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Last Updated on June 16, 2025
Learn how to use journaling for your mental health.
Let me begin by telling you four things about me, all interconnected and relevant to this article.
First, I am a long-time volunteer and certified classroom instructor for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in Tennessee.
Second, I have diagnosed depression and anxiety, as do many members of my family, past and present.
Third, I am a professional nonfiction and creative nonfiction book editor and writing coach, specializing in memoir.
Fourth, during 2021, I co-authored a book with my friend, psychologist and teacher Terri Lyon. That book, Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world, offers a straightforward 5-step Activism Path that shows you how to identify your unique experiences, talents, or skills and use them to become an activist on behalf of those with mental health disorders and their loved ones.
Benefits of Journaling
The list of mental health benefits from journaling is long and the research is solid. Journalist and therapist Kara Mayer Robinson, in an article for WebMD, summarized the many benefits of journaling into these four:
- Promotes self-awareness. You will get to know yourself better.
- Lets you take charge of your emotions and worries. You can see them. Name them. Take control of them.
- Shifts your viewpoint about yourself and those around you. You will gain a broader perspective.
- Creates a positive opportunity for healing and recovering self-worth. Whether you write in a journal about problems or gratitude, a healing process happens.
What is Expressive Journaling?
Expressive writing, explains Pennebaker, is not so much about what happened during your day (more the territory of a diary), but how you feel about what happened. By regularly documenting your emotional reactions to life events, you are able to identify problematic thinking patterns that might not be serving you well.
Journal writing does not have to be about trauma or emotionally painful events, but such topics tend to dominate this kind of journaling. There are gratitude journals, dream journals, and prayer journals. While these are all wonderful in their own right, the focus of this article is journaling as a form of mental self-care.
Potential Pitfalls of Journaling
Like any process that encourages you to delve deeply into your memories and emotions, journaling can have its downsides. Here are a few behaviors you should practice:
- Share your writing. Journaling can dredge up all kinds of emotions and might cause an outpouring of negative feelings and memories. It should never drive someone to a place of despair. Sharing your journals with a mental health practitioner, a journal writing group, or even just friends can keep you balanced and keep your memories and feelings in perspective.
- Don’t write excessively. Don’t write in your journal to the exclusion of other activities. Journaling should add insight and growth to your life, not rob you of other life experiences.
- Don’t overanalyze. Overanalyzing your journal entries will not lead to improving your life. Read your entries two or more days—even a week—after you’ve written them with an eye toward planning, problem-solving, and decision-making. Journaling is meant to be a complement to your life’s activities, not its focus.
Choosing Your Topic
Keeping in mind that the purpose of journaling is to benefit your mental and emotional health, you should choose to write about a topic that is dominating your thinking, positively or negatively. Only you know what that is: a trauma or emotional upset such as divorce, death of a loved one, assault, or something about which you feel guilty. Or maybe a possible new career, love interest, travel opportunity, and so on.
Additionally, you can choose to write about this topic for several days in a row or write about a different topic each day; again, the choice is yours. But wisdom dictates that, if you are wrestling with a traumatic or painful event, the more deeply you explore it, the more benefit you will get from the writing.
Tips for Journal Writing
Journaling is a self-care practice that has few guidelines. But if you hope to take the process seriously, with an eye toward healing and growth, follow these recommendations for the when and where of journaling.
Where and When
- As a rule of thumb, it is best to write for at least twenty minutes for four consecutive days each week. You can write for more than twenty minutes and more often than four times each week. But twenty minutes for four consecutive days is considered the minimum to see benefits from the practice. The more often you journal, the better you will become at it and the clearer a picture you will get of yourself.
- Write each time in the same location, if possible, a place that is comfortable and quiet, where you feel safe and focused.
- Write at approximately the same time each day, if possible. Some writers journal first thing in the morning, some, last thing at night. Customize the timing to suit you and your schedule.
- Write quickly and don’t stop to edit or correct. Don’t over-think it. Just let the words spill out.
- Journaling is one of the cheapest but most effective methods of self-care and self-reflection. Choose journals that suit your budget and your personality. Choose a pen or pencil that feels comfortable in your hand. If you prefer, keep your journal on a laptop or desktop PC. Typing allows for speed, but putting pen to paper produces a tactile sensation that produces a more visceral connection to the words. But the choice is yours. The medium does not matter, just the practice.
How
As for how to write to get the greatest benefit from your journaling experience, employ these guidelines.
- Avoid Negative Language. Try to avoid the use of negative emotions language. Journaling that heavily uses words related to hate, despair, anger, anxiety, fear, depression, revenge, and guilt (to name a few) has been proven to be less beneficial. Using consistently negative language creates a whirlpool of self-pity that keeps you stuck in the trauma.
- Focus on Positive Language. As the flip side to the above, journal writers who use more positive emotions language see more benefit from their writing. Words related to love, support, growth, joy, beauty, revelation, redemption, self-actualization, and self-esteem experience better mental health, boosted mood, confidence, and a positive attitude about life. Positive language is an indication that you are forging a path toward clarity and healing.
- Use First Person Pronouns. To review some elementary school grammar, singular first person pronouns are I, me, my, mine, and myself. Second person pronouns are you, your, yours, yourself, and yourselves. Third person pronouns are he, him, his, himself, she, her, hers, herself, it, its, itself, they, them, their, theirs, and themselves. Heavy use of second and third person indicates you are still primarily focused on others—what others said or did. To move forward, you must see yourself clearly in the present and visualize yourself in the future. Work to use first person pronouns more often.
- Use insight words. The use of insight words, such as understand, realize, know, acknowledge, recognize, and admit is further proof that you are coming to terms with your own situation, demonstrating acceptance and objectivity.
In Conclusion
While journaling is not a substitute for psychotropic medications or talk therapy, it is a proven asset to a mental health regimen. Keeping an expressive journal, following the guidelines in this article, can be an inexpensive gateway into understanding yourself, coping, setting goals, and seeing progress. You can make journaling fit your budget, your schedule, and your objectives. With a little effort, journaling can become a part of your life that brings you joy and peace of mind. Give it a try.
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The Ultimate Guide to Journaling: How To Teach Expressive Writing
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