10 Ways a Journal Can Change Your Life
A Storyteller’s Guide to Personal Transformation.
When did you first become aware of your own handwriting? The special shape of letters making words in a script uniquely, almost magically, your own?
Did anyone tell you how beautiful your messy early efforts were?
Or were you quickly told to be neater, more uniform, and make fewer mistakes?
We learn early that it’s the comfort of the reader that matters, not the joy of the writer.
It can often feel the same with life.
Each of us holds the pen to script our own story. Yet all too often we’re encouraged to tailor our unique story to fit the narratives around us.
Good news, that stops today.
I’m going to share with you 10 Ways a Journal Can Change Your Life. My whole life guide as a storyteller, published author and journal coach to developing a journal habit for personal transformation.
Writing as a tool for personal growth and emotional healing? You betcha.
Journaling is more than a mere diary entry.
It’s like the wardrobe to a magical world. The rabbit hole to a journey of outrageous joy.
Yes, your own handwriting is a gateway to life transformation and a compass toward your intensely centred-self story.
In this article I showed you the 7 different types of journal you can use. Here, I want to share with you ten areas of your life than can be impacted and transformed through journaling.
The pen truly is mightier than the sword.
Journaling is not simply an uninterrupted rant with yourself.
Journaling is a tool. And that tool can be used to empower different areas of your life.
You will often read about how journaling can be good for your mental health, (and I’ll touch on exactly what that means here too) but how about a journal that revolutionises your finances? How about a journal that gives you an orgasm? (ok, not like THAT!!!) Or how about a journal that takes you from relationship trauma to emotional healing?
My own journey with journals began when I was eight.
Right about when I was being told that my handwriting was ENORMOUS, sloped the wrong way and that it was illegible because my tittles (the best word in grammar, a tittle is the dot over a letter) joined the ascenders (tall necks) of my next letters. Shamefaced but rebellious, my hideous writing and I ran away to the nearest notebook and made a pact to stay hidden from the world.
Fast forward forty years of stubborn and secretive journal-keeping and I have used my private written armour to build one gorgeous career as a designer, transform my creativity into a new career as a published author, end a long-term relationship and build a beautiful co-parenting family, become a wild-swimmer and solo traveller. I thought I could not ask more of my journal but, when my life turned upside down with the suicide of my ex-partner and co-parent, my journal wrote me safe against trauma and the social narrative of blame that comes with suicide.
My journal reminded me that, no matter what was being said, I knew my story.
It gave me the confidence to stand up as a solo parent and fight a legal battle for my child.
It sat with me as I took control of my financial future.
It helped me write a life of deep emotional resonance and wellbeing.
You may be looking for an answer to a problem and think ‘but surely journal writing can’t help me with THIS?’
To which I say, yes, yes it can.
Let’s dig straight into ten areas of your life that a journal can help you find emotional healing and personal growth in. This is a detailed article with a lot to consider. Here’s what we’ll be covering (and don’t forget to bookmark this article now to come back to later):
Mental health
Intentional living
Vocational pathways
Aspirational yearnings
Financial health
Relational connections
Sensual delight
Spiritual perspective
Environmental resources
Physical health
1. Mindful Matters: Spelling Out the Path to Mental Wellness
Let’s start with the most obvious nib to this pen. Journaling is Mental Health 101.
But what does that actually mean? It means that keeping a journal can help you in these ways:
Bust the Stress Habits: Expressive and exposition journaling can significantly reduce stress and anxiety. Connecting with your deepest thoughts and feelings reportedly lowers stress levels and helps soothe anxiety.
Kickstart your Mood: Journaling can boost your mood and reduce symptoms of overwhelm. Gratitude, abundance and manifestation journaling can reduce depressive symptoms.
Mastermind Yourself: Journaling facilitates self-reflection, leading to greater self-awareness and increased emotional regulation. It can help to break patterns of behaviour and provides accountability.
Take your Brain to Gym: Reflective writing, the physical act of writing your experiences down, improves memory, awareness and comprehension.
Triumph over Trauma: Specific trauma-related journal methodology (Pennebaker) can significantly aid in the healing process and improve immune system functioning damaged by trauma.
