Journaling for Anxiety Report Topics

If you are someone with anxiety, you already know how hard it is to live with. Anxiety in 
general can really have a negative effect on your life. It keeps you from social situations 
in work and in your personal life, can impact the fulfillment you find, and even get in the 
way of daily tasks like driving or going out for coffee. 

Anxiety has so many different faces and is never the same for everyone. However, with 
all that it does to you on a daily basis, there are also many ways to find treatment and 
reduce the effects of anxiety, including those panic attacks you might endure. 

While it si important to keep seeking help from your doctor and mental health 
professional for anxiety, there are also some natural remedies to consider. One of them 
is journaling.

This report will go into journaling and how it helps with anxiety, including using it for 
specific anxiety disorders, finding triggers, and giving you insight into what you should 
write about in your journal.

Keep reading to find out how you can use a journal to help with your anxiety.

1. Why Journaling Helps with Anxiety

You now know that journaling is one of the top recommended ways, especially natural 
methods, for helping with anxiety – but why? The answer is complex, but starts with one 
main principle: writing things down can help provide emotional and mental healing. 

The concept of journaling is not new by any means. People have been writing in diaries, 
journals, and notebooks for many years. It provides so many wonderful things, but 
improving your focus to helping you de-stress through the act of writing out your 
thoughts and feelings. Mental illnesses like depression and stress can also be improved 
with journaling, but let’s talk about why journaling helps with anxiety. 

You Can Start a Thought Journal

When you have anxiety, journaling gives you the perfect opportunity for recording all 
your thoughts and feelings. This is often referred to as a thought journal. While you can 
definitely use your journal for things other than just your thoughts and feelings that day, 
this is one the primary benefits to using one.

If you have anxiety or panic attacks, you can start writing down all your worrisome 
thoughts that are causing these anxious feelings. It can be anything from being afraid to 
be in social situations if you have social phobias to generalized anxiety and the 
frustration it causes you. Be as descriptive as possible, and it not only lets you get those 
thoughts out, but it can help you find ways to reduce the anxiety side effects as well. 

It Allows You to De-Stress

Through writing down your thoughts and feelings in the journal, you can also de-stress 
and get some of the frustrations out of your head. With anxiety, it creates a multitude of 
issues with your mental and emotional state. With added stress, it has a tendency to 
magnify everything you are experiencing, to where you feel like you can’t possibly 
handle anymore.

Use your journal as a way to unload all of the stress and worry. Write down not just your 
thoughts in terms of your anxiety, but everything bothering you. Do a brain dump in the 
journal where you explain all your worries, frustrations, venting and yelling at your 
journal, just using it as an opportunity to tell someone (or something) what you are 
dealing with at this moment.

Journaling Provides a Quick Distraction

With anxiety and panic attack disorder specifically, journaling can help distract you 
when you need it most. Anxiety disorders can do a lot for your psyche, affecting nearly 
every area of your life. You might need a good distraction that is healthy and will keep 
your mind on something else. What better way to distract yourself than journaling? Here 
are some examples:

If you have a social phobia and are in a public place, write in your journal so you don’t 
think about other people in the room.
With generalized anxiety disorder, use the journal to write whenever you feel anxious.
For panic attack sufferers, write what you are feeling and what you think caused the 
panic attack. 

You Can Find Your Triggers

We will go more into this in a later section, but one of the reasons you should journal if 
you have anxiety is to find your triggers. Everyone has triggers – those situations, 
people, or even sustenance that can create an emotional or physical response as a 
result of your anxiety. While there are some common triggers, like caffeine and stress, 
many people have very specific and abnormal things to trigger their anxious feelings 
and panic attacks.

By journaling daily about your thoughts and what is worrying you, you can actually look 
back on previous days for patterns of what might be triggering these feelings. 

It Helps with More Clarity and Focus

Finally, journaling is going to give you more clarity and help you find the focus you need. 
Anxiety disorders can be so damaging to your mental health because they overwhelm 
you, make you fearful almost constantly, and affect personal and professional lives as 
well.

If you suffer from anxiety, journaling not only helps you get all those negative thoughts 
on paper, but through writing, you can find clarity. You will discover where your anxiety 
is coming from and just might be able to figure out a way to reduce these anxiety 
responses to live a more fulfilling life. You gain more perspective just through the act of 
writing.

2. Journaling for Different Types of Anxiety

Journaling is not only good for all mental health disorders and anxiety in general, but 
there are some specific purposes to use journaling for the individual anxiety disorders 
you might be experiencing. While there are many types of anxiety, it is especially useful 
for these 5 major types of anxiety. Keep reading to find out how you can write in your 
journal if you have any of these anxiety disorders. 

