journal

10 Journaling Prompts for Counseling Clients in 2023

January 5, 2023 by Sarina Arefzadeh

As we head into a new year, clients come to counseling with a fresh perspective. This is an excellent opportunity to get them started on the right foot. Whether it’s developing a new healthy habit or refining a familiar one, journaling is one of the best homework assignments to help clients reach their goals. The best way to begin is with a quick and simple daily journaling check-in. This is inexpensive, accessible, and it’s something clients can do on their own time.

Share these 10 journaling prompts to get clients started with journaling into the new year:

What is your intention for today?
Choose a word of the day.
What does your mind need today?
What does your body need today?
What does your heart need today?
What’s something that will make you feel good today?
List 3 things you’re grateful for.
What are you letting go of?
What are you making space for?
Write out today’s affirmation.

Reminders when it comes to journaling

Often, clients want to start journaling but feel resistance, also known as a mental block. Some assume there’s a ‘right’ way to do it. Some don’t see themselves as writers (and that’s okay!). For others, the issue is not knowing what or how much to write. That’s why journaling prompts are essential, as they get the creative juices flowing.

Reassure your clients that this doesn’t have to be an elaborate activity. Simply taking 5 minutes daily to write down just a few words is enough to start feeling the benefits of journaling. This will also get clients used to picking up their journal every day, instilling the daily habit.

You can also encourage clients to have fun with this by personalizing the habit, and the journaling prompts, to their own routine. For example, some clients are night owls and may do better journaling as an evening reflection piece for the day, rather than first thing in the morning. Not only will lifestyle matching help the habit stick, but it will empower clients to take charge of their mental health journey.

How to keep clients on track with a healthy journaling habit

To keep your clients on track and help them shift as needed, try utilizing a homework app like Therachat. It’s a simple way to give your clients the nudge they need between sessions while continuing to build client trust. With daily homework reminders, mindfulness exercises, and emotion tracking, it’s an innovative way to help your clients feel supported between appointments.
If you’re a counselor ready to level up your practice in 2023, digital technology is essential. Meet clients where they are — right on their own devices — with a digital homework app. Learn more about Therachat for clinicians.

How to Use Journaling in Therapy | Helping Your Clients Get Started with a Journal

September 24, 2018 by Admin

Journaling, commonly known as a journal writing consists of a short writing practice that can be continued day to day. Keeping a journal has become very popular in the mental health community for its therapeutic use during treatment.

Journal therapy helps clients keep track of their emotions, thoughts and situations through documented exercises and prompts. The use of a journal creates a reflective environment and helps clients voice concerns or things on their minds.

Therapists have been increasing their recommendations of journal therapy in recent years thanks to the long list of benefits supporting it. One of the initial things that attract therapists to endorse journal therapy is the ease of set-up and ability to guide clients between sessions in writing about specific things.

Journal therapy helps clients capture emotions, analyze concerns and commence a dialogue with themselves, which helps their therapist to decipher what’s been going on outside of sessions with the client and their condition.

Still not convinced?! Let’s explore the science behind journaling during treatment.

The Science Behind Journal Therapy

The science behind journal therapy continues to uncover the mental health benefits of routinely journaling. And luckily the practice can be applied for a variety of conditions including the following;

Anxiety Disorders
Depression
Low self-esteem
Relationship issues
OCD conditions
Grief
Chronic Illness
Substance abuse

Journal therapy alone won’t cure a client’s condition, it’s the treatment as a whole that helps for a steady recovery. However there’s a number of ways how journal therapy supports treatment by uncovering a wide variety of concerns of clients.

What Do Studies Show?

A study of the benefits of writing from the Journal of the American Medical Association (Vol. 281, No. 14) showcased that there’s more to journal therapy than meets the eye. 107 patients suffering from asthma and rheumatoid arthritis wrote for 20-minutes on each of three consecutive days, 71 of them covering topics of stressful events and the 37 remaining covered emotionally neutral subjects of their day plans.

The next 4 months after the writing exercise, 70 of the patients showed improvement on objective, clinical evaluations.

In addition, those who wrote about stress improved more and deteriorated less, than controls for both diseases. “So writing helped patients get better, and also kept them from getting worse,” says Smyth.