Think of journaling as a multi-vitamin for the mind. Yes, it takes longer than swallowing a pill. But the impact is scientifically proven to work. And it costs no more than a pad and a cheap Bic pen.
Bonus: It’s also a superb alternative to talk therapies for people who may be on the neurodivergent spectrum, non-verbal or socially anxious.
Starter exercise: Take a bird’s eye view of your emotional regulation.
Buy a notebook and commit to a thirty day challenge to get to know your emotional reactions.
For each day, split a double page spread with a horizontal line across the middle of both sides.
Visualise your emotional neutrality as that steady line going through the vertical hours of each day, from the moment you wake up on the far left side to the moment you go to sleep on the far right.
Note when the line goes up in response to positive experiences and when it dips in response to challenges (hint, if you feel this happening, record it as soon as you can). Record stress, overwhelm, moments when you snap, moments of real delight, calm, achievement, etc. Use words, sketches, punctuation, anything to help capture the mood shift.
Every time your mental equilibrium rises or dips, make a note as to what caused it, and what helped you return to the steady line.
After thirty days you will be able to see the things that impact your emotional regulation. Knowing and seeing your triggers and coping strategies like this will enable you to more consciously make decisions about how to handle things. Focusing your energy on increasing those things that help regulate you will increase their presence and impact in your life.
Once you’ve identified a key trigger to your mental equilibrium, keep another 30-day notebook where you record each time this particular trigger impacts you. Reflect on how you could have behaved differently. Build these reflections into intentions.
PS, it’s quite normal at the start of this exercise to feel like EVERYTHING knocks you off course but the exercise will help you really drill into specifics.
Emotional regulation is only one of many aspects of your mental wellbeing. Mental wellbeing is not simply the absence of mental illness, it includes all the functions of our mind. If you are curious to identify an area that feels like you could really develop and benefit from, have a look at this full overview of the many aspects of mental functions and health.
2. A Centred-Self Life: knowing your north.
Imagine this… it’s a critical moment and you’re asked the question ‘What are your values in life?’
How long will it take you to respond?
And how long will it take you after the response before you start to think if you actually meant what you said or you just said what you thought you were meant to?
Why does it feel like there is a ‘right answer’ to the question of values?
A right answer that always feels vaguely out of grasp. But may cinch a new job, ally or relationship.
Journaling is a way to explore those questions in privacy, off-stage. At some point in your life, it might be a crisis or it might be critical, you will need to know what your main character energy is going to be. What matters to you, when it really matters to you?
Journal your way to that inner north. Your intentional compass in any storm.
The idea of intentionality is to grow from a person who is living as advised or instructed by society (family/peers/colleagues/institutions/biases) to a person who is living centred in their self-worth within society.
Starter exercise: It helps to take away your options to know your choices.
It’s easy to throw values around like pennies. But what if you were only allowed three?
Use this download to narrow down your options and hone in on the choices you would make.
Now that you understand your deepest values better, ask yourself how often you are living by them. Seek out the moments in your days when you feel you are living intentionally and keep a journal to record these. Also note the moments where you didn’t respond with intentionality but reacted to external circumstances.
This can be a wonderful temporary journal that you use for a set period of time to better understand yourself.
In an age of immense external communication, intentional journaling is hearing the story of your own life, returning to and refining those ideas repeatedly, effectively rewriting the neural pathways of your own story.
3. Beyond 9 to 5: Strategies for Career Satisfaction.
Given any chance to quote Dolly, I will always be first in line.
And, as a creative person, I’ve experienced every variety of dire warning that I’ll never make a living doing what I love. You know how some people hate dentists? My personal professional pet peeve are Career Advisors.
Journaling can be an effective strategy for transforming your job into a pathway toward purpose and enrichment.
It is the means of understanding what your unique qualities and motivations are.
It’s a way of asking who you are as a person, what your experiences are, what makes a difference to you, what income you need, what working environment you need to thrive in, how to build growthful networks, how to respond rather than react to workplace culture, what you secretly aspire to and how to manifest the next phase of your working life.
If you are finding yourself hollowed out by a job that you no longer want to do, but feel overwhelmed by the process of change, try keeping a lunchtime journal that commits to a 15-minutes-a-day strategy for growth. (30 minutes a day and you’ll look like Dwayne Johnson)
It is the life-changing, effective journaling tool I used to shift my finances after calamity hit me but it is a method that can be used on any area of life.
