Wake up each morning and prepare for your day. As part of your preparation, sit down in a quiet place with a notebook and pen, and write for about ten minutes.
After your long day of completing your professional and personal responsibilities, it is time to wind down and prepare for a good night’s sleep. As part of this preparation, sit down in a quiet place with a notebook and pen, and write for about ten minutes.
The above techniques have been proven through research to offer health benefits and improve your overall self. Just ten to fifteen minutes a day can provide significant improvements.
Sounds easy, right? It is. However, there are steps you can take to make it even easier. The key to effective journaling is to be focused rather than writing random thoughts. Below are several tips to help you do this. Keep reading to find out which ones you can apply.
Write Down Your Goals
Every day we have goals. We want or need to accomplish tasks throughout our day. Once those are completed, we start thinking about the next set of tasks we need to do, and so on. Writing down your goals in a journal helps you organize and prioritize the tasks.
When you are journaling in the morning, write down the goals you must complete that day, in order of importance. Then, write down the goals you would like to complete that day. Be sure to avoid placing a high priority on the goals that do not have to be accomplished. This helps you avoid beating yourself up if you do not get to them.
Related: How to Keep a Daily Journal of Your Journey
For example, top priority goals may include meeting a work deadline or picking up the kids from school—a not so important goal could be dusting the shelves in your home. While dusting is essential, nothing terrible will happen if you miss a day or two.
Your journal is also a place where you can write down your long-term goals.
At night, you can write positive affirmations for completing your daily goals. You can also journal what you hope to accomplish the next day. Journaling helps stop your mind from racing, preventing problems with falling or staying asleep.
Keep It Positive
What you say to yourself and what you write in a journal influences how you behave. If you always think negative thoughts or write about adverse events, your actions and reactions will become negative.
For example, if you write about how much you hate your co-worker in your journal every day, your attitude and behaviors will be negative. Journaling can help ease stressors like this.
Instead of venting about the trials of your day, journal about all the positive things that happened during your day. There is a positive that can be found for every negative. Rather than saying, "My spouse gets on my nerves," say, "My spouse has some great qualities, like…".
Through your journal, you can retrain your brain to replace negative thinking with positive. You can even write about the parts of your life for which you are grateful.
Share Your Gratitude
Journaling for self-improvement must include recognizing people and things that you are happy to have in your life. You can journal about material items, events, friends, family, and anything else you value.
Busy schedules, feeling overworked and underappreciated can make anyone forget about the good things in life, the meaningful components. To overcome the fatigue and not feeling valued, start journaling about everything you are blessed to have in your life.
Include things that may be taken for granted each day, like food to eat, a bed to sleep in, or a job. Include family and friends you love. Don’t forget to include yourself, your health, and all your positive traits.
Related: How to Start a Gratitude Journal
Practice Problem Solving
Problems arise for everyone. They can happen at any time, any day. Thinking about your issues can lead to stress, leading to sleep disturbances, unhealthy coping behaviors, raised blood pressure, and more.
Journaling can improve the way you problem-solve and cope with stress. This is much different than just writing down the negative things that happened to you, the people you don’t like, or just venting.
The idea is that writing down the problem, followed by writing about solutions, allows you to process it healthily. Otherwise, thoughts of the problem will stir around in your mind, making it hard for you to concentrate on anything else.
To problem-solve through journaling, follow these steps: write the problem, list possible solutions, and then write which solution is best. For example, let’s pretend you were underpaid on your last paycheck. Write in your journal, “My problem is that my paycheck was incorrect this week.”
Solutions to write may include talking to your boss, talking to human resources, complaining about it on social media, not saying anything to anyone, and just losing the money." Which one is best? The first two will likely get positive results.
The more you can work through issues in your journal, the less time you will spend stressing over them.
Make it Fun
If you are like most people, you could use a little more fun in your life. You deserve more fun in your life. If you were asked right now to list ten activities you have participated in in the last week that were fun, you might find it challenging to fill the list. Unfortunately, that is normal. Everyone is too busy with "life" that they don’t prioritize fun.
This must change, and journaling for self-improvement is the perfect way to help you implement fun activities into your life.
Start your bucket list and journal about the many exciting activities you want to do before you die. Then, start checking them off the list.
Finally, if you are struggling with journaling, reach out to a licensed counselor. They can offer you a multitude of journal writing activities, self-reflecting questions, and worksheets to help you figure out the best journaling techniques for your journey of self-improvement.