Extensive studies continue to show the benefits of writing about your experiences during the day. A study from the University of California took 20 volunteers to a lab for a brain scan. Before this scan, the volunteers were asked to spend 20-minutes per day writing, for the four days before the scan with 10 of the candidates writing about an emotional experience, the others about something neutral.

The science from the brain scan proved that the emotions-lead writing experience induced relaxed neural activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (element of the brain).

One more extensive study showed the effects on recovery. The study in 2003 found that 76% of adults who spent 20-minutes a day journaling three days consecutively before a medical biopsy were healed in full 11 days later.

Meanwhile, 58% of the control group had yet to recover. The results indicated that with just one hour of writing about an emotion experience helped candidates to reduce stress levels and understand the events of the situation.

Getting Started with a Journal

So, your clients are open to engaging with a journal. Where do you start?!

This is great news! Any additional ways you can engage your clients between sessions, will help treatment. The positive thing about journal therapy is it takes many shapes, so the act can be used in a multitude of different ways.

Many therapists like clients to use journal therapy for their out of session time. Having clients start their therapeutic writing experience when they have the time, can promote journaling to become a positive, healthy routine.

Here’s a list of recommendations:

Start by recommending the inclusion of journal therapy during sessions. Explain the benefits of how therapeutic journaling has improved many treatments and increased the longevity of the recovery post-therapy.
Introduce an initial piece of homework. Between sessions set your client a 10-minute writing activity to kick things off. 10-minutes is a healthy-sized introductory period of writing they can get started with.
Each session review the act and benefits of journal therapy. Re-evaluating, why this is beneficial practice, will increase homework compliance and engagement rates with your client.
Set more complex homework exercises that will test their insights. Activities like this will promote in-session discussions and cement their commitment outside of sessions. You can find recommendations listed below.

Don’t hesitate to add a digital tool to the mix that can help both you and your clients practice journaling. With Therachat you can send your clients journal prompts at any time and your clients will be reminded to do so. A tool like Therachat will also show you the journal entries immediately so you can follow along with your client in realtime and use that info to have more effective sessions.

Journal Therapy Exercises

So, now you’ve started out with a basic practice of 10-minutes.

You’ll be looking to ramp up your use of the practice with your clients outside of therapy sessions. Remember, keeping things relevant and interactive with clients will keep them progressing towards their end goal.

These are some of the best ways to use journal therapy:

Routine Entries – The first and easiest practice is to ask your client to set a time aside every single day that they can add to their journal. A routine practice will help to improve the more advanced exercises but help to build your clients confidence around the topic of journaling. Setting a limit of 10-20 minutes of emotional writing will help to get things started as they bring this into treatment.
Letter Writing – The act of letter writing can be a good way to start a journal entry. Writing letters to the people in your life that you have an emotional connection with can help to release stress and promote reflective practices. This is something to discuss with your client and work out whether it is suitable. Positive or negative entries will help express your emotions.
Dialogue – Using dialogue can help to promote awareness of other people’s state of mind. Asking your client to take the role of someone and writing about how they would react can help to create a two-way conversation that the client can review and be aware of emotional reactions. This can promote social learning and help anxiety as they try to change perspective.
Photo Entries – Using photographs to start an entry can be a great way to write in an emotional manner. By having a photo to speak to in your journal can help bring up emotional situations. Maybe it’s a positive photo that you can share about how you felt in that current state or one that makes you feel pressured or anxiety, all of these will help produce a reflective piece of writing.
Prompts – An easy way to get your client started. Bringing a range of prompts for their journal can help them to answer complex emotional questions without much hassle. Prompts like “The happiest times in my life have been…” or “The most emotional day of my life was…” will help to test their emotional state and get the ball rolling as they start out.
Listicles – One that doesn’t take too long but many clients enjoy, starting a listicle. Asking a client to list the “Top 10 Things They Like…” or “The Top 100 Things They Hate” can help them to list one word or short sentence answers and flag many issues they are having. Being grateful or providing issues in this format can provide you as the therapist a condensed list of talking points with your client.

