Easy Wellness journal ideas
Getting your thoughts on paper is an effective method of clearing your head. Our brains can only hold so much information before we start to feel overhwelmed. Wellness journal ideas help to get those thoughts out of your brain.
Keeping a wellness journal helps ease the day to day pressure on our brain. Dave Allen, author of “Getting things done”, says the brain is for having ideas, not holding them. But we forget that and instead cram our brains full of all sorts of information.
This in turn impacts on our wellness.
For that reason I would really encourage you to keep a wellness journal. A wellness journal
o help you get started you will find below a list of different journal types that you can keep, followed by different wellness journal ideas that you might want to incorporate into your journal.
Firstly let’s look at what results you want from your journaling practice and the personal journey you will undergo as part of using one of these different types of journals.
Wellness journaling
Before you embark on your journal decide what result you want from your journaling practice.
Do you want to establish new daily routines to help you cope with and enjoy your life better?
Do you want to monitor mental health issues? Journaling around your feelings of wellness, what makes you feel well, what makes you feel tired and anxious can be a very valuable practice.
You may benefit from writing prompts, and we have a list of useful writing prompts here that can trigger your brain to help start your daily writing practice.
You may want to track some form of daily goals such as water intake, mood level, steps or just keep track of your health in general.
Personal journaling
Gathering your wellness journal ideas together and creating a great journal is only part of the story. The real story is the personal journey which you will undertake as part of this process.
The best wellness journal for you is one which provides a safe space to give you a better understanding of your own mental wellbeing. The most important thing is that it is personal to you.
Developing new habits from wellness journal ideas
Do not feel pressurised into journaling every day if you do not want to. Establishing a regular pattern is a great thing, but it doesn’t have to be every day.
Once you have established what results you want from your wellness journal and what kind of personal journey you might undertake let’s look at different journal types you could use:
Different journal types
Bullet Journaling
Bullet journaling has become very popular. It is a flexible method of journaling within a structure.
Reflective journaling
Reflective journals allow for self reflection and critical analysis on your area of learning. As we all know, wellness doesn’t just happen, it is usually the result of careful self reflection and thought. A simple way to get started with reflective journaling is:
- choose your reflection subject – don’t try and reflect on all of your life. Take it small pieces at a time and deal with them well.
- Write in your reflective journal regularly. Give yourself a specific amount of time to address your subject matter. It doesn’t have to be a short length of time, there is no pressure. The time constraint is simply to keep you focused.
- Observe yourself. Before reflecting on paper, observe yourself, your actions, thoughts and feelings.
- Regularly take time to reflect on what you have written.
- Find list of reflective journal prompts to help you embark on your self reflection journey.
Mood Tracker
The purpose of this type of tool is to help look for patterns in how moods vary over time and due to different situations and circumstances.
In some cases, a mood tracker can be useful for people with mental health conditions—such as depression and anxiety—to help identify and regulate moods.
Gratitude Journal
The concept of the gratitude journal is very simple. It is a method of tracking everything that you are grateful for. The fact of tracking them will make you more aware of just how much you have to be grateful for which you don’t notice each day.
Some people give themselves a certain number of things to be grateful for each day, eg 10 things to be grateful for each day. By tracking them the idea is for you to become more appreciative of your life.
Food Journal
Food journals are an excellent way to monitor your relationship with food which can often be as emotional as physical. You can track how you feel about the food you eat and how much your emotions affect what you eat.
Mental Health Journal
Monitoring your mental health or a recent mental illness can be a great healing process. You can use wellness journal prompts, sketches or images to also help with your mental health journaling.
Now that you have picked the type of journal you will create, let’s look at what you will write on those blank pages. You can incorporate many different things into your wellness journal, but it’s also a good place to establish some regularity and routine to make it easy for you to come back to each day.
Pick a few of the following:
Areas to monitor
Journaling is a very free exercise and there are few rules. The choice of wellness journal ideas is entirely yours. However, we have created a short list of wellness journal ideas to help you create your own journal. Use these options and create the structure of your wellness journal as you like.
The most effective way to use your journal is on a regular, daily, basis and having a structure in place can be the perfect way to establish good habits in your wellness journey.
Wellness goals or journey – Do you have a goal in mind or a journey or any specific actions you want to take on a daily basis? Establish these from the start.
