Journaling for Depression 

Suffering from depression can affect you physically, mentally, and emotionally. It is 
something millions of people go through every day, desperately trying to find the 
magical cure. While you can’t cure depression, there are many ways you can relieve the 
symptoms and learn to live a healthy, well-adjusted life.

One excellent practice to start is journaling. This is amazing for depression and many 
other mental health disorders, providing a way for you to distract your mind, find triggers 
for your depressive episodes, and giving you something healthy to do during your worst 
moments.

Here are some things to know about journaling for depression.

1. Why You Should Keep a Journal

Have you ever kept a journal? If you’re looking to make certain types of self-
improvements, keeping a journal might be a really great habit to start. Making manual 
and process based augmentations to your mental health can be exhausting, but the 
new studies have shown that there can be far reaching benefits to journaling but what 
could those be? This can help you to understand yourself and others. The following 
article with be discussing a few reasons why you should keep a journal. 

Tame Your Emotions

As you gain more experience with the ebb and flow of your own emotions, it will become 
a lot easier for you to document and observe what kinds of things are occupying your 
mind. When you journal, you are recording the instances that put your responses on 
display. You can go back to moments and gain insights into how these patterns work. 
This allows you to see patterns that give you entirely new sets of information. 

Learn to Problem Solve

What do you do with the information you’ve collected? Well, that all depends very 
heavily on you, but the main focus it to be able to look at the picture that your patterns 
create. Do you react to certain things differently during certain times of the day or 
season? Who were you around when you did these things, what was the weather like, 
and so on. 

Recall Sharpens Cognitive Skills

How good is your memory? Some people can only remember song lyrics and phone 
numbers while other can remember entre lines of dialogue from childhood movies. 
When you have to recall information from your memory, you are strengthening your 
cognitive abilities. The more you do this, the more you will become proficient at recalling 
stored information in your mind. The longer you do it, the more easily you will be able to 
remember bits of stored information. 

Be More Creative

When you're in the habit of writing, it begins to come naturally. You will become more 
aware of the paths that you can travel to achieve goals. 

You Can Achieve Clarity 

By studying your patterns, you can discover the most likely causes for triggers, and 
maybe devise ways to soften the blow. With hard work over time you may be able to 
overcome many of the issues that are taking away your time and effort.

2. Recording Your Triggers

Have you experienced some strange sensation from a triggering event recently? When 
you’re examining your triggers, it can be very difficult to know exactly when you are 
experiencing a triggering event. For some people, the symptoms can be very obvious 
while others could manifest in very different ways. This can vary from person to person, 
and even from situation to situation, so that it was this article will be focusing on sharing 
some information on the importance of recording your triggers in a mental health 
journal.  

Self-Awareness Is Important

One of the most difficult parts of this process is getting to the point where you can 
identify when you have had a triggering event and what your response was. If you are 
seeking some help from a professional, knowing this information can make your 
recovery a bit more efficient. You will have a better understanding of your behaviors and 
reactions to stimuli. 

Display the Full Month

When you are making your chart to record when you were triggered, be sure to include 
the entire calendar for the month. This will allow you to easily track when the event took 
place and see if there are correlations between the time of month, time of week and so 
forth. You’ll also be able to see how many time per month just by flipping through each 
day. The goal of making this kind of journal is to have the information available within 
seconds of looking at each page. 

Recount the Day's Events 

It’s important to record everything that happened, especially anything that sticks out in 
your mind as to what may have triggered you, whether it be encounters with people, 
animals, situations, or sounds. Sometimes you may even need to reconsider what 
you’ve recorded after some time has passed. You might be very surprised to find that 
some things bothered you more than you first thought. 

Describe How You Felt

This is another important step to pay close attention to. You want to leave space at the 
bottom of each page where you can write some descriptions of your feelings that came 
about as you responded to the trigger. It can be extra helpful to color code these 
emotions so that you can make a chart and see how your mood changes and how it 
relates to triggers. 

3. Practice Depression Self-Care with Journaling

Do you ever find yourself having a hard time getting out of bed, or wanting to take that 
shower before work? When you’re dealing with deep depression, it can be very difficult 
to do the daily activities that need to be done to care for yourself. It’s okay to need to 
have reminders of these things because all people go through times where certain tasks 
aren’t at the top of their list of things to do. This article is geared towards sharing a few 
tips on using a journal for self-care.

Ruminate on Your Feelings

How often do you typically sit and think about how you really feel? Sometimes it takes a 
while to really know how you feel about certain things. Emotions can be very difficult to 
process, and if you’re missing certain bits of information, then you could be in for a 
shock. Don’t try to do it all in your head, use the journal to know when you got upset. 
Record who was in the room, and how you felt.  

