Journaling | Intuition Development | Emotional Wellness

Stress is a (not so pleasant) part of life. Sometimes it feels like the way to “beat” stress is to power through and keep going until it disappears because we’ve solved whatever issue or problem is causing us stress. There’s certainly something to be said about buckling down and dealing with the concrete issue at hand, but it’s also important to take a moment to sit with our emotional experiences surrounding the stressors in our lives. It’s hard to believe in moments of stress, but – in many ways – the emotional stress response is actually separate from the thing that has us stressed out. Often, if we’re able to work through the emotional experience of stress, the underlying issue that elicited the stressful feelings disappears or becomes easier to deal with. I find that journaling helps me to sit with my emotions and work through them when I’m in need of some stress relief.

I’ve put together these journal prompts for stress relief to help you work through the emotional experience of stress and bring relaxation to your mind and body.

On a scale of 1-10 how much stress are you experiencing right now? Is this more or less stress than you feel on average?

What is stress? How do you know when you are experiencing stress? How do you know that you are experiencing stress right now?

What does this stressful experience physically feel like in your body? Where in your body do you feel the physical sensations? What do the physical sensations feel like? If you had to describe the physical sensations as colors and shapes, what colors and shapes are the physical sensations? Where in your body are the physical sensations located?

Besides “stress” what names would you give to these emotions? (Angry, sad, depressed, overwhelmed, anxious, scared, etc.)

I’ve come to believe that every emotion has a purpose. If there was no purpose for an emotion, our bodies wouldn’t produce that emotional experience. Now, this definitely doesn’t mean every emotion is pleasant, and it doesn’t even mean that we accomplish the purpose of the emotion each time it arises, but I do believe that every emotion – even anxiety – arises for a good reason.

For me, anxiety served as a helpful way to block out other emotions that it wasn’t time for me to address yet. Anxious thoughts are distracting, they keep us busy and leave us with no time or energy to address deeper matters. The unpleasant physical sensations associated with anxiety are also very good at convincing us to turn around and run from what we’re feeling because anxiety feels really unpleasant to sit with.

Anxiety is a natural, protective response of the human body that we’re all capable of calling upon. But, looking at my mother and grandmother, I can see that there is definitely an intergenerational dynamic to my relationship with anxiety. Part of that intergenerational dynamic is also being completely oblivious to the fact that we have anxiety. And what a grand plan that is! If you don’t even know you’re anxious, you’re an extra step away from getting to the root of the hard things you don’t know how to address yet.

Sometimes we go around life chasing purpose like it’s something that can be checked off a list. It’s tempting to believe that we will have - or find - purpose when we accomplish some tangible thing in the outside world. I wonder, though, is purpose more of a feeling that we’re seeking? The feeling of being connected to something meaningful, or maybe just the feeling of being connected at all?

Maybe that’s the case for you, maybe it’s not, but whatever has you seeking purpose right now, I know that you have important things to say to yourself that are worth listening to.

These journal prompts to find your purpose are designed to help you reflect deeply on what it means to have purpose, why purpose matters to you, and what the drive for purpose that you’re feeling has to tell you about yourself and your life’s journey.

What does it mean to have a purpose in life?

Is it important to have a purpose in life? Why or why not?

Think of a time that you did something you felt had purpose. Write about your memory of this experience. What did you do? Why did this feel purposeful to you? What thoughts did you experience? What emotions did you experience? How did others respond to you?

What does it feel like to do something that has purpose? What other emotions do you associate with this experience? What physical sensations are associated with these emotions?

Self worth is a feeling of care, respect, and love for yourself. Let’s talk about why self worth matters, and how you can use these affirmations for self worth to work on developing your self worth. Plus, I’ll show you a couple other resources including a free printable, for improving your self worth!

I once felt confused about what self worth is and wondered why it didn’t seem confusing to other people. I remember learning about self worth in elementary school and being absolutely perplexed; we sang a song with lyrics that said, “I’m special, you’re special, too,” and I just remember thinking, “How does that even make sense?” In hindsight, I understand that my childhood experiences taught me that self worth was a bad thing to have. I also now understand that plenty of other people also find self worth to be a confusing topic.

