The Transformative Power of Journaling: Tips from Dr. McDonagh

So one of the skills that we talk to our clients often about here at Good Therapy SF is the power of journaling or the benefits of journaling. Often clients will give me a bit of an eye roll because this is something that we have heard very often, and it seems like a overused suggestion, but it’s actually very useful.

So one of the ways in which it’s useful is that often when we’re working through something, we’re often just in the back of our mind with it. And by that, I mean, we’re not thinking through our day to day frustrations with complete thoughts. We’re not using our frontal lobe to its benefit.

And when you force yourself to journal, you actually think through your thoughts, feelings, emotions, using a complete sentence structure. And that actually forces you to understand and investigate your feelings and your thoughts in a more beneficial way. So when you do that, when you think through things using a full sentence, you actually use more of your prefrontal cortex, which actually helps you process these difficult feelings and emotions more effectively.

So the completing it through a full sentence is the best way to approach these types of thoughts. That’s one benefit to journaling.

Gratitude Journaling

Another way to focus on journaling too, is to focus sometimes on a particular aspect of your life that maybe you’re not paying attention to. Gratitude is one practice of journaling that can be useful.

So you can actually redirect or train your brain to focus more on events throughout your day. That have gratitude in them that you might not have otherwise observed. One type of prompt for this is to try to identify three things you can be grateful for throughout the day.

And if you want to go for bonus points, you try not to repeat those three things. So each day forces you to identify three new things throughout the day that you can be grateful for. And that’s actually really useful because it gets you in this habit when things get hard of identifying, okay what went well for me? What’s something that I can like positively identify with? Instead of maybe settling into that default thinking, which is this is where I’m frustrated. This is where I’m irritable. And that makes me feel worse as a result.

Goal-Oriented Journaling

Another type of journaling that could be useful is goal-oriented journaling. Very often we have these big aspirations for ourselves and we say I’m going to do something like run a marathon, for example.

But we don’t really focus on the steps that are required to get there. So the goal-oriented journaling helps you to really break down the steps that are necessary to get to that end point. And really that’s where a lot of benefit comes from is like teaching yourself that you can accomplish goals that might seem too intimidating at first by breaking it down to simple achievable steps.

So that’s another benefit to journaling as well. Give you that goal-oriented perspective.

So for more journaling tips, please feel free to reach out to us at goodtherapysf.com. Take care.