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

This is probably the most common anxiety disorder, and often the one people are 
referring to when they mention that they have anxiety. With generalized anxiety disorder 
(GAD), you experience anxiety at any time, often not triggered by anything. Some 
people with GAD have severe panic attacks, while others experience frequent worry 
and fear, often irrationally. As you can imagine, it can really affect your quality of life 
when you are constantly anxious about anything and everything.

Luckily, journaling is here to help you with your anxiety. If you have generalized anxiety 
disorder, journaling can help in the following ways:

Expelling your worries – If you have a lot of worries or fears that are exacerbated by 
the GAD, then journaling is crucial for you. It can help you not only talk about what is 
worrying you or causing those anxious feelings and thoughts, but actually expel them. 
You can write them down, and one by one, look at the reality of what is causing you 
anxiety. In many cases, you understand that they are a result of the anxiety.

Finding your biggest triggers – This is also true of other anxiety disorders, and is 
going to be repeated more than once. The reason is because finding your triggers for 
GAD is one of the most important parts of treating it and having a better quality of life 
with anxiety.

Distracting your mind – Just like most other anxiety disorders, journaling can really 
help if you need a good distraction. With GAD, this might be if you are having a panic 
attack, or just on a day when your anxiety is at its peak and you can’t settle your mind.

Panic Disorder

The next anxiety disorder you might be suffering from is panic disorder, or panic attack 
disorder. With this type of anxiety disorder, you get panic attacks that can range from 
mild to severe. They often come out of nowhere, but many of them do have things that 
can trigger them. Also keep in mind you can have panic disorder along with other 
anxiety disorders like generalized anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder.

If you have panic disorder, try these journaling methods to help you:

Look for patterns – The first thing you can do is look for patterns in your thoughts and 
feelings, in order to figure out what is causing your panic attacks. Like GAD, they can be 
completely out of nowhere, where you never really figure out what is causing them. But 
you might find that simple things like being in a social situation, drinking too much 
caffeine, or not exercising enough can be making your panic attacks more severe or 
more frequent.

Journal during a panic attack – Don’t just journal in between your panic attacks if you 
have this anxiety disorder, but during one. As soon as you feel one coming on, get to a 
place where you can write about it. If you can handle it, write about what you are 
feeling, including when the physical or mental effects started coming on. This can 
distract you enough to start reducing the severity of the attack, but also help you look for 
patterns in the future.

Describe what has helped – Another way to use journaling if you have panic disorder 
is to look at what is helping you reduce your symptoms. Over time, you might find that 
going for a walk every afternoon, getting a pet, or talking to someone during peak 
anxiety times has helped. This is really important information to continue improving your 
quality of life with anxiety.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, is a type of anxiety that is a little more 
complex than GAD or panic disorder. With OCD, there are two parts to it. The first part 
is having those anxious thoughts, also known as obsessions. Then they lead to 
repetitive behaviors as a result of the thoughts, which is where the compulsions come 
in. Unlike other anxiety disorders, you don’t usually have panic attacks, but instead the 
worries and thoughts lead to those compulsions. 

Many people think about someone turning lights off and on 10 times or washing their 
hands obsessively when they think of OCD, but it can often be subtler. You might have 
more minor obsessions and compulsions that simply take away your focus and make it 
hard to keep a job or start a new project. Regardless of the severity of your OCD, 
journaling can help you as well.

You can use journaling for two things with OCD – your obsessions and your 
compulsions. Here is how:

Keep track of your obsessions – The first way to use journaling for OCD is by writing 
about your obsessions. These are all those anxious, overwhelming, and excessive 
thoughts you might have that lead to the compulsions. This is another way of talking 
about your triggers, as you can see where the thoughts come from, and what causes 
them to manifest into a need to complete your compulsions. The simple act of daily 
journaling and writing down all your thoughts can help you see patterns about where 
these come from.

Write about your compulsions – Not only should you write your thoughts down, but 
the resulting actions as well. These will be your compulsions. They can vary depending 
on the person, so you might find that when you start thinking about germs in an 
unfamiliar environment, you will start scratching at your skin or have an immediate need 
to scrub your skin raw. This is unhealthy physically, but also mentally. Write down any 
time you notice a reaction you have to certain thoughts.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

This anxiety disorder is something not many people understand completely. It is often 
associated with people who have come back from war or gone through other terrible, 
traumatic experiences. With post-traumatic stress disorder, it can be caused from any 
type of traumatic event, including those that other people who didn’t experience it, might 
not see it as severe enough. However, you should never underestimate the effects of 
PTSD, no matter what level you have it.

With PTSD, you experience stress and panic attacks as a result of the traumatic event 
you went through. This can be anything from a childhood of emotional and/or physical 
abuse to being in a severe car accident or surviving a natural disaster. You typically 
experience the severe reactions and panic attacks when you have flashbacks of what 
you went through.