So what is self worth? Self worth is a feeling (a felt connection) to yourself as a person deserving of care, respect, and love. One of the reasons self worth was so confusing to me was because I would have intellectually agreed that I deserved care, respect, and love, but I couldn’t feel any of that. In fact, I couldn’t feel much of anything because I was pretty disassociated and didn’t know it. There was also a whole subconscious part of me that didn’t believe I was worthy of care, respect, and love, because I didn’t experience much of that as a child. Until I could learn to connect with that part o me, the feeling of self worth was pretty elusive.

According to Plato, Socrates famously said, “[T]he unexamined life is not worth living…”. I think that’s taking it too far, but self reflection does play a very important role in living the good life. Without moments of self reflection we can find ourselves cut off from who we are and what makes like meaningful. Without sufficient self reflection, it’s all too easy to find ourselves living a life that isn’t truly aligned with who we are on a deep level. Self reflection is how we bring back to life parts of ourselves that have gone in to hiding in the face of pressure to conform and the humdrum of daily life.

There’s a line in a Rilke poem that I love that goes like this: “[T]hough we strain against the deadening grip of daily necessity, I sense there is this mystery: All life is being lived.”[1] Self reflection is part of tapping in to the heartbeat and the mystery of the life being lived inside you, so take a short break from the necessities of daily living to spend a little time with yourself with these journal prompts for self reflection.

Write about a moment in time when life felt really meaningful or fulfilling to you. Write about everything you remember about this moment including any sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and feelings that are associated with this memory. What about this moment made it feel particularly meaningful or fulfilling to you? Does this tell you anything about what makes life feel meaningful or fulfilling to you?

If your New Year’s resolution is to journal, you’re in the right place! We’re going talk about tips and tricks for making journaling your New Year’s resolution. From making a plan for journaling success in the new year to responding effectively to the hurdles along the way, we’ll cover how to incorporate journaling into your self care routine this year.

As you embark on your New Year’s resolution to journal, let’s talk about why you want to journal, what kind of journal you’ll keep, how often you’ll journal, how you’ll respond to moments of struggle, what you’ll need to get started, and what to do when your journaling plan just isn’t working.

Taking a few moments each day to connect with yourself through writing is a wonderful habit to get in to. These everyday writing prompts for your journal are designed to help you put together a daily writing routine using repeatable everyday writing prompts. If you’re looking for a unique writing prompt for each day of the year, check out this article with 365 Daily Writing Prompts.

I’m proud of myself today because…

The best thing about today was…

The hardest thing about today was…

The experience I had the strongest emotional to today was…I think I had a strong emotional reaction to this because…

Here’s one sentence to summarize my day…

I felt the most fulfilled today when…

Almost everyone dreams, but dreaming is still a bit of a mystery to all of us. Let’s explore the meaning of dreams with these quotes about dreaming from psychologists, a neuroscientist, mythologist, and classic literature. We’ll even explore quotes about dreaming from a TV series and a philosophical aeronautics engineer from the 1920s.

#1 Quote about dreaming

“Heaven and hell are within us and all the gods are within us…They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the organs of the body in conflict with each other.” Joseph Campbell in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers

Journaling about life's profound questions can offer valuable insights into your personal worldview. By gaining a deeper understanding of how you see the world, you become more aware of the reasons behind your actions and the way you approach life. Allowing your mind to explore these deeper inquiries also opens you up to the mysteries of existence and the vastness of the universe. I invite you to grab your journal and reflect on life’s mysteries with these deep philosophical journal prompts.

How do you know that an action is right or wrong? What does it mean for something to be right or wrong, ethically speaking? Is doing what is right important? Why or why not?

Is it ever ethically okay to do something wrong? If so, when is it okay to something wrong?

What is the meaning of life?

If you change over time and your cells change over time, what makes you still you?

Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did the first thing in the universe come from?

