Getting Through the Hard Stuff with Journaling

• Recording your thoughts in a medium outside your own head helps your mind to become quieter: It stops returning to the same worn-out mental loops over and over. 
• When you recount and reflect upon your thoughts and experiences you are, in effect, telling your own story. Journaling helps us clarify, edit, and find new meaning in these narratives.

It serves as a tool for identifying what you should prioritize on a daily basis, and what you should let go of. And it also gives you a record of the progress you’ve made toward your goals to keep you motivated.

• When you keep a journal, you can look back on important life events to read about how you felt at the time. You may also be able to learn from these past experiences.
• Writing about traumatic events results in physical and psychological health benefits. Journaling focuses on understanding traumatic events and makes people see these events with an extra level of clarity.

Start your daily journal off on the right foot by scheduling your writing for a set time every day.

• If you find your mind is most active in the morning, wake up 15 to 20 minutes earlier and jot down your thoughts then.
• If you prefer to record everything after the day is over, then make it an evening activity before you go to bed.

• Write about your activities.
• Write about what scares you.
• Write about your decisions.

3 pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-conscious, done as soon as one wakes.

They are not meant to be art. Or even writing. They need not be smart, or funny, or particularly deep. It's a form of “brain drain”, a way to expel all that angry, petty stuff that spirals through our subconscious and muddies our days.

• Boost in mindfulness
• Better memory
• Better communication skills
• Improves mental health
• Better sleep
• A stronger immune system
• More self-confidence
• Higher I.Q.

Using a Bullet Journal as a productivity tracker helps you see what all you have done and what is being neglected. It tells you if what you are doing is healing to you or is counterproductive.

Manually making a mental health tracker, and filling it daily to check your anxiety, depression, sleep, energy levels or even pain can tell you if there are any trends in the symptoms.

Daily tracking of progress and improvements, noting down one or more successful activities, or any small thing done right every day, can boost your mental health. The idea is not to condemn yourself but to motivate you towards positive progress.

1. Get a Journal and Writing Utensils
2. Start an Index Page: The backbone of your BuJo system, like a table of contents in a book
3. Create Logs - places where you can brain-dump tasks, projects, goals
4. Pick Signifiers: Many people use bullets for lists of tasks, circles for events, and dashes for notes. 
5. Document Items with Collections: Collections are running lists and anything you want to remember for later(like blog topics, books you want to read etc.)

• A future log helps you keep track of items that aren’t yet on your immediate radar.
• Monthly logs include things like calendars and categorized goal lists for the next 30 days.
• Daily logs may includes entries of to-dos, meetings, and reminders.

• Journaling can be used to sort through turbulent emotions and to discover hidden lessons from your experience.
• Art journaling: using mixed media can help you express yourself in refreshing and unusual ways.
• Journals can help you reflect. Journaling is a method of allowing the light of understanding and compassion to shine on your past.

• Start writing about where you are in your life at this moment. Describe your living situation, your work, and your relationships.
• Don’t edit your thoughts or feelings and don’t correct your grammar. Don’t censor your thoughts.
• If there’s something you are struggling with or an event that’s disturbing you, write about it in the third person.

Organizing unnecessary items is wasting energy. 

• Have less stuff.
• Eliminate outdated articles to read “someday." 
• Find an appropriate place for everything and make sure it is easily accessible. 
• Choose one tool and stick with it.
• Pack tools immediately after use.

It eliminates methods and ideas that no longer work and promotes the more important things. 

Writing down the 5 things you're most grateful for every day has tremendous power on the level of your overall happiness.

Writing down your goals and tracking the action steps that are being taken towards them is a great way to identify areas of growth so more can be done to maintain consistent progress, even on a bad day.

You can start a bullet journal in pretty much any empty notebook that you have lying around. That’s all you need. A journal and a pen. 

However, it is much more likely to use a bullet journal every day when getting some joy from the materials you're using. That means that a nicer journal and some bright, funky pens are also a great way to get started and enjoy the process a bit more. 

A page where you can write down any future appointments or dates for a month you haven’t set up yet. 

That way you can easily reference it to see if there’s a dentist appointment coming up or a deadline sneaking up on you.