Journaling for Self-Reflection

A daily reflection journal in 5 minutes

Choose three questions, write for 5 minutes, and finish with one line about tomorrow.

Pick questions you can answer with facts: "What took most of my energy today?" works better at the end of a long day than "Who am I?" Then write what happened and what you felt, without stopping to fix spelling or to be fair to yourself. When the 5 minutes are up, finish the sentence and add one thing you will do or watch for tomorrow.

The same time each day makes it easier to keep going. Evening works well for many people, because the day is still fresh.

12 journal prompts for self-reflection

Three groups of four. Mix groups when you choose your three.

Today

• What took most of my energy today, and was it worth it?
• When did I feel most like myself today? What was I doing?
• What did I say yes to today that I wanted to say no to?
• What surprised me today, about someone else or about me?

Patterns

• What feeling came up more than once this week? What was happening each time?
• What do I keep putting off, and what is the first small piece of it?
• Where did I act on my values this week? Where did I not?
• What story did I tell myself today about someone? What do I actually know?

Next

• What would I do differently if today happened again?
• What is one thing I want more of next week, and one I want less of?
• What do I need right now that I haven't asked for?
• What is one thing I learned this week that I want to remember?

Reflection or rumination? How to tell on the page

Reflection and rumination look alike on paper: both are about you, and both can run for a page. They end in different places.

The table is our short version of a split that comes from research. In 1999, Trapnell and Campbell showed that the habit of paying attention to yourself is two separate tendencies: reflection, driven by curiosity, and rumination, driven by distress. Treating them as one habit had hidden why people who look inward a lot tend to know themselves better and yet feel worse ^[1].

In a 2011 study of 121 students, insight, meaning a clear sense of why you feel and act as you do, was the only one of six self-focus measures that predicted higher well-being on every scale. Rumination predicted lower well-being on three of the scales ^[2]. That is why the pad asks, after you write, whether you noticed something new.

If most entries end up as rumination, the steps in how to stop ruminating are built for that.

Write about bad days, relive good ones

Analyze the hard days on paper. For the good days, write to enjoy them again.

In two of three experiments by Lyubomirsky and colleagues, students spent 15 minutes a day for three days on their worst or their happiest experience, by writing, talking into a recorder or just thinking. Writing or talking about the worst experience improved life satisfaction and health four weeks later compared with thinking about it privately. For the happiest experience, it went the other way ^[3].

In the third experiment, students who analyzed their happiest day in writing ended up worse off than those who simply replayed it ^[3]. So for a good day, a line like "the call with my sister at 7 p.m., when we laughed about the dog" does more than "why did today go well?"

Journaling for self-awareness: look for patterns

Once a week, read your last seven entries in one go and underline anything that shows up twice: a feeling, a person, a time of day. Then write one sentence about it. The pattern is often clearer from a week away than on the day itself.

Write about thoughts as well as feelings. In a 2002 experiment, 122 students journaled for a month about a stressful event. Those who wrote about both their thoughts and their feelings became more aware of the positive side of what had happened; those who wrote only about feelings reported more illness symptoms during the study ^[4].

Does reflective journaling help?

A little, on average, and more for some people than others. A meta-analysis of 146 randomized studies of writing or talking about personal topics found a small positive effect (r = 0.075), with results that depended on how and by whom it was done ^[5]. Those studies tested structured writing, not daily self-reflection journals as such; we found no trial of the daily kind. Use the journal to notice things; it is not a treatment.

When to stop writing

Stop or change course in these cases:

• If you feel worse after each entry for a week, stop and switch to something you do with your body, such as a walk.
• If every entry ends at the same hurt, write one line about it, then put the journal away for the day.
• If writing brings back a traumatic event in detail, stop and come back to the room with 5-4-3-2-1 grounding. Work through trauma with a therapist rather than alone on a page.
• If the thoughts on the page are mostly harsh things about yourself, a self-compassion meditation is meant for that.

For writing aimed at worry, see journaling prompts for anxiety; for noticing what went well, gratitude journal prompts.

Frequently asked questions