the Tools that Work for You
You don’t need any specific tools for journaling.
It doesn’t require a fancy hardback journal or specialized calligraphy pen. All you need is a fifty-cent notebook and a cheap writing instrument.
But, sometimes, the fun extras motivate you to keep journaling. I use colorful pens, stickers, and pretty journals. Seeing the crucial details in color makes me happy and keeps me journaling.
You may prefer a single color, highlighters, or even crayons.
Who cares?
There’s no right or wrong way to journal. Use what makes you happy.
It Doesn’t Always Have to Be Writing
Not everyone thinks the same way. Some think in words, while others think in images, graphs, collages, or concepts.
There are probably many other ways that people think I haven’t even considered.
If your brain doesn’t think in words, then you don’t have to journal in words. Journal in sketches, graphs, diagrams, math, or whatever symbols or icons work for you. Create a junk journal or an art journal.
Use words when you want and images when you want. Your journal is for you; no one else needs to understand it.
Use Prompts
If you are stuck with writer’s block and have no idea what to journal about, use a prompt. Everyone needs a hand sometimes, and there’s no shame in using available tools to build your habit.
Journal prompts guide your brain in the journaling process. They give you the boost you need to get the creative juices flowing.
We developed three unique sets of journaling prompts to get you started.
Visit our store to check them out!
Don’t Worry About Perfection
Perfection is the enemy of progress. Sometimes, we get stuck because we worry that we won’t do something correctly or like what we’ve done.
Your journal is just for you. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Your first journal entries can be complete nonsense! It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you start. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly because nobody will be good at anything that takes effort when they are just beginning. What matters is that you try, not that you get it right.
Try Different Techniques
There are many different journaling techniques and processes. We’ve discussed some (freewriting, using prompts) and different styles of journaling (food journals, gratitude journals). The thing is, journaling is not a one-size-fits-all process. Different techniques work for different people.
To find out what works best for you, try them all or a few that speak to you.
You may be surprised to find that you like a few different techniques, and that’s okay. If a particular method is speaking to you on a certain day, use it. Then, switch the next day.
Your journal pages don’t all have to be the same.
Journaling is all about self-discovery, and using different techniques will help you achieve that.
Online Journaling
Many people have ditched pen and paper for online journals, and that’s fine, too. Some might simply use a word-processing app, like Microsoft Word, while others might want to use a journaling app.
Diarium is a digital journal app available on the Windows app store. It allows you to dictate your journal entries, so you don’t have to worry about typing or writing anything down. The free version offers all the basic functionality you will need, but you will need to use the premium version to export your journal entries.
Livescribe created specialized journaling pens and paper that will transfer your writing into digital form so that you can store and organize it via computer. This allows you to journal traditionally with pen and paper but store and edit your thoughts digitally.
Types of Journals
Some people keep separate journals for separate purposes. Various kinds of journals are available, from gratitude journals to travel journals, food journals, and journals used to set goals.
Your journal can be as specific or as general as you want. You can use a separate journal for all these things or have one giant journal for everything.
The Best Journals
So many amazing journaling products are available, but the best is the one that works for you.
Here are my favorite journals, but you might prefer something different.
Get a journal that inspires you to open the pages and start writing.
Start Journaling Now
Keeping a journal is easily one of the best ways to organize your thoughts, express yourself, and reflect on your inner thoughts and feelings.
What are you waiting for?
Grab a notebook and a pen, and get started!
Journaling is so underrated. I remember I wrote a personal journal around 2013 – 2015 and I’m reading the entries now and it’s like a time capsule. Taking me back to those days and remembering what life was like is so interesting.
I should totally add that as a reason to start journaling!