Starter exercise: Bust the general malaise.
‘Hating the job’ can become an easy catchphrase but what are you actually doing about it?
Commit to writing a journal every lunchtime that you are at work. It’s an easy time to either scroll on social media or carry on working. Harness this legal right to rest for your own future.
In a small portable diary or on your notes app, write out a job ambition that really scares you. One that feels utterly desirable but almost impossible. The idea here is to stretch your micro-aggression-pinned wings into the realm of daydreams while you lunch.
Now, every day, in your fifteen minutes, do one thing toward that goal. 15 minutes to rewrite your CV. To sign up to online jobsites. To network or post on LinkedIn. To learn something new. To find a training course. To book a day off where you commit to working toward the goal. To practice a conversation with a co-worker or manager. To see how you can use this job as a testing ground for the person and skills you need for the job you truly desire.
At first this will feel overwhelming, but coming back to the same hope and dream and ACTING on it, every day, repeatedly, will build a habit of expectation in your mind. Each nugget of action is a step toward a different vocational position. And believing that you can be that person, here, now, in this less than perfect place, helps you step with confidence into the right future, at the right time.
4. Authoring Dreams: Writing the Next Chapter of Your Aspirations
It’s all too easy to attach the idea of aspirations to another part of our lives.
We aspire to career success. We aspire to parenthood or relationship status. We aspire to wealth or homeownership.
All of those things (and anything else you value) are worthy aspirations. No buts there.
Unless the aspirational you has a yearning that does not connect well with other parts of your life.
Perhaps your greatest dream job is fundamentally not open to you for numerous solid reasons. Maybe you want a loving family and also aspire to row across the Atlantic. Perhaps you are a high-flying career person who wants to travel extensively. Perhaps you’re being told to retire but you always wanted to run your own business. Maybe you had a rough start in life but you want to be a philanthropist. Perhaps your dreams feel devalued by the world around you or simply too grand and impossible to ever be attained.
And what are your deepest aspirations?
It’s not a given that we all know from a young age what means the most to us. The advice to follow what your 8-year-old self dreamed of only works if 8-year-old you had a secure upbringing where you were given the chance to explore your interests. If not, it can be incredibly hard to work out what you want out of your life.
And aspirations change. Especially if you achieve them. What comes next?
Tuning into the key aspirations that make you excited for life can sometimes be scary because it can reveal conflicts with other areas of our life. Or it can reveal a terrifying blank space you don’t know how to fill.
In our heads the scale of something we need and can’t achieve can become Godzilla-sized. Out on the page, you realise that there are nuances that you haven’t taken the time understand. That you can start with a Gecko and leave Godzilla to later in the day.
You don’t need to have known since you were 8 what you most deeply aspire to in order to write a story that 80-year-old you will be proud of.
Starter exercise: It should feel out of reach. Stars aren’t found on the ground.
There are four key questions you can start with in looking for your deepest aspirations.
Use a journal to dig into these and then, like Matt Damon in The Martian, do the maths.
What is the first step you can take toward that goal?
You want to climb Everest? Start with a Munro. Which Munro? When? With whom? What kit do you need?
You want to inspire others? Discover your own strengths. Start sharing your tips and expertise. Find out what people really need.
You want to be a writer? Join a writing group. Start with short stories. Enter a local competition.
Use your journal as a dedicated space that you come back to and explore the steps you are taking toward your dream AND how that dream evolves as you move closer to it. Because trust me, it will.
Whatever you want, move the dream from the internal realm to the external world by writing about what feels impossible. The more you create that reality on paper, the more you will create it in your life.
5. The Money Map: Navigating Your Way to Financial Stability
But can a journal really change your finances?
Absolutely.
The shift of our personal finances to an online system means that it’s never been easier to spend money. And how we spend it. How we’re encouraged to spend it. The connections between apps and wallet is a single-click process. These days we rarely even have the postal thud of a statement onto the floor to give us a monthly reality check.
Which is why keeping track of your spending, assessing your savings, pensions and investments (words that can make a grown-up sweat) and building a personalised map to chart your way into safe financial waters can be a game-changer.
