Transform Your Middle School Diary Into a Journal

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It doesn’t have to be all “Dear Diary” – unless you want it to be

By Claire Leibowitz

Picture yourself laying down on your stomach, holding a pink frilly pen, legs kicked and crossed in the air, writing in a big diary that says “KEEP OUT” in big red letters on the front. Now get that thought out of the way, and don’t think about it again.

A certain stigma exists against mental illness, associated with a distaste for various coping mechanisms. Journaling is beyond a tween girl sitting on her bed in a cliché movie. Personally, journaling was part of my 2021 new year’s resolution to be more in tune with my emotions.

I tried hand-writing my thoughts out every night, but it was hard to stay consistent. I was always unmotivated and almost too lazy to put my thoughts down on the page. At that point, I had been using notion, so to organize my deadlines, reading list, calendar, and to-do lists. The website has a huge selection of templates and messing around one day, I saw they had a journal template.

I organize it by day, and particular entries are sometimes cataloged, like the one in the photo with colored blocks and symbols. Most days, I just do a Google search of “journal prompts to better yourself,” scroll through a few links and settle on something that feels challenging. If I’ve had a hard day, I’ll vent and process it. If I think about something from the past, I’ll let that out. I turn my daily journaling into what I want it to be. It’s different every day. And no, I don’t start by saying “Dear Diary.”

But why is journaling important in general? There are so many mental health and cognitive benefits that enhance the mind and your mood overall.

Positive Psychology offers several reasons and tips to journal. The practice, in general, stimulates both the left and right sides of the brain: the left uses analysis and rational thinking to process emotions, and the right uses creative expression through writing and thought.

Also, according to Positive Psychology, journaling is able to boost mood, enhance a sense of well-being, improve working memory, work through trauma and break through inhibited emotions. It’s a way to calm and clear the mind, release negativity, explore experiences, enhance your self-awareness, shift perspective, increase optimism, and progress towards goals.

The website offers the best tips to get the most out of your journaling experience: keep it personal and do it on your own terms. I do my thinking at night before I go to bed, but it doesn’t matter if you choose a different point in the day. It’s also important to keep it as consistent as you can. I stay on top of it during the weekdays, giving me about five solid days of reflection a week. Finally, you don’t have to share your thoughts with anyone, so write freely with the notion that it’s just for your eyes.

The University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) also calls for journaling to manage anxiety, stress, and depression. Because a large percentage of students have been diagnosed with mental illness, journaling is a positive and easy coping mechanism that has many advantages. The URMC also claims that journaling helps prioritize problems, fears, and concerns and helps you become aware of your habits and actions, so you can work on becoming your best self.

Journaling is a great resource to utilize: it’s free, it’s easy, and it’s proven to be effective. The current mental health stigma needs to disappear. Accepting our problems can make us more open. Journaling can help us with acceptance and steering us towards the paths we want to choose.

There’s no wrong way to do it, as long as you feel good doing it. You can search for any kind of prompts: self-discovery, self-love, a bad day, a good day, to get out of your head, to get deeper in your head, certain moments or milestones, challenges, or anything that comes to mind.

Journaling is not the frilly cliché that’s been stuck in our heads, but a powerful coping mechanism that processes our emotions, thoughts, and habits to make us the best versions of ourselves.