Create A List of Gratitude 

One very solid way of grounding yourself is to make a list of tall of the things that you 
are grateful for. This can show you just how wrong you are when you're feeling like the 
world has turned its back on you. Write down how you feel knowing that there are 
people who care about you. Are there any colors that you would associate with those 
memories. 

Be Patient with Yourself

Above all, it’s very important to remember that you are a work in progress. You have the 
right to make good healthy choices about what you want to do. Feel free to forgive 
yourself for mistakes. Mistakes can teach you about yourself in shocking ways. As you 
record these different time periods you are slowly building evidence to help you to find 
out what might be causing you to have intense reactions of different kids. Just be sure 
to have time to yourself every so often.

Make Time for Exercise 

Use your journal to help you give yourself reminders about what needs to be done. 
Seeing them in your journal repeatedly will usually give you the re-enforcement that you 
need to stay motivated. Take a moment to work out according to the plan you have in 
your journal. Once you’ve finished it, cross it off the list. 

4. Journaling Exercises for Depression

Learning to cope with depression can be quite a journey, but it can be extremely 
rewarding to find ways to cope and overcome the feelings that can prevent so many 
people from being able to effectively carry out tasks in their daily lives. What are the 
ways that you’ve chosen to deal with depression? There are tons of ways to do so, but 
one effective and healthy way to work out depression is through the act of journaling. 
The purpose of this article will be to explore a few aspects of journaling for depression. 

Remember Good Times in Detail

The first exercise to look at is one where you choose positive memories to recount. 
Think deeply about the experience and try to put the entire thing to paper. Remember 
smells, tastes, how the air felt, and anything else sensory that you can remember. 
Focusing on this can help you to see how impactful the good times have been and help 
you to focus on more of the positive experiences that you've had. Record each aspect in 
detail and see what you come up with. 

Learn to Be Separate from Emotions

It’s important for you to separate yourself from your emotions. It’s been said by many 
wise people that it’s difficult to see what's going on until you’re out of the situation. This 
can be even more true than you expect so it’s good to practice thinking logically about 
the things that are going on and avoid looking at them through the lens of sensitive 
emotions because those things could steer you into the wrong direction. 

Define How You’re Feeling

To get to the root of how you feel it’s absolutely essential to give a real name to the 
emotions that you experience during recall. When you’re dealing with or confronting a 
certain memory, be sure to include something like,” When I thought of (this situation) I 
felt ______.” It’ll be easier to know what's going on when you isolate each section of 
thought as you go through. This will give you a better picture of how the entire situation 
affected you and not just one singular moment. 

Be Aware of Physical Sensations While Recalling Memories

Lastly, when you are remembering things, it can be tremendously helpful to record the 
responses that you are having during the recall. If you feel somewhat ambiguous about 
your feelings, this will be likely to give you a clearer picture of how you’re reacting to 
memory. 

5. Tips for Journaling with Depression

I can be really hard to do what you need to do when you're in the middle of a serious 
bout with depression. The feelings of futility and frustration can be massive challenges 
for anyone. It’s at this point that you will have to make a choice about what you are 
willing to accept. Research into cognitive therapies has shown that keeping a log of your 
emotional responses can give you insight into how you feel about what you experience 
and how much control you have over those emotions. 

Devote Time to Writing

If you don’t spend time writing you’ll not be likely to ever really get anything down. Too 
many people worry about when it’s a good time to get something down or if what they 
say has any merit. Just get it written. The goal is to simply record your thoughts and 
feelings. You want to discuss details so you can discover any patterns. 

Discover What May Be Triggering Depression

The primary purpose of keeping a journal is specifically to find anything occurrence, 
encounter, or moment where you might be discovering a triggering event. By having it 
aligned with a calendar and a list of events that took place, you can figure out if it's the 
time of week, time of month, or if your emotions are tied to a recent event that may have 
affected you on a deeper level. 

10 Things That Depression Takes from You 

Write down the things that depression makes difficult, or impossible. Depression is 
highly responsible for isolation, and self-esteem issues. These powerful insecurities can 
bleed over into other areas of life, thus creating groups of self-imposed roadblocks. 
These can be some of the hardest to remove because they come your worst critic. You. 
Focusing on the many positive experiences can be a road to health and contentment. 

Appreciate A Good Memory 

One exercise that can help tremendously is that of focusing on a positive experience 
and documenting all that you can remember. What things did you see? What colors are 
present? This is intended to not only show you that you have some really great 
memories, but also so that you can recall vivid sensations associated with the memory. 
This can help put you in a better mood and occupy your mind with more pleasant 
thought. 