A finance journal begins with a determined, brave look at what is.
This allows you to assess gaps in knowledge and understanding, before building a staged pathway toward healthy personal wealth.
Keeping a weekly or monthly date with our financial journal is a way of building accountability and intentionality into our spending. Setting challenges and experimenting with new ideas can shift our patterns of learned behaviour.
We rarely spend alone. From the families that instilled our money habits, to the ‘found families’ of friends and colleagues, to the families we support ourselves, money matters often incorporate a network of habits and expectations. Disconnecting from these to learn about our own habits is a process of self-reflection and growth. In the same way that we’re encouraged to love ourselves if we want to find genuine loving connections, value yourself in order to share genuine wealthy habits with others. Then take those successes back into your family and spread the wealth.
NB. I am not a money expert and cannot advise you on financial matters. Poor financial decisions can have a lasting and detrimental impact on your health, relationships and life, so always consult professionals and do your research for sound advice. What I can do here is advocate for using a journal as a way to keep track of your financial habits and to do the painful hard first look in a way that eases the terror that money matters can cause.
Starter exercise: Create a ladder to your dream destination.
Begin by writing out all the elements of your financial life on post-it notes. What do you earn? What do you spend? What debts do you have? What savings? List it all on individual pieces of paper. Then get creative to loosen up your money muscles. What could be better? What would be ideal? What would be a dream come true? Now go the other way? What could be worse? What would be ultimate disaster?
Shift the post-it notes around into a sort of Snakes and Ladders map. Where do your personal post-it notes fit in? Where are you on the game board? Where have you fallen down before? How can you see the good in where you are by focusing on the pitfalls you’ve avoided? What can you prioritise on changing? What do you need to research and learn to understand more?
Once you have a clear overview, use your journal to keep a record of your goals and your progress toward them, as well as the lessons you learn along the way about your money habits. Record the people who you begin to learn from. Note what goals really work for you and what takes a long time to shift.
Set a regular date to keep your journal updated with your progress. To begin with, this may be daily. As you grow more confident and successful in reaching your goals, see if you can push this out to weekly, or monthly. Find the sweet spot that really keeps you on the money ball. As you stretch that date out, also see if you can push your ability to forecast your finances. From one week ahead to one month, to one year.
Visualising your financial wealth in this way enables you to see beyond your current situation. Connecting the idea to play helps release some of the adult fear of money and reconnect to the courage of childhood. It gives you the confidence to reach out for help and advice. Money doesn’t have to be a fearful subject to be avoided.
6. Interpersonal Alchemy: The magic of meaningful connections
I’ve already said this but it’s REALLY IMPORTANT, so let’s say it again. Be a healthy atom.
What? I didn’t say that before?
Oh, yeah! I said the whole ‘love yourself first thing’. Let’s try it so you actually hear me this time.
At the molecular level of existence, individual atoms have energy that form covalent bonds with other atoms, forming stable molecules.
An individual atom can only make a molecule with another healthy atom.
Damage to one or other of the atoms can result in an unstable bond. Not good.
Instability can lead to a break in the molecule. Bad.
At its very worst you can create a free radical. Very bad (though admittedly it sounds cool).
Also, interpersonal relationships are super important to human health. If you believe you are better off alone, or with a cat, news flash, you’re a free radical. A really damaged atom believing you’re cool.
Conversely, most damage comes from other atoms (people). The thing that’s best for you is also likely to be the thing that damages you (you really couldn’t make this stuff up for a book).
When we talk about relational connections, we’re talking about the WHOLE gamut of connections in your life.
Starting with your parents’ parents’ parents and moving through your bloodline to you, your siblings, your early influences and your entire life connections. Yes, that means your boss is also part of your interpersonal alchemy. As is your evil ex-mother-in-law.
Let’s also get super clear on something here: the pinnacle of interpersonal alchemy does not have to be an intimate relationship or marriage.
Depending on who you are, and what your priorities are, your most important relationships could be with friends, with fellow students, with a sibling, with a colleague, with a child or parent. Just not with a cat. (No shade on the cat lovers here, I’m a cat worshipper myself, they are just the most free radical of all free radicals.)