Becoming a Journal Master

The act of therapeutic journaling will take time to master and your clients will start to benefit across a longer period of time. Like many studies show; the extensive use of journaling can help and promote recovery, so keeping it in the client’s mind as a healthy routine practice will boost outcomes.

A final recommendation would be a read by the author, Kate Thompson.

Her book, Therapeutic Journal Writing: An Introduction for Professionals is one of the best recommendations for those looking to further understand this topic and how they can endorse the practice with their clients.

On a final note, journaling can provide so much to your clients. Reviewing it as part of your practice will become one of your best decisions of the year and integrating as part of your homework compliance will help to arrive at your client’s destination with a stronger footing.

Let us know whether you’ve used journaling in therapy. We’d love to hear your stories about what has worked, what hasn’t and how you go about endorsing the use of journal therapy.

25 Useful Journal Prompts

August 23, 2018 by Admin

Using journal prompts is one of the most effective ways to get the most our of your journaling practice. The use of prompts is becoming more common with journal users to express their emotions, situations and thoughts.

Normally with journals, you would start your entry adding to what happened in the day, how you are feeling, what elements in your day sprung surprises and any other aspects on your mind.

For both therapeutic use and personal reflection, the journal can help us understand more about ourselves as well as the progress we’re making. Have you ever considered journaling about specific areas to keep track of your progress?

We wanted to create a list of 50 useful journal prompts in specific areas to help you whether you are just beginning journaling or are familiar with it, but can use some inspiration.

All these journal prompts can be used no matter whether you journal on paper or digitally.

Let’s share the best journal prompts to get the ball rolling! [Read more…] about 25 Useful Journal Prompts

4 Tips for Journal Therapy – How To Get The Most Out of Journaling

July 24, 2018 by Admin

So you’ve had a few sessions with your therapist and they introduce to you the concept of journal therapy. Their goal is to keep a log of your progress, feelings and emotions to help further your reflections on your condition as you go through it as well as to create actionable ways to combat reactions. Week to week, chances are your therapist will lack insights into how your condition affects you and this can be very useful once in the hands of a practitioner.

Journals have been used for many years to help a running log of a person’s life or emotional state and the popularity of journals is only growing as their reputation spreads. Journal therapy is very similar to the popular technique of talk therapy used by many therapists to help you express your emotions by vocalizing your experiences.

We’d like to recommend a few ways that you can start using a journal to master your day.
These are all recommendations and advice for newbie journal users. Let’s dive in.

Starting Your First Journal Entries

Your first few entries will be difficult, what do you write about…?! And how do you go about writing it? One of the best starting points is to date your piece. This simple and routine task will help to determine the date to which you’re writing on and will help you in the future to see the progress you’ve made.

Many people start their first entry off with a short outline of why they’ve been asked to create a journal. This is a very open way to begin your journal and can help set the tone. After this introductory piece, the first entries will be easier to write.

Writing up your feelings and emotions can be a good starting point, whatever stage you are in treatment. The act of journaling is to be reflective but also present, so sharing your current state of mood can help towards building the best outline of you journal.

From positive to negative emotions, making sure to log all entries to how you feel will capture all of your moments. Covering all of your potential drawbacks to the best of days, the journal will give your future self a view into your thought process. This can be extremely valuable as you reflect on your condition and ever feel the need to understand or look back on your emotional state later on.

Making sure you complete your journal on a routine basis during treatment can be tricky, with all of the many other things to do during your day, it’s another to add to the list. Setting a simple routine reminder on your smartphone or using the reminders of your journal app, can help you to not forget when you have to fill in your journal entry.

Now, you’re sold on journal therapy, let’s dive into some useful tips for making the most of your journal.

Writing Tips for Journal Newbies

1. Picking A Journal App

Using an attractive journal will make writing a lot easier to come back to as a habit.

Thanks to the digital world that we live in today, it doesn’t have to be a physical notebook. There are plenty of ways you can log all of your emotions and thoughts digitally, securely too. The smartphone in your pocket can become a tool for collecting those valued moments for later analysis. If you’re looking for a strong journal application, we’d recommend our own, Therachat.