Therefore, the main way to use journaling with PTSD is to talk about the event you 
experienced whenever you feel that you need to. You already know what triggers the 
response to your PTSD – which is of course the flashbacks. They often feel so real you 
can harm yourself or others when you are having a bad flashback. Journal every single 
day, talking about anything and everything. Talk about the traumatic event when you 
can, but don’t feel like you have to. The act of writing can be helpful with PTSD in any 
context.

Social Anxiety Disorder

The last anxiety disorder we want to talk about is social anxiety. This type of anxiety is 
when you get the panic or anxious feelings when you are in a social situation. Like 
every type of anxiety, the conditions and severity can vary depending on the person. 
Some people will have social anxiety when they are at a party or with a large group of 
people, while others experience it any time they leave their house. 

Journaling for social anxiety provides a few benefits, including the following:

Giving you something else to focus on – The first way journaling helps with social 
anxiety is by giving you a distraction. There will be times when you can’t avoid social 
situations, but it is often easier when you have something to occupy your mind (and 
hands). You won’t think as much about other people when you are writing in your 
journal. You can write about anything, including how you are currently feeling fearful of 
the situation, but you can write about many other things. Bring your journal everywhere 
with you, so if you are in a coffee shop and feeling anxious, you have something to do.

Helping you understand your anxiety – Journaling also helps you to understand more 
about your social anxiety and those situations that make it worse. Back to those triggers 
again! With social anxiety, there are usually specific situations you get into that are 
going to worsen the panic you feel. For some people, it is severe where every time you 
are around someone you don’t know, including just being at the grocery store, makes 
everything worse. Others have a harder time with speaking in front of an audience or 
starting a new job. Any time you feel anxious being in a public or social situation, 
describe what you were doing, who was there, and how you handled it.

Providing a way to move forward – Through journaling, you can start moving forward 
and find resolutions for your social anxiety. There is no cure for a social phobia, but you 
can learn what makes it worse, and look at ways you have helped yourself cope in the 
past.

3. Using Your Journal to Stop Panic Attacks

For this section, it is time to talk about specific benefits of journaling for anxiety. 
Specifically, using journaling to help with your panic attacks. As you know, a panic 
attack is your body’s response to feelings of fear, anxiousness, worry, and often terror. 
It can be exacerbated by people or situations, but in many cases, you don't even know 
where the panic attack came from. 

If you have ever had a panic attack before, you know the symptoms, but here are some 
common ones in case you are not familiar with it:

The feeling of impending doom
Thinking you are having a heart attack
Sudden increase in your heartbeat
Heart palpitations
Trouble breathing or swallowing
Chest pains
Sweating or chills
Feeling like you have no control
Numbness or tingling
Lightheadedness
Feeling “out of your body”
Tunnel vision

You can have any combination of panic attack symptoms, from just a few on this list, or 
others that you notice. This can be excruciating to live with, especially if you are 
someone that gets the panic attacks more severely, or more frequently. You might have 
panic with panic disorder, GAD, social phobia, or PTSD. 

Luckily, there are ways to help with your panic attacks, including journaling. Here are 
some ways to use journaling if you have panic attacks:

Make a List of Your Panic Attack Symptoms

 When you start feeling a panic attack come on, try to get to a place where you can 
write in your journal. The first thing you should do is make a list of all the symptoms you 
are having. This act is going to be useful in the future, but also help to keep you 
occupied and relieve some of the symptoms by writing. Make a bullet point list of what 
you feel or think at this moment.

You can make a longer description next to each one, or just be brief with having 
dizziness, tunnel vision, a headache, or a racing heartbeat. Write them down so you can 
look back on it later. 

Be Detailed With What You Experience

Before going further, keep in mind that it is hard for some people to concentrate during 
their panic attack. If you find that writing about it while it is happening makes it worse, 
put the pen down and find another way to relieve your anxiety. However, if you can 
handle it, try to write down what you are experiencing. Be as detailed as possible, 
including what you were doing before the panic attack came on, and how you started 
finding relief. Every detail counts and can help you find ways to avoid these attacks in 
the future.
 
Write Yourself Down from a Panic Attack

People with panic attacks already have an arsenal of things they try to do to get down 
from the panic attack. There are many methods, some of which might work great for 
you, such as:

Listening to music
Watching your favorite show
Doing deep breathing
Meditating
Coloring or making art
Talking to someone else
Counting backwards from 100

Aside from these common tactics, you can also try writing in your journal. The act of 
writing is helping you on multiple levels. It is distracting your mind, especially if you are 
journaling about something other than your panic attack. You can also talk to yourself 
down by writing about your thoughts and what led to the attack, explaining to yourself 
that it is not an actual heart attack – reminding yourself it will be over in just a few 
minutes. 