If you feel lonely, inadequate, lovesick, or you’re recovering from the trauma of a broken family or personal relationship, taking time to journal about your interpersonal connections could be the biggest single thing you do that will improve your life quality.
Starter exercise: Draw the web that makes up you.
Begin a fresh notebook by creating a spider diagram where you put yourself in the middle and then progress outward through layers of the people who influence you. Add another layer of people who influence them, in different colours. Draw links between anyone who is connected. Once you’ve done that, begin a journal where you write about each person.
How long have you known them? Where did you meet? What do you know about their stories before you met? How have they influenced your story? What is the best thing they bring to your life? What is less good? Do you have any doubts about them? Or about them when they are with other people? Or about yourself when you are with them?
Take time to work out what each person in your life is contributing to and draining away from the glass of you. Make sure you write about that in reverse too. There’s a difference between being Centred in our Self and being self-centred. What do you contribute to them? Or expect of them?
At the end of each entry, ask yourself: What questions would you ask that person with total honesty? Then write a dialogue between yourself and that person answering those questions.
Taking time to chronicle and explore your past and present relationships will give you rich insights into your own character as well as theirs.
Disclaimer: I’m obviously a storyteller, not a scientist, so no science geeks coming at me for the cavalier use of scientific terms, please.
Also, no cats. Don’t send me cats. I cannot resist them.
7. Sensuality in Everyday Life: How do you experience sensuality in your daily routine?
We’re all aware of what makes us feel alive sensually, of what we enjoy and desire. Right?
(Removes writerly glasses, shakes head, whimpers in distress, replaces glasses, cracks knuckles, returns to keyboard)
No, people, no. Your sensual life can be as dry and abandoned a desert as your savings accounts.
There are so many aspects to our sensuality. Our gender identity, our sexual orientation, the impact of both on our personal development within the culture we have grown up in and live in. The messages we were given as developing teenagers, as partners and lovers. How do you feel about sensual, solitary pleasure? About sexual intimacy and pleasure?
Whoa…. let’s take a step back from the sandy abyss here.
What about the joy your body takes in its senses?
The ways in which we connect to everyday sources of sensory awareness and pleasure can impact our overall feeling about sensual joy.
Writing a journal that specifically awakens your senses, that tunes into the physical connection you have to the outside world and how that makes you feel emotionally, mentally and socially, can lead to a transformation in your understanding of what pleasure means to you, rather than what it should mean. And it can be a radical journey of self-joy following a painful breakup or betrayal.
Starter Exercise: Keep a journal that catalogues sensory awareness.
How does it feel to put on a fresh shirt? To change the material of the clothes you wear? What does wool feel like on your skin? Or cotton? Or silk? Spend some time dressing up in your clothes and making notes of how each outfit feels physically, and how that makes you feel emotionally.
Write about having a bath. Take the time to write about the preparation of the bath, then focus on your physical sensations and almost immediately afterward, record your thoughts. A few days later, write the scene again, remind yourself of the way you felt in different parts of your body.
Take time when you wake or before you go to sleep to take a sensory journey through your body, exploring every part of your connection between the inside and outside world. Then write this up from memory in your journal.
Don’t want to devote a whole journal to this? Take time in your daily journal to write a single sentence for every entry about something that you took the time to physically experience through your senses and take intense pleasure in.
Sensuality is the second great taboo in our western culture after, or even alongside, money. Glorified on film and in book, vilified in daily conversation.
Use a journal to give it the intimate space it deserves in your story. And if the outer world feels a dangerous place to be truly yourself on a sensual level, first find solid ground in a private journal.
8. Awe and the profound: how to understand your… ssshh… ‘spiritual’ side.
I’ve learnt the art of the sideways glance at spirituality.
Asking about spirituality is one of the most interesting revealers of character. Those who feel I have given them permission to talk about their faith and religion stand at one extreme to those who quirk an eyebrow at me and think I’ve gone a bit ‘woo’.
Some words have such weight to them that I prefer to try and talk around the word than start with it capitalised at the beginning of a sentence.
I serve it up with a soft drink, a snack and a gentle ‘What makes you feel awe?’