Struggling with perfectionism can be rough. Appearing “perfect” is rewarded in school, the workplace, and in plenty of other facets of life. Perfectionism provides us with the illusion that we can gain acceptance, love, belonging, and safety with hard work. But in the end, perfectionism takes a heavy toll on the body, mind, and soul, and it robs us of an authentic connection with ourselves and others.

Perfectionism has been a long-time struggle for me. I grew up in a household with a mother who used perfectionism as a coping mechanism to deal with an abusive childhood she refused to acknowledge, and she passed both the abuse and the coping mechanism of perfectionism on to me. I could still lower the standard I hold myself to (I definitely consider dealing with perfectionism an ongoing journey), but I cannot describe how freeing it was to finally “give up” and look at the reasons behind my drive for perfection rather than distracting myself with to do lists, tasks, and activities.

On the journey to let go of perfectionism, one of the early things I worked on was changing the way I talk to myself. At first, I thought all the going on about positive self talk was really hokey, but I now understand just how important talking to myself gently is. Affirmations for perfectionism were game changing for me, so below I’ve put together a few examples of positive self talk for perfectionism that I hope will be helpful to you as well!

Finding yourself often involves uncovering the things about yourself that you’ve hidden away based on messages you’ve received from the world about what is and isn’t acceptable to think, feel, do, and be. We all want to be loved, accepted, and connected to other humans. From the time we’re an infant we’re dependent on human connection for our very survival. We go throughout life with this hard-wired desire to connect and belong, and sometimes the need to connect and belong causes us to lose touch with deep parts of ourselves that we believe pose a threat to belonging and connection. Because living life as the full and complete you can feel like a threat to human connection, sometimes the journey to find yourself can be a bit scary and confusing. These journal prompts for finding yourself are designed to gently guide you through a conversation with yourself to help you re-discover the you that exists beyond the fear of what the world has to say about it.  

Your dream symbols are unique to you, but sometimes it helps to have guidance about what a particular symbol in a dream might mean to get started interpreting your dream. Use the information here about snake dreams as a guide, but don’t let it override your intuitive sense of your snake dream’s meaning for you.

Before you read about what your snake dream might mean, try answering these questions to tap into your intuitive sense of the meaning of your snake dream before you’re too influenced by the information in the rest of this article. It can also help to write out the answers to these questions in a dream journal.

What did the dream snake look like? What color or colors was the snake? What size was the snake?

How was the dream snake behaving? Was the snake sitting still? Was the snake moving? If so, how was the snake moving? What was the dream snake doing? Was the snake aggressive? Was the dream snake interacting with you or anyone or anything else in the dream? If so, how was the dream snake interacting with people and things in the dream?

Where was the dream snake located? What were the surroundings like? What was the dream snake near?

When was the last time you saw a snake?

Does the dream snake remind you of any particular snake you’ve seen before (in real life, a movie, television show, art, another dream, etc.)?

What was your emotional reaction to the dream snake? If there were other people in the dream, how did they respond to the snake?

I remember when I really wanted to work on self growth, but I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. I wish I’d understood then that self growth was already happening, but sometimes it can be hard to recognize progress! One of the first really meaningful ways I found help early in my self growth journey was through self growth tests like those I’m going to share in this article. I remember taking the Myers Briggs test and thinking, “Oh, I’m not abnormal or somehow wrong or defective; this really helps me to understand myself better.” I was fairly obsessive about it after that, and had many friends take the test and tell me their personality types. Once I knew my friends’ types, I would try to guess people’s types from observation or having them answer a few questions. I actually got pretty good at it!

Now, no personality type can describe everything about a person, but tests like this can be really helpful on the self growth journey. These self growth tests can help you learn new things about yourself, confirm things you already know about yourself, and bring together a series of disconnected ideas about who you are. All of these things can be incredibly helpful for self growth! Personality tests are also a fun way to get started with self growth because they’re pretty easy to take and the results can be amusing.

Here are a few tests that I’ve found helpful for self growth.

Sadness visits us all from time to time, and sometimes its hard to know how to help yourself when you’re feeling sad. These journal prompts for sadness are here to help you find comfort in yourself when you’re sad.

