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How I Finally Stuck to Journaling (Almost) Daily
Shifting your perspective is the key to overcoming mental blocks
In an ideal world, I would get up every morning and journal while having my coffee.
I’m sure I’m not alone in loving the idea of journaling, in theory. I’m a writer, so it seems natural I should be a journaler, especially since it’s helpful to have a good record of events and thoughts for memoir and personal essays.
Being a writer also means notebooks are the default gift I receive on most occasions. These gifted would-be journals stare at me from my bookshelf, judging me.
It’s also common knowledge at this point that journaling has a number of psychological benefits, including reduced stress, increased emotional intelligence, and more. These are all good things, and I would like to invite more of them into my life.
But, for some reason, I’ve struggled year after year to solidify my journaling habit. Inevitably, I journal for a few days in a row, miss one day, then another. Soon enough, a month goes by without picking up my notebook, and by then it feels like too much to try and recapture all that lost time.
The trouble was, I could never quite figure out how to journal. It sounds silly, but I’d sit and stare at the blank pages in my notebook wondering what exactly I should write. Almost immediately, the entries would devolve into flat reiterations of what I’d done each day, not interesting even as I wrote them.
Sometimes, I’d look up journaling prompts, of which there are many, but this, too, failed to keep me consistently returning to the page. The prompts felt random to me, not like the record of my life and thoughts that I hoped my journal would contain.
Last month, I finally broke my losing streak of journaling attempts, scribbling away in my notebook every morning. How did I do this? I reframed the narrative.
Or, really I tricked myself into journaling by… not calling it journaling, at all.
If you’ve read The Artist’s Way, you might be familiar with the concept of “morning pages.” In essence, it’s a way to get the creative juices flowing. You wake up and write three pages, longhand, straight away. The…