Here are some of the things that people have responded with:
Yup. That’s a lot of different versions of spirituality.
Connecting with the profound in life is as important as connections with other people. Stepping outside of our daily life, taking time to do something for no reason other than that it reminds us we are an unlikely assortment of old star dust on a planet dancing loop-de-loops around another dying star, keeps us connected to the finite nature of who we are. It lifts the veil of overwhelming immediacy, pulls our minds to the infinite and returns them with a better appreciation of our really quite minor place in the cosmic scheme of things.
But how does journaling help you do this?
Well, journaling is a kind of accountability and mindfulness practice, and you can tune that tool in any direction you want. If you feel that your life is lacking in the profound and awe(some) department, use a journal as a record of exploring this new and unknown topic. Visual journals and art journals can be a really good way to connect to the creative profound and explore your interests. A daily practice diary, where you commit to journal every day for a certain amount of time, preferably over an extended period, can gently bring you back to a commitment to bring the spiritual into your everyday realm.
But first, you need to know what particular flavour of awe lights you up.
Starter Exercise: Here are a few Q’s to help you catch a hold of the fine thread of awe.
What silences you? Write about the moments in your life where you felt totally silenced. This is a good indication of awe.
What makes your jaw drop with admiration? What do others do that seems so awe(some) that you feel deeply curious about it?
What books/film/media made you intensely emotional? What can you remember about those moments that really impacted you?
Is there a piece of music or art that gives you goosebumps? What does this do for you?
What moments of compassion or kindness have you witnessed that have truly humbled you?
Is there a cultural or traditional ceremony that brings you deep connection and peace?
Is there a childhood faith that you feel disconnected from but want to reawaken? Or is there a faith outside of your own experience that appeals to you?
Is there a time that you felt intense gratitude and it lifted your appreciation of life? This can often happen after trauma or loss of a loved one but is an experience that soon fades. How could you reclaim that sense of deep gratitude?
What part of nature do you feel most connected to? How can you increase the time you spend in this way?
Use a journal to dig into the things that stir you to a sense of the universe that is vaster than you and follow that interest with curiosity and commitment.
Seeking the profound isn’t often easy. It’s slippery and intensely personal, Physically writing about your exploration will anchor the ephemeral into your daily life.
Be aware that a spiritual journey of any sort can expose interpersonal ambiguities you weren’t aware of. Discovering how important a spiritual aspect of life is to you can make others around you uncomfortable. So take your time and go steady with the ungraspable, it’s not something you need to grab a hold of but more, tease gently from a knot into a fine skein of strong thread.
9. Location, location, location: the environmental background.
Can your environment really help with emotional healing?
Absolutely. In the same way that we are the sum of the five people we spend most of our time with, we are the product of the environment that surrounds us.
As an interior design artisan for twenty-five years, I know about space.
I know how the calibre, colour, sound and intensity of internal spaces can impact us.
As someone who grew up in the suburbs of a city but spent my holidays sailing and have raised a child in a rural, farming environment, I know about the impact of external space.
Grey space, blue space, green space.
As a human being in the ‘20s, I know the devastating fear of environmental damage and how it shapes our hopes, dreams, mental health and wellbeing.
Space matters.
If you’ve never heard of Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist who invented the hierarchy of needs, all you need to know is this:
Your environment is the second level of needs, right above basic physiological needs such as air, food and water. Beyond those basics you must have shelter and safety. Without that need being met, even if you are thriving at higher areas, such as interconnection, purpose, creativity, growth, expansion, you will struggle to mentally escape the impact of your environmental lack.
And sometimes, you cannot change the space you are in. You cannot physically move to another space.
But what you can do is change the space you are in. You can change the space itself or change the mental connection to the space you have.
Focusing too much on a seemingly unfixable problem with the ‘space you’re in’ can become endemic, leaking into a pervasive sense of life unhappiness. Parts of our life that keep us in survival emotions (anger, resentment, dread, despair) will blow themselves out of proportion. Writing a journal where you clearly work out what the problems are, commit time to either changing the problems or changing your mental space with the problems can move you from a miserable wreck to someone whose life can begin to thrive. And ultimately, you cannot lift yourself out of that environment if you do not change your mindset. The shift has to happen within the original environment for you to move beyond it.
