This week I chose to explore how daily journaling can be a form of mindfulness. Journaling has always formed a regular habit of mine, though I tend to engage with it more so when I’m stressed rather than as a daily meditation. I chose this as my weekly practice to see if daily guided journaling had any sort of benefit to me.
When doing some research into journaling and mindfulness, I found an interesting article on Verywellmind.com regarding the uses of journaling. It outlines the value of journaling as a problem solving tool, as well as a trauma coping mechanism. However, the utility that struck me was using journaling to foster gratitude through daily reflection.
This link provides their outline for gratitude journaling, which I found to be a helpful framework: https://www.verywellmind.com/writing-in-a-gratitude-journal-for-stress-relief-3144887
The format I chose to follow was to answer and reflect on 3 questions in the morning every day:
- Who am I most grateful for today?
- What ability am I most thankful for today?
- What intention do I want to set for today?
The first two questions are specific to reflecting on what I’m grateful for, and the third prompt focuses more on what I want to change on or improve on in the day.
I found these questions valuable for a few reasons. Mostly, it forced me to take time every morning to slow down, think, and create a focus for my day. Throughout the day if I felt flustered or tired, I was nice to come back to the thoughts I had created at the start of my day to remind myself what I have to be thankful for and also what I wanted to achieve with my day.
This is a practice that I hope to continue beyond this inquiry. So far, I have found journaling to be the easiest “meditative” practice to incorporate in my lifestyle and the most valuable.