Meal planning – You can keep a meal planner journal as part of your wellbeing journal practice. However keeping a meal planning element in a general wellness journal can be a helpful tool. Journaling across different activities can be a healthy holistic approach to your wellness journey.
Physical health – Monitoring your physical health is a great way of tracking your overall health, both mental and physical. Your physical health is as much a result of your mental health as it is of what you eat.
Healthy habits – Healthy habits are another backbone of your wellness journal ideas. Wellness is a result of often simple acts performed regularly. Decide for yourself what healthy habits you want to adopt.
Track them in your journal (a bullet journal would be a perfect way to track habits). You can also use your journal to provide daily prompts to keep your healthy habits regular.
Water intake – Monitoring your water intake is a great way of ensuring that you are drinking enough water. Lack of adequate hydration leads to dehydration. Dehydration causes tiredness and a reduced mental state. So, monitoring your water intake is one of those little things which can have a major impact on your mental health.
Daily habits – Daily habits are, as we’ve already seen, the backbone of your wellness journey. There is no right way or wrong way to monitor them, whatever works for you and gives you a positive outlook on your wellness journey is the right thing.
Daily life – You can do a regular brain dump of things going on in your life. Getting your thoughts on paper is a simple act which has far reaching consequences for a positive mindset.
This is because the act of writing your thoughts down frees the brain up and gives you clarity. When you have clarity in your brain you will feel so much better.
Track of your periods – tracking your monthly cycle is one of those thought-provoking prompts which can really help you better understand your moods and energy levels.
Weight loss – Losing weight is one of those short-term goals which can help promote healthy wellness in your life.
Firstly tracking your weight loss / food intake is positive and motivating and secondly as you lose weight you will feel so much better and much more empowered as you realise that you have agency over your own life.
Energy levels – Monitoring your energy levels in your every day life can be very relaxing and encouraging. We all have fluctuating energy levels, they never remain the same. It can be very discouraging to have low energy levels without understanding why.
If you monitor your energy levels you might start to recognise patterns in the energy levels in your everyday life.
Next time you have a couple of days when you feel particularly tired, the chances are you will be so much kinder to yourself because you will understand that this is just part of a larger energy level pattern and sooner or later your bouncy energy levels will return.
Positive experiences – Similar to a gratitude journal, journaling your experience of positive experiences is a simple but good idea and one of the different ways in which you can achieve wellness through journaling.
Create your own action plan for monitoring positive experiences. Do you want to list them out daily? And if so, how many do you want to list each day? You could create this as part of your daily to-do list.
Or it could be one of your monthly goals: at the end of each month list out the positive experiences you have had. For me, I’d definitely forget if I had to wait to list them out after a month, so I would opt for charting them as part of my daily pages.
Morning routine – Create your own morning routine. First thing in the morning set your daily intentions and undertake your activities that you plan to do each day: yoga, meditation, pray, go for a run and write in your journal.
Self care – Self care is fundamental to healthy wellness. In fact a good self care routine is one of the first steps you should take to establish long term wellness.
Ask yourself what self care looks like to you, think of specific goals. Is it time each week for a long leisurely bath? Is it to have your nails painted, or facial? Is it to set aside time to read one of your favourite books?
Whatever it is write it down then set out regular times when you will do these self-care activities.
Innermost thoughts – Monitoring your innermost thoughts is a core pillar of your wellness journal ideas. “The unexamined life is not worth living” said Socrates. Use any of the journal types above and use your journal writing to firstly write out your innermost thoughts.
The trick here is to do this without editing your thoughts, just write down what you are thinking. After you have written down your thoughts you can then examine them.
You can examine your innermost thoughts by carefully rereading what you have written and then thinking about what you have written and then journaling about those subsequent thoughts.
Big goals – Challenges are a great and necessary part of our life. A certain amount of hardship and difficulty is actually really good for our wellness. So don’t be afraid to set big goals.
And more importantly, don’t be afraid to fail. Just go all out and do your best. Don’t second guess yourself or think you can’t do it. Just go all out. Decide for yourself what your personal big goal will be.
It will be different for each of us. Set that goal and go all out on it. A big goal can take an entire year to achieve, it shouldn’t be something that you can complete in a month.
Other similar blog posts:
The benefits of journaling for mental health
How to use journaling to track your self improvement goals
What is a growth mindset journal