Reducing a difficulty down to size can be done by magnifying those areas of your life that are thriving.
Starter Exercise: Lean into gratitude
Write a gratitude journal every evening before you go to bed. A simple notebook by the side of the bed that you take five minutes to jot your achievements, riches, joys and blessings in. (If this time of day doesn’t work for you, choose another. My gratitude journaling at night is a bitter wasteland. 5am in the morning and I’m in love with the dirty sink.)
Savour your life and journal about how you bring so much to those areas where gratitude rises. When you have counted all your blessings, finish with one positive comment about your environmental circumstances. This may feel hard at first, but give yourself grace to let your entrenched mental energy shift. Don’t be hard on yourself that this feels forced to begin with. There may be months or years behind your current patterns of thinking.
Then, gradually, increase the list by one thing a week. Take time to include lots of details about the thing in your environment that you are focusing your positive energy on. Really let it shine in your journal.
As you build a gratitude habit, you will begin to seek out things to add. Your inner work will change your outer actions.
Not for nothing is Marie Kondo a global powerhouse of mental health. The space we live in, and the things we fill our space with, are resonant with connections and meanings. Owning those ties, honouring and releasing them is a whole act of self-care.
10. The house you reside in: your body and physical health.
In the trenches of diet culture and gym warfare, how could a journal possibly help you improve your physical health?
Well, first off, buy a really heavy one and lift it as weights….
No, no, don’t do that.
There are multiple ways to use a journal to bear witness to a physical story.
Perhaps you have suffered an accident or had a major op you need to recover from? Or felt the change of menopause or childbirth? Perhaps you have been so busy succeeding in another part of your life, that you lost touch with your old habits for keeping fit and healthy? Perhaps your physical presence does not fit with the cultural expectation you live in?
Perhaps, hardest of all, you have a morning mirror voice that says the cruellest things you would never dare whisper to another living being.
Writing those things down in a journal will make you see visibly how you are sabotaging yourself in being the fittest version of you.
And in the writing, what you’ll come to understand is that ‘you’ is a profoundly personal statement. ‘You’ are not the influencers whose toned bodies you admire. ‘You’ are not the same as your friends or colleagues. ‘You’ is not (and nor is it ever going to be again) the 20-year-old version of you.
Unless you’re twenty and reading this. Even then, I bet your morning mirror voice can be a bitch.
Changing the critical voice that drives you to feel bad about yourself into your own best friend could be the single hardest aspect of any movement you make toward greater physical self-worth.
Starter exercise: Become your own best friend.
If you struggle with saying morning affirmations, write them instead.
Use a notebook with a two-page spread.
On the left hand side, let your Inner Critic voice speak freely. Give each thought it’s own line. Fill the page if you need to.
Then release that energy with five deep breaths. You know, the kind of breaths you take when you’re about to knock the head of your arch enemy and you desperately don’t want to serve time. Those breaths.
Turn to the right hand side and respond with Intense Kindness. (As though you were correcting your closest friend saying such horrible things about themselves.)
Carry on writing the affirmation journal until the right hand side speaks louder and longer than the left.
If you want to change your physical wellbeing, yes, use a bullet journal. Yes, use a habit tracker. Yes, make your journal an accountability partner. Do all these things to set targets and reach for them.
But YES, YES, YES, use a journal to write a kinder story of yourself that you step into. Leaving the old, harsh, critic in the mirror behind you.
Invisible ink: the magic picture.
No doubt some of these suggestions for how you can use journaling to transform your life will have resonated more than others. Starting with mental health and finishing with physical I’ve covered the range of whole life health. It’s a big list, and lists can be intimidating.
So what if I took the list, bent it in a circle and joined the ends?
Physical and mental health become the link, the binding force in a wheel that, when you spin it, becomes invisible in its details.
This is what journaling does. It slows the wheel down, until you can see the details of these ten segments of your life. Those distant list members are the first and last slice of your cake. The beginning and end of your story. Exploring these ten segments of your life through journaling can be a powerful tool for personal growth and emotional healing.
You can pick one or two areas to focus on, dive into an area that feels completely off limits or use the Rewrite Journal to take a steady, committed path toward whole life health in all areas.