Using this free, secure journaling tool with journal activities created by therapists, you can collect emotions, thoughts and document your state through this application. It’s recommended by many therapists and comes with built-in reminders. An added bonus for your schedule means, your smartphone is portable and easily accessible allowing you to add notes at any time of the day.

2. Being Open

The best results of journaling come through being honest.

Inside of your journal, being as clear as you can with your emotions is valuable. Honesty in your journal breeds an opportunity to truly reflect on your emotional state. This open approach to your journal will help in real-time by providing you with the effective way to reflect on the events of the day or your feelings at that current time.

Getting started could be much harder when you need to be reflective. There are a host of prompts that can be made available through your therapist or even online allowing you a strong starting point to kick off your entries. Here’s a great list of journal prompts to get you started.

3. Morning Entries

One of the recommended times to enter into your journal is in the mornings. This potentially quiet segment of your day provides a window to add to your journal, distraction-free. Many journal takers love to enter their thoughts during this period of the day, after a long sleep allowing them a feeling of creativity to kick off their day.

A popular author and leading podcaster, Tim Ferriss recommends to start off your journal practice in the mornings for 15-minutes. With a cup of tea or coffee, he’ll sit down and enjoy his practice reflecting on his thoughts at that current moment.

Of course, you are able to enter entries multiple times during the day, however, a morning entry could push start your day with a sense of control by reflecting on the day before, or the day ahead.

4. Set a time limit

Your journal is a place to reflect. Once you get started, the practice is yours to adapt.

Setting a time limit for your entries is a good way to condense your writing and recap your emotions without the need for long entries. Many journal fans use time limits to keep things simple, setting a timer between 10 – 20 minutes long as a guideline to freely write about their emotions. If you see yourself as a slow writer, not a worry, set the timer to 30-minutes.

This has helped many of those journal users to keep on task and express all of their experiences in a healthy piece of writing.

Using your Journal

Your journal practice will get stronger and stronger over time. Taking your journal with you across the day is important. Capturing the stressful moment, concerns, and experiences will help to provide a window of control and venting. A lot of journal users love to have a portable journal in their bags to grab at any point to share all of their experiences.

Coming back to remind yourself to do your journal. A recommendation is to download a popular task manager like Todoist, or even Reminders on iOS to set recurring daily reminders on a routine, like journaling. Or you can use the built-in reminders a lot of journaling apps offer.

This will help reduce stress around making sure you are taking the time to do this.

Where to write?

We’d recommend going with what suits you best. Many people use notebooks, others have migrated towards the digital applications. Digital tools can be scary. The act of downloading an application, writing on your iPad feels very alien to those who love the feel of a notebook, but it can appeal to many lovers of technology because it comes with added benefits of all entries being available 24/7, having built-in reminders and many more.

There are a host of digital journal tools available now for your iPhones and Android phones making your practice portable to wherever you go. The power of your devices allows you to add photos, videos, day information and much more about your day to your journal entries. If you’re a tech lover and following therapy, you can also recommend to your therapist. Through Therachat your journal entries will immediately be shared with your therapist so they can follow you in between sessions and provide actionable feedback, giving you the best result from entering into your journal.

So whether you’re keen to use your journal on your iPad or on a fresh-new notebook, it all works!

How can your Therapist use your journal entries?

Bringing your journal to treatment will help your therapist towards tailoring the session. Remember your therapist isn’t going to be there during the week so they will not know about all of the experiences that you encountered.

Like with anything new, journaling will become easier to adapt to your daily routine. Making sure you add your entry will slowly become a habit, and your pieces will evolve into a fluid piece of writing perfect for assessment from your therapist if that’s the path you choose. Rounding up, through the use of a journal, will help to fill in the gaps and help to customise future sessions with you accordingly. For many therapists, clients (you) having a journal is a perfect way to enhance your treatment and further extend your homework to benefit your condition.

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Journal therapy is one of the many helpful resources for those suffering from mental health issues as it helps to develop a healthy routine of reflection and documentation. Make sure to follow along with our Blog to keep updated with all of the journal-related advice you need!

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Let us know in the comments below about whether you’ve ever tried a journal or have considered it? Or if you’re a journal pro, feel free to share what works for you!

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