How Journaling Helps with Depression: 4 Easy Steps That Guided Me
Journaling has emerged as a powerful tool for managing mental health, particularly in addressing depression and anxiety. As someone who has experienced two bouts of depression, I can attest that journaling helps with depression. I am not a doctor or medical professional in any way, but I am a human who has dealt with depression twice in her life. So this post is about how journaling has served me well to get out of depression and off my meds during my first depressive period.
I was first diagnosed with depression at the age of around 25 years old. This depressive episode lasted around one year. The second time, which was 7 years later, required medication for almost 2 years. Looking back now, both times the processes in my head that finally led to a total dysfunctioning of me in daily life were the same: I let my intrusive thoughts, the spiraling of negativity take over, which left me feeling ultimately hopeless, helpless and overwhelmed.
I have let MY negative thoughts go wild, thoughts that I unconsciously created, repeated over and over again and gave all of my power to. So in the end, there was no energy left for “real” life. And this is exactly where journaling came in. Looking back at the journals from the first time, these are the processes I went through and I hope that they can serve some of you as well:
Step 1: Capturing Negative Thoughts
I began by writing down all the intrusive, negative thoughts that plagued me daily. This helped clear my mind and made me more conscious of my thought patterns.
To see them written down, written with your own hands, makes you more conscious about them. Potentially, this step already creates a feeling of relief. Some days we just feel overwhelmed without knowing why. But if you go deep and wide on your life’s struggles, you get clarity.
Maybe you thought you had tons of problems, when in reality you circle around one or two topics the whole time. You now have a list of thoughts like “I hate my job so much”, or “The way I look, I will never have a boyfriend” – just to name two examples from my notes.
Step 2: Categorizing Thoughts
I grouped my thoughts into different life areas (e.g., work, relationships, health). This organization provided clarity on the main sources of my distress.
You might have negative thought patterns in many areas of life, or maybe it all comes down to how uncomfortable you feel at your job or how the mess in your apartment is killing all your joy. If those are the two main issues, I would have categorized them as “Job” and “Living environment”.
Step 3: Identifying Priority Areas
I focused on the area that had the most significant impact on my well-being first. For me, it was my job situation. Choose the area of life that you think (trust your guts) has the most impact on your well being at the current point in time
It is a subjective feeling on what impacts your life most, or to say it differently, where a change will have the most positive impact on your life. Are you so worn out after 10 hours on a job you hate that the rest of the day is just miserable as well? Do you come home from work and want to relax but all you find is a chaotic apartment full of stuff you don’t even need? For my part, I was so paralyzed by my job and knew I needed to work on that problem first before I was able to work on anything else.
Step 4: Taking Action
Using my journal, I analyzed the problem, made sense of it, and created an action plan. This step required honesty and the courage to make uncomfortable changes.
This is where you need to dive in, this is where action is required first. Once you have decided which problem you want to give your attention to first (no wrong or right here, eventually you need to work on all of them anyways), use your journal to analyze, make sense of and lay out an action plan to get it out of your way.
This seems like the hardest part for some people, because it requires absolute honesty towards oneself as well as the actual doing of uncomfortable things. However, nothing changes if nothing changes and in your life, you are the only one who can change something. Also, as soon as you write down what you need to do to fix that thing and you just can’t do it, the solution will still continuously squirrel through your head and at some point you will eventually be ready to take action.
After I realized that my new job would never allow me to be myself and the toxic environment in that office was murder to my spirits, I quit my job the next week. I did not allow myself to spiral down the negative thought-lane of “I will never get a new job”, “That will look so bad on my CV that I quit after only 6 months” and the like – I took the action that I needed to take to pull myself out of depression. I got my ass up and did what was inevitable anyways.
Conclusion
Journaling is a powerful tool for managing mental health. It provides clarity, promotes self-reflection, and encourages action. By writing down our thoughts and feelings, we can break free from the cycle of negative thinking and take steps towards healing.
Understanding that I was the creator of all my thoughts, negative and positive, made me realize that I had all the power. The meds have helped me in the initial state to get out of bed at all, but I only truly progressed once I worked on my problem areas one by one. What I needed to understand was, that I created these thoughts myself and they only became so powerful, because I kept thinking them again and again, going down a rabbit hole that led absolutely nowhere. Because thinking is not acting, it’s just pretending to be active. True action is healing, one tiny step at a time.
Remember, recovery is possible. Take it one step at a time, and don’t hesitate to seek professional help when needed. You have the power to change your thoughts and, consequently, your life.
You can do it too! A warm, understanding hug
Viktoria