4. What to Journal About

Now for the fun stuff – what to write about! You already know that you can write down 
experiences of panic attacks and record your triggers, but there are many other things 
to write about in your anxiety journal. Here are some different ideas:

Bullet Points of Thoughts and Worries

This does go back to the triggers slightly, but it can also be more complex. A journal is 
similar to a diary, where you can talk about your today, explain your experiences, and 
reflect on your day. Another way to use it is to just talk about your thoughts, worries, 
fears, and feelings. Taking a few minutes out of your day to really delve deep into your 
own psyche and figure out what goes through your head is therapeutic, particularly 
when you suffer from anxiety. You can just have a bullet point in your journal each day 
about each thought or feeling, or you can describe them in great detail.

How You Feel Today

Why not use your journal like a typical feelings diary? This is an easy way to get started 
with writing in the journal each day. Just talk about how you are feeling at this moment, 
and how your feelings have changed throughout the day. This can also be therapeutic 
and over time, help you understand your anxiety more.

What You Are Grateful for

Gratitude journals are a wonderful way to feel better about yourself and your situation, 
and reduce some of your stress and worry. This is really useful if you find that 
sometimes irrational worries or stress in your life is exacerbating your anxiety and panic 
attacks. Every day, write something you are grateful for. Even on your worst day, you 
should be able to find something that was good. It can be a big thing like a promotion or 
a small thing like having a nice chat with a friend or being appreciative of your family. 

Writing a Letter to Someone Else

Sometimes you might not have much else to write about in terms of yourself, so you can 
use this opportunity to write to someone else. This is a letter you will never send, but 
can help you understand yourself more and how others impact you. Here are some 
letter ideas:

Write to a family member who has passed – If you have a family member or close 
friend who is deceased, there are likely many things you want to say to them. Perhaps 
the letter is updating them on what you have been up to, talks about how much you 
miss them, or even says things you never got a chance to say to them before they died. 
There is a type of comfort and closure that comes from this type of letter in your journal.

Write to your past or future self – You can also write a letter to yourself, either a past 
or future self. If you have made some mistakes in your life and feel like you are caught 
up in the regret, try writing a letter to your past self. This gives you the chance to accept 
what has happened, and allows you to let it go and move forward. A letter to your future 
self is a way of practicing mindfulness and taking actions now that can help you become 
that future version of yourself you are writing to.

Write to a fictional character – This is more of a fun letter that lets you talk to a 
fictional character, such as from a book or movie. It is great for being more creative in 
your journal and finding your passions and interests.

Write to someone who has impacted your life – This can be anyone who has had an 
impact on your life, good or bad. It can be a type of thankful latter to someone who has 
brought comfort and joy to you, helping you to focus on gratitude. It can also be 
someone who has had a negative effect on your life, who you have always wanted to 
talk to about what they have done or caused in your life, but for whatever reason, never 
got the chance to say to them.

Explaining Your Biggest Fear

Another thing you can talk about in your journal is your biggest fears or a collection of 
fears. This is good for people with anxiety because you can interpret these fears and 
rationalize them. In many cases, they have a root cause that isn’t quite what you 
thought. It is great for gaining more clarity and really analyzing your thought processes 
and what motivates you.

Talking About the Good and Bad

The last idea we have for you is to explain good and bad in your life. This can be a 
general idea of what you feel are your strengths and weaknesses, or a bullet point of 
something good and something bad that happens to you each day. The reason this is 
recommended is because the good helps you be grateful for something, while the bad 
helps you learn from your mistakes, do better, and grow as a person.

5.  Journaling Prompts to Help With Your Anxiety

If you are finding it difficult knowing what to write about in your journal, don’t worry! You 
are definitely not alone in this. You will probably find out that some days it is easy to 
write for pages at a time, while other days you feel stuck and like you are too stressed 
or overwhelmed with anxiety to know what to write about. This is when journaling 
prompts come in handy.

Journaling prompts provide questions or statements that give you a direction for your 
journal entry. Some of them require a few simple sentences, while others really open 
the doors for more complex and detailed journal entries. Here are some journal prompts 
that are great for someone with anxiety:

1. __________ makes me feel worse.

2. I want to __________, so I need to work on my social anxiety. 

3. I hate my anxiety because…

4. Right now I feel _____________ and I want to feel ___________. 

5. Describe your greatest strength. Follow up with how grateful you are and ways you 
use it daily.

6. Do the same with your greatest weakness, but write about how you can improve it.
7. List 10 things you are most grateful for.

8. Talk about ways you can get help with your anxiety.

9. Talk directly to your anxiety, writing a letter to it. 

10. Describer what your emotions feel like.

11. Think back on when your anxiety first started, explaining it and where you think it 
came from.

12. Be creative and describe a short story where you no longer have anxiety. 

13. Explain how you would help someone feels who is suffering from the same anxiety 
disorder as you. 

As you see, there are many ways to go with this. The most important thing is that you 
keep writing every day in your journal.

