Journaling has been something I have maybe dabbled with in the past but never properly committed to. After dropping out of college after a mere six weeks at the age of 19, moving home to rural south Kerry, and watching all my friends enjoy the joys of college life, I was filled with anxiety (and FOMO) about what I would do with my life.
It was a counsellor who recommended I start writing in a journal to find the stem of this anxiety. Ladened with a pen and a notebook I believed this alone was going to help me sort out my anxious mind and my jumbled CAO form ranging from careers in midwifery to journalism.
After a few weeks of attempting to write a journal, the activity got lost in the depths of my daily routine consisting of feeding my chicken roll addiction and rewatching 18 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy.
It wasn’t until recently when I found this old journal that I decided I owed it to myself to give it a proper go. Although my last journaling stint was a bit hit and miss, I told myself this time I would commit to a full six weeks, a total of 42 days – two days longer than Jesus spent in the desert.
I did come at it from a slightly different angle, instead of the lengthy monologues I wrote two years ago, this time I decided on a gratitude journal. I found the prompts and affirmations in the journal helpful, and honestly, I enjoyed spending a couple of minutes writing what I was grateful for each day with my morning coffee.
Psychotherapist Samantha Fitzgibbon tells us of the benefits that can be reaped from putting pen to paper, “It puts you more in tune with your emotions, as opposed to just letting a story go around and around in your head. It helps to organise your thoughts and find clarity. It has been shown to decrease mental distress as well and it can aid better sleep”.
Six weeks isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things but managing to stick to something for six weeks in our busy lives should be celebrated. It certainly wasn’t all smooth sailing and the odd day I forgot or found myself too busy to get stuck into my thoughts, the negative self-talk would set in.
Fitzgibbon explains though that we shouldn’t be going hard on ourselves: “It’s like eating healthy. We can all go on these tangents of eating really health and feeling really good in ourselves and then might eat a load of chocolate or a take-away or something and feel really bad in our body.
“We have to have balance with everything and we can’t carry on everything consistently all of the time. We aren’t robots, we have to give ourselves that bit of grace and say, ‘well, I didn’t do it yesterday but I’m going to do it again today because I know it is something that helps me.'”
Having found that I enjoyed gratitude journaling a lot more than my previous failed attempt, I was curious to find out the effects gratitude journaling can have on the mind.
Samantha says: “Journaling is just a tool in a box of many tools, it’s not going to resolve all the issues someone has but you can use it if you are using it alongside other tools as well.
“Gratitude journaling is bringing you into the focus of being present, it is bringing you into the here and now and getting you to look at what you are grateful for and what you already have. It is a wonderful tool to enhance the positivity we already have in our lives.
My journal had a section at the top of the page where you were instructed to write a positive affirmation. I did feel slightly out of my depth here trying to fill this space each day and will admit that I did end up searching Pinterest for ‘positive affirmations’ to write and chant to myself.
Samantha says that these affirmations can come from anywhere, and are a nice way to change something negative into a positive.
“The positive affirmations are essentially training the neuro pathways in the brain to think more positively about things,” she says. “Our brain naturally goes to the more negative and that comes from the primitive way that our central nervous system is lined up. It is to keep us safe.
“I would use positive affirmations a lot with clients who maybe don’t love something about their body or something they want to change about themselves. Instead of them saying, ‘oh I hate my legs’ you would look at the things you can positively say about your body.
“It is positive reinforcement and the more you are training your brain to look at your body in a different way, the more you are training your brain to be grateful for the parts of your body we don’t give enough attention to. For example, how much we use our hands every day.”
If my time spent journaling has taught me anything it’s that finding gratitude in the smallest of things brings you a lot more satisfaction and happiness in your everyday life.
Writing a journal may not be everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s ok. As someone who loves writing, even I still sometimes struggle to fill the pages of this diary. But Samantha says this is normal, and there are plenty of other ways to express yourself.
“Journaling can be anything, it doesn’t just have to be words on paper it can be writing, drawing, doodling, and painting,” she says. “It can be just random words that come to your mind when you can’t make sentences. It’s about getting it out of your head.”