What does the sadness physically feel like in your body? Where in your body do you feel the physical sensation associated with sadness? What do the physical sensations feel like? If you had to describe the physical sensations as a color and shape, what color and shape is the physical sensation? Where in your body are the physical sensations located? How big or small does your sadness feel?

If you take deep breathes and move around a bit, do the physical sensations associated with sadness change? If so, how?

Is there a location in your body that feels nice (or neutral) right now? If so, spend a few moments breathing in and out deeply and focusing on this location in your body. Write about what this experience was like.

I love reading and I love journaling, but I’m more of an emotive journal writer. That’s why I love the idea of making your reading journal a place not just to record what you read, but to reflect on what the book meant to you and what you can learn about yourself and the world around you from your reading. These reading journal prompts were created to help you explore what your reading meant to you. Let’s get started!

My favorite quote from this book is: ____. I really connected with this quote because: ____.

The character I’m most like in this book is ____, because ____.

The character I’m least like in this book is ____, because ____.

The most important thing I learned from this book is ____.

I find that when I want to improve my self talk in a particular area it helps to record myself talking to myself the way I want to. I use the ThinkUp app for this, but you could also easily do this with any recording device on your phone. (The ThinkUp app is a nice way to add pictures and sound and organize your recordings into various lists if that’s something you’re interested in.) Then, if I’m feeling anxious, I can just play the recordings I made for myself on the topic of anxiety. With practice, this eventually helps positive self talk come more naturally in the moments its needed. If this feels totally hokey and annoying to you, that’s okay! I’ll be honest, when I first started doing this I was crawl-out-of-my-skin-uncomfortable, but that eventually passed.

The best positive self talk for your anxiety will be unique to you, but it definitely helps to have some examples of positive self talk for anxiety to work with, so here are a few examples of positive self talk for anxiety to get you started!

We get a TON of messages about what self care is and what self care isn’t. Despite all those messages (and maybe in part because of them), there was a time when I honestly found self care really confusing. In large part, this is because I was looking outside myself to answer my questions about what self care looks like.

We’re told self care is getting a pedicure, or buying ourselves a treat, or setting boundaries, or standing up for ourselves, or taking a bubble bath, or we’re told that thinking self care is pedicures and bubble baths is a “not deep” silly way to talk about self care. What I learned when I began to use journaling to really listen to myself is that self care can be a bubble bath, pedi, setting boundaries, or pretty much anything else that actually makes me feel cared for by me. Writing it out this way it seems so obvious, but this was truly lost on me for a long time.

Self care was definitely not something I was taught growing up, and I didn’t really know how to listen to myself to find out how I needed to experience care. It turns out that the self care I most needed was learning how to hear myself over the noise of ingrained coping patterns and societal messages. Journaling became my designated time to sit and listen to myself and hear about my needs and desires. As my journaling practice helped me connect more deeply with myself, I also learned to hear myself throughout the day. This made self care so much easier! Sometimes I fall into old patterns and quell my own voice and needs to accommodate someone or something else, and sometimes life is just hard and that makes self care difficult, but it is so much easier to meet my own needs now that I know what they are!

I wrote these self care journal prompts with the hope that these prompts will help you nurture your connection with yourself and learn what self care looks like for you.

To dig into how intuition benefits wellbeing, we first need to talk about what intuition is. I explored this more deeply in my post on what intuition means, but by way of recap here, intuition is a quick way of knowing that doesn’t come from logical reasoning or the conscious mind. Intuitive knowing comes from an accumulation of all the knowledge that we hold; some of this knowledge comes from our personal experiences and some of it comes from inherited instinctual information. Intuition is an important way that we arrive at conclusions and make decisions. We often think of intuition as being an animal-like instinct coming from our spirit, or a feeling more than an intellectual knowing. Intuition might speak to us through words, phrases, music, images, or symbols that float into our mind. Intuition is one of those things that can be hard to define in words, but easier to feel or explain metaphorically. With that definition of intuition in mind, let’s explore how intuition benefits wellbeing.

