15 Journaling Exercises to Help You Heal, Grow and Thrive
As the year comes to a close, it's a good time to pull out your journal and write down your thoughts. This is especially helpful to make sense of your experiences in the past year and the concerns you may have for the coming year. If you don't know where to begin, here are some journaling exercises from Psychology Today to help you get started.
Explore Your Strengths and Weaknesses
1. Make a list of three qualities you have that you consider weaknesses, then explore how these so-called weaknesses might be recast as strengths. For instance, if you believe micromanagement is a weakness of yours, it could also mean that you’re organized and responsible. Once you determine the strength on the flip side of that quality, write about a time when you used that quality in a positive way. If you can’t think of a recent example, write something aspirational (how you might use this quality positively in the future).
Dive Into Your Emotional State
2. Write about a moment when you felt a particular emotion and how you physically experienced it. Were your palms sweating? Was your heart racing or head throbbing? How did you experience/interact with your environment through all your senses? Was it dark, sunny, stuffy, or breezy? What did you hear and smell? By expressing your emotional state through your physical experience of it, you’re able to delve into the heart of it. You can also write about your current state: What emotions are you experiencing right now, and what’s the physical response?
3. There’s a relationship between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Chart your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors over the past month, listing two examples for each. What effect did your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors have on one another? And how did your changes in each category affect the other two?
Define Your Intentions
4. List five qualities of your personality or your outlook that you think defines you. Write just one word/ phrase/sentence for each—not a summary of your whole life. Don’t overthink. What rises to the surface as important now? You can even do this prompt periodically to see how the list changes. Then expand on the qualities, writing about each of those aspects of you.
Discover Your Safe Place
5. Think of a real or an imaginary place where you feel safe and at peace. Create that place in your mind and write a detailed description of it using all your senses—what you see in this place, but also what you hear, smell, taste, and feel through tactile contact. You can then use this as a visualized meditation, closing your eyes, breathing, and imagining this place thoroughly, one sense at a time.
Build a Positive Relationship With Food
6. What role does food play in your life? Are you filling an emotional void with food or drink, using it as a friend?
7. Describe a recent food craving. Were you really hungry? Scan your body for its food needs. What does hunger or fullness feel like right now?
Bring Your Family Together
8. What are some positive family traditions that you would like to return to or begin? Are there any unhealthy traditions that you can change or let go of altogether?
Practice Gratitude
9. List five things that you’re grateful for — people, positive experiences past or current, places, material items — then expand on each one, describing it/him/her in detail, perhaps at a particular moment in time.
Make Time for Joy
10. List three activities that bring you joy. Expand on each activity, describing a recent time when you fully engaged in it. If you’re finding it challenging to engage in these activities as often as you’d like or need, explore strategies for working them into your schedule more often.
Create a Balance
11. List two things you tend to say yes to or have said yes to recently and two things you tend to say no to or have said no to recently. What was good self-care and what wasn’t? For example, saying yes can be a way of embracing an opportunity and engaging with the world (good self-care), but it can also be a way of spreading yourself too thin. Saying no can help you maintain healthy boundaries and manage your time (good self-care), but it can also isolate you and cause you to miss opportunities. This awareness can help you prioritize, and determine the value of things and what’s truly important to you
Be Aware of Your Self
12. List three positive qualities/strengths that you value in yourself. Then list three qualities that you aspire to achieve. Expand on each quality. For the qualities, you already have, what are recent examples when you showcased them? For the qualities you aspire to, how might you achieve them?
13. List five roles or labels that you think define you. Write just one word/ phrase/ sentence for each, not prioritized, not a summary of your whole life. Don’t overthink. What rises to the surface as important now? You can even do this prompt periodically to see how the list changes. Then expand on the roles/labels, writing about each of those aspects of you.
Connect to Your Loved Ones
14. Write a letter to your loved ones. What is on your mind and in your heart that you find hard to express in real life? You may find that expressing it on the page is useful preparation for actually expressing it. You also may find it useful as a private exercise to work out your thoughts and feelings on your own in order to interact with him or her more productively in general.
15. Think of one thing that you need right now. Write out how you might most effectively communicate that need to a particular person. Then write out what you imagine that person’s response will be.
When you are going through these journaling exercises, it is important to set goals and be honest with yourself. Keep in mind your goals for today, for this week, for this month, and for this year; then expand on each. Explore the support you may need to achieve those goals, strategies, potential barriers, and how to overcome them.
