Mental clutter occurs when the mind has too many thoughts, making it difficult to process and focus. If you just consider that one phrase, it is pretty scary. Too many thoughts to process! Just think about the very important stuff that could get lost, forgotten, put aside because of mental clutter. We have talked about several aspects of clutter and de-cluttering, but I have saved the best tip for last. This tip can help you de-clutter and gain control. Plus it’s good for us in many other respects including mental health, moving forward, self-esteem, organizing, self-control and many others. It is great that we have a variety of Journaling Options to De-Clutter Your Joyful Mind.
Self-Improvement Journaling Options
When people talk about journaling, they most often speak of daily personal journaling. You can start daily personal journaling in a notebook, with an on-line app, or in your daily planner. Journaling is one of the most powerful self-improvement activities you can do for yourself. If you commit to practicing consistently, it can transform your mental fitness, emotional well-being, and even physical well-being.
Common Self-Improvement Journaling Options
Journaling is personal. You can Gratitude-Journal by concentrating on positive things in your day. You can respond to Journaling Prompts that help you look at thing in a deeper of different way. There is also Stream-of-Consciousness Journaling where entries might look more like a diary entry. You can daily journal to track day-to-day activities or expenditures. Having a daily journal will be a great resource to look back on to see how far you’ve grown. It can also serve as a reference if you feel life is moving too quickly.
Self-improvement journaling includes two other, more unusual styles: Visual Journaling and Bullet Journaling.
Other Self-Improvement Journaling Options
Visual Journaling uses images to record events and perspectives. The images or drawings tell your story. These can be simple line drawings, storyboards, comic strips, photos or stylized sketches.
Bullet Journaling requires some advance planning. Instead of starting with a blank or empty lined page, a bullet journal has sections with evenly spaced dots (bullets) to guide your entries. Bullet journals are highly customizable with sections designed to track everything from your mood to your daily steps. Alternatively, you can use a separate page as an agenda with bullets for reflections such as “one thing that made my day today” or “my intention for today.”
“The beauty of journaling is that there’s no right or wrong way to do it. It’s a deeply personal experience that can take many forms. One day, journaling could look like a diary entry, similar to the ones you may have written when you were a teenager. The next day it can be a list of things that bring you joy or a list of goals you want to achieve. Developing a journaling habit can help you work through your emotions, specially when you’re feeling anxious or sad. It can also help you grow, become more self-aware, and gain meaningful insights. For these reasons, journaling is one of the best self-improvement tools.” www.betterup.com
Mood Journaling (a.k.a. Emotional Journaling)
Mood journaling is an entirely different category of journaling that is lesser known, but highly effective. It can help you track emotions, figure out triggers for those feelings, and will aid concentration and self-control.
Do you ever feel depressed, just plain off or unhappy without knowing exactly why? We can feel like we’re living at the mercy of our emotions, even though we often forget to ask ourselves what those emotions are or why we are feeling them.
One useful exercise to get to the root of lingering negative feelings and increase positive ones is keeping a mood journal, or emotion journal.
What is a Mood Journal?
“Mood journaling is the act of logging your mood so you can recognize trends, triggers, and use of your energy. You can mood journal just by logging how or what you feel. Or you can go more in-depth by naming your emotion and identifying what caused it, what resulted from it, and whether it was contextually appropriate.” greatist.com
Your mood journal is deeply personal. Perhaps you are using it to discover what causes your emotions, understand your responses, or get a better picture of why you feel what you do. In any case, you must first figure out how to track your moods. You can just use paper to keep track of things or a form designed for mood journaling. (There are many aps on line and there is a free, printable Emotion Journaling Worksheet here at Life Coaching With a Smile.)
Mood Journaling
“If you can record how you are feeling and what you are thinking, you are better able to track your emotions, notice people or places that are triggers, and recognize warning signs of your strong emotions,” says therapist Amanda Ruiz, MS, LPC. Mood or emotion tracking can help you check to see if the emotional responses match with the circumstances that caused them and check the scale of your response, too.
A mood journal focuses on your emotions. It will bring clarity to how you can improve your mental and emotional health. “An emotion journal allows you to record your feelings over several days or weeks and then notice patterns or trends,” Ruiz says.
When you can recognize these trends, you can work to eliminate or avoid certain triggers — or focus your energy on how best to respond next time.
Mood journaling works best if you log in, or jot down your feelings every day. That way you can fill in gaps at the end of the week. If today’s emotion wasn’t such a positive one, you have a decision to make: What are you going to do about it?
Use Journaling to Make Action Plans
For situations you can change, make an action plan. Have an honest conversation with a partner, friend, health professional, or coach. Consider what healthy coping mechanisms you have at your disposal (better self-care, perhaps, or time with good friends), and take care to implement them.
Sometimes our emotions don’t correspond well to the importance or scale of the trigger. For example, a 5-minute traffic jam on your way to work might ruin your mood for the entire day. But if you can understand your triggers when they happen, you can practice self-care in the moment. You can prevent a small thing from having an even bigger negative emotional impact.
Working on improving your mental health with a mood journal doesn’t necessarily mean that identifying your triggers or behavior patterns will lead to immediate solutions. It will give you a path for moving forward and even finding small tips to what is going on with your emotions can be helpful. Seeing big results may take a while.
Don’t become discouraged, though. Whether you practice any of the self-improvement journaling or mood journaling options, continue journaling and fine-tuning your action plan to find what works best for you.
Related Article:
Emotion Journaling Worksheet: How to Boost Your Mood