We’re already using our intuition, so we are better off when we learn how to use our intuition well.

What does it mean to love yourself? If this question feels hard to answer, that’s okay. We get a lot of conflicting messages from the world around us about what self love looks like and those messages can be hard to wade through. These journal prompts for self love are designed to help you connect with yourself so that you can hear what you have to say about feeling loved by yourself. Grab your journal and pen and cozy up for a conversation with yourself about loving you.

Think of a moment when you felt really loved by yourself. Write about this self love memory and include all the details you remember about this experience. What emotions did you experience? What physical sensations were associated with those emotions? What thoughts were associated with this experience? What led up to this experience? How did you feel beforehand? How did you feel afterwards? Why did this experience make you experience self love so intensely? How did this experience impact you in the moment? Has this experience with self love continued to impact you? If so, how?

How do you most commonly show yourself love? Do the ways you commonly show self love help you to feel loved? How do you know when you’re feeling loved by yourself?

How does showing yourself love impact your life? How would feeling even more self love impact your life?

Whether you’re just starting to journal or you’re already an avid journal writer, sometimes a little topical inspiration can help. There are many ways to use journaling to help you stay emotionally well, and I’m eager to share a few topics for journaling that I personally use to help with emotional healing and emotional wellness. (P.S. If you’re just getting started with journaling, you might want to consider what your goals for journaling are before checking out the topics for journaling below. You can take the quiz, What Type of Journal Should I Keep? if you’d like some help exploring your goals for journaling.)

Here are ten of my favorite topics for journaling!

Journaling Topic #1 - Journaling about topics you want to work on

If there are specific topics you know you want to work on for your self-development, journaling about those topics can be a great tool on your emotional wellness journey. You can use journal prompts or guided journals on the topic that interests you, or you can just sit down and write about the aspect of yourself you want to work on and record whatever comes into your mind. Here are a few sets of topical guided journal prompts to help you get started with this kind of journaling.

Even when you don’t understand the symbols in your dream, you can still learn something by analyzing your dream patterns. I recently read a very interesting dream study that analyzed more than 200 dreams and identified 5 dream types that almost all dreams fall into. Even more interesting, the study explained how as dreamers make psychological progress, their dreams move through these 5 dream types.

I’m excited to tell you what I learned from this very interesting piece of research (“Dream Content Corresponds With Dreamer’s Psychological Problems and Personality Structure and With Improvement in Psychotherapy: A Typology of Dream Patterns in Dream Series of Patients in Analytical Psychotherapy” by Christian Roesler), because to me it really drove home the importance of dream journaling to help track dreams over time. Full disclosure, I’m not a psychologist or therapist, but I do love dream journaling and reading about what psychologists have to say about dreams! What I read in this dream study absolutely rang true for what I’ve noticed in my own dreams, and I think it can help all of us better understand our dreams.

Let’s explore what it means to be grateful (and even what it means to be ungrateful) together. These gratitude prompts will help you recall grateful moments and memories, reflect on what you’re grateful for and how it feels to experience gratitude. These gratitude prompts are also designed to help you explore messages you’ve received about gratitude since childhood and delve into how those messages might be impacting how you experience gratitude today. Grab your journal, and let’s get started!

Gratitude Prompts

What are you grateful to have experienced in the last year?

Did you experience gratitude today? What are you grateful for about today?

When you were a child, did the adults in your life express or exhibit gratitude? If yes, what kinds of things were the adults in your life particularly likely to express or exhibit gratitude about? How did they express or exhibit gratitude (in other words, how did you know they were feeling grateful)? How have these childhood experiences influenced the way you express and experience gratitude today?

What is something that feels like of silly to be grateful for, but that you’re still grateful for? Why are you grateful for this? Why does it feel a little silly to be grateful for this?

Happiness is often something we desire, but it’s less common to actively reflect in a “big picture” way on what actually brings us happiness. These happiness journal prompts are designed to help you explore what happiness feels like, what it means to be happy for you, and what does and doesn’t bring happiness to your life. Grab your journal and let’s get started unpacking your conceptions about happiness and your experiences of happiness.

