This time of year, many people are starting new habits. You might have considered exercising, eating better, or sleeping more. Those are all wonderful ideas, and doing any of these things would definitely have significant benefits for basically everyone.
But I have another idea, and it’s one that you might not have considered. It’s been one of my most impactful habits over the past few years, and has made an absolutely enormous difference in my life. Maybe you’d like to add this habit to your life.
That habit is…
Journaling!
What is journaling?
Journaling is a practice of writing about your inner experiences – your thoughts, emotions, and reactions. The purpose is to help you get to know yourself better.
Journaling is not the same as creating a logbook. You’re not aiming to record everything that happens every day. Instead, when you’re journaling, the goal is to dive more deeply into your own experience. The best way to do this is to simply keep writing. Allow words to flow freely onto the page as they appear in your mind and heart.
Most of us have been trained to be critical of our own writing. We tend to edit what we’re writing, trying to make it more polished and presentable. However, your journal doesn’t need to be polished – it’s just for you. It never has to be shared with anyone else at all. (I choose to share my journal with my therapist sometimes, but it can be entirely private if you prefer.)
While you’re journaling, do your best not to judge whether your writing is “good” or not, and don’t do any editing at all. It can be challenging to break these habits, and your inner critic may show up from time to time. Try to just keep writing freely, without regard to creating anything “great” that you could show to others. This is just a tool for getting in touch with yourself.
How to get started with journaling
If you’re new to this practice, you might not be quite sure where to start. Luckily, you don’t need much to get started with journaling.
First, buy your journal. Choose a journal or notebook that’s reserved just for your journaling practice. It’s not ideal to use the same notebook where you write your to-do lists and notes. You want to help your brain get into the journaling mindset whenever you pull out your journal. So dedicate a special notebook for this purpose. It certainly doesn’t have to be anything fancy or expensive – but it can be, if that would feel good to you. You might also want to buy a pen in your favorite color, and use this only for your journaling practice.
Next, choose when you’d like to journal. It’s best to do this at around the same time every day, in order to make it a habit. This doesn’t mean that you can’t journal at other times as well – if you spontaneously feel called to journal at a different time, you can do an extra session. For example, if you find yourself having a major emotional reaction and you want to process why that’s happening, you could journal about it. But in order to build the habit of journaling, try to choose a time when you’ll plan to do about 15 minutes of journaling every day.
Some people like to start off the day with a few minutes of journaling – you can make this part of your morning routine, to get help get your day started off on the right foot. Some people like to journal just before bed, to give them time to reflect and process what happened that day. There’s no right or wrong answer. Choose a time of day that will work best in your life. The more consistently you stick to your intention to journal at this time, the more you’ll build a solid habit that will become a fixture in your life.
The next step is to write your first journal entry. But what to write about? I’ve seen a lot of people get stuck here.
What should you write about while journaling?
Sometimes, when you sit down to journal, you’ll find that your mind is already preoccupied with something. When this happens, just go with whatever is spontaneously flowing out of you. Often, in the business of daily life, we don’t have time to process everything that happens to us. Our minds will tend to save some things for later. When you start journaling, you may open up a floodgate, and you’ll give yourself time to process things that have happened. This is a very important process.
Other times, you may find yourself just sitting in front of a blank page, not really sure where to start. I certainly have days like this with my own journaling practice. At these times, you can turn to journal prompts. These are short questions designed to help get you thinking about something in your life. Use a prompt as a jumping-off point. Wherever your writing flows from there is absolutely fine – you don’t have to stay “on topic” at all! A journal prompt is just a good way to break out of a stuck place and get you started.
Here are a few journal prompts that you might like to start with. You can choose whichever one of these speaks to you. If you want to try to use all of them, you could do that in one journaling session if you’d like – when you feel complete with one topic, you move onto the next journal prompt. Or you could take them one at a time, starting with a new journal prompt each day.
When were you diagnosed with your chronic skin condition?
How did your diagnosis impact your life?
Do you think that you learned healthy coping mechanisms after your diagnosis?
How is your current mindset? Do you feel that you have a healthy mindset, particularly around your skin and your appearance?
How is your mental/emotional health? How has your skin condition impacted it?
How is your physical health? Do you feel that your skin condition has impacted this?
How are your personal and professional relationships? How has your skin condition impacted your relationships?
What do you want to change in your life going forward?
These certainly aren’t the only possible journal prompts. You can find huge lists of prompts online, or you can generate your own. I offer lots of journal prompts in Mind Gut Skin Academy, to help you explore various aspects of your health and your life.
When you sit down to journal, you might want to start by considering, “What am I feeling or thinking about right now?” If something comes immediately, start journaling about that. If not, then you could reach for a prompt to get you started. Or you could start with whatever comes freely, and then switch to a prompt when it feels like you’re done with that. You can experiment until you find what works best for you.
Building a health-conscious lifestyle
For people with a chronic skin condition, it’s absolutely crucial to build a lifestyle that’s based around making healthy choices. This can make a huge difference in your skin health, which is connected to your overall physical and mental health in so many ways. This is the time of year when many people take stock of their choices, and often realize that they haven’t been making their health a priority.
If you’re ready to change your lifestyle to prioritize your own health, it can be challenging to know where to start. Changing habits that you’ve had for years isn’t easy, although it’s definitely worth it. It helps to have some support, to help you figure out where to start and how to make changes that will last.
That’s why I started Mind Gut Skin Academy. I wanted to share my roadmap for transformation and support other women with chronic skin conditions in becoming as healthy as possible. I also wanted to help connect women with each other, so they could support each other along the journey. The brand-new version of the program will be launching soon – head over here if you’d like to learn more or want to sign up for the waitlist!