Finish this sentence with the first thing that comes to mind: “To be happy I need _____.” Why do you think this is the first thing that came to mind? Write one paragraph arguing that you need this thing to be happy. Write one paragraph arguing that you don’t need this thing to be happy.

When did you feel the happiest today? Write about everything you remember from the experience. What physical sensations were associated with feeling happy? How did you know that you were feeling happy? What about the experience made you happy? What thoughts were associated with the experience?

Write about a time in your childhood when you felt happy. What physical sensations were associated with feeling happy? How did you know that you were feeling happy? What about the experience made you happy? What thoughts were associated with the experience?

Explore what it means to be connected and attuned to your body and your five senses with these journal prompts designed to help you on the journey to live an embodied life. We’ll begin with journal prompts that explore your connection to your five senses, and end with journal prompts to help you reflect on what it means to you to live an embodied life.

Write about a childhood memory of having a pleasant emotional response to a sound, scent, or taste. Write down everything you can remember about the experience and how it felt. What emotions did you experience? What physical sensations were associated with those emotions?

Think about a texture that you find pleasant (this could be a food texture, clothing texture, etc.). Write about this texture in as much detail as possible. What does it feel like? What emotions do you associate with it? Why do you think you find this texture pleasant?

In an average day, how often do you consciously pay attention to and experience pleasant sensations associated with sound? Take a few deep breaths and then try to lightly focus on only the sounds you are hearing for 5 minutes. Describe the sounds you heard. How did you feel focusing on sound for a few minutes? What emotions arose for you? What physical sensations were associated with those emotions? What thoughts arose?

Journal through the month of September with me with these daily journal prompts for September! These September journal prompts explore a variety of topics. In September we’ll journal about memories, our first experiences of love, and the eras of our lives. We’ll also do a few fun journaling exercises involving poetry, free association, our dreams, and a personality test.

Journal Prompts for September 1st

What time period of your life do you feel most nostalgic for? What emotions accompany the nostalgia? What physical sensations do you experience in your body when these emotions arise? Why do you think you are being drawn to this time period of your life right now?

Journal Prompts for September 2nd

What is your first memory of feeling loved? Write about everything you can remember about this experience including how it felt emotionally to feel loved and what physical sensations were associated with those emotions.

Journal Prompts for September 3rd

In your journal, create a simple timeline of your life describing the “eras” of your life. How did you differentiate between the eras (schools, jobs, where you lived, friends you were close to, relationships, etc.)?

Journal Prompts for September 4th

What were your favorite books and movies growing up? Why were these favorites? If you remember the first time you read a favorite book or watched a favorite movie, write about that experience. Are there any similarities between these books and movies and books and movies you enjoy today?

Journal through the month of August with me with these daily journal prompts for August! These August journal prompts explore a variety of topics. In August we’ll journal about the life we imagine versus the life we live, living life with all five senses, and how we respond to the ups and downs of life. We’ll also do a few fun journaling exercises involving poetry, free association, our dreams, and a personality test.

Journal Prompts for August 1st

Think about a moment in childhood when you imagined what a future time in your life would be like. The imagined future time could be a big or small life moment; it could be an event that was happening the next week, imagining what life would like two years in the future, or what life as an adult would be like. What did you imagine this future moment would be like? What did you imagine this future moment would feel like? What was the future moment like in reality? How did the future moment feel in reality? What was similar about the moment you imagined and the moment you experienced? What was different about the moment you imagined and the moment you experienced? Did the moment you imagined influence how you experienced the moment in reality? If so, how?

Journal Prompts for August 2nd

What scent brings up the strongest emotions for you? What emotions does this scent bring up? Write about a time when this scent brought up strong emotions. Why does this scent bring up strong feelings for you?

Journal Prompts for August 3rd

Think about a time in your life when everything was going particularly well. What was going on in your life at this time? What emotions did you experience? What kind of things did you say to yourself about why things were going well?