Journaling | Intuition Development | Emotional Wellness
Tune In To Your Inner Voice
Access the healing powers of your inner guidance through journaling exercises, daily journal prompts, tools for building intuition, and resources for emotional wellness & emotional healing.
Affirmations For Perfectionism
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!
Journal Prompts For Finding Yourself
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.
Gain New Insights Into Yourself With These Illuminating Self Growth Tests
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.
Find Comfort With These Journal Prompts For Sadness
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.
Self Talk For Anxiety To Get You Through Anxious Moments
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!
Self Care Journal Prompts For Nurturing Mind, Body & Soul
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.
How Intuition Benefits Wellbeing
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.
Cozy Journal Prompts For Self Love
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?
10 Topics For Journaling Your Way To Emotional Wellness
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.
Warm Gratitude Prompts For A Grateful Heart
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?
Let Happiness In With These Happiness Journal Prompts
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?
Grounding Journal Prompts For Embodiment
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?
Night Journal Prompts For A Peaceful Heart
Ending your day with journaling can be a relaxing way to ease out the hustle and bustle of the day. Journaling at night can also help you connect with yourself, understand yourself better, and ease into sleep. In this article you’ll find night journal prompts along with four fun night journal exercises that incorporate poetry, music, meditation, and free association into your journaling practice.
Night journal prompts
Here are a few night journal prompts to end your day with! Choose a few night journal prompts from the list below and use them every day, or mix up your night journal practice and choose different prompts every night.
What’s one thing I can do to make myself feel cared for this evening?
How connected with myself did I feel throughout the day today? How grounded (in the present moment and connected to my body) did I feel today? How often did I check in with myself today to see how I was doing and what I needed?
Healing Journal Prompts For Mental Health
These journal prompts are designed to help you work through difficult emotions when they arise and to help you explore the state of your mental health and consider what better mental health looks like for you. I’m not a therapist and this isn’t the same thing as therapy, these are simply questions that have helped me improve my own mental health. A lot of the journal prompts on this website are journal prompts for mental health, so feel free to explore and find journal prompts that are a good fit for you. Check out the suggestions for more mental health journal prompts at the end of this article, too.
Journal Prompts For Positive Self Talk
We can be so used to the way that we talk to ourselves that we don’t notice when our self talk is impacting us negatively. When I really started paying attention to the way I talked to myself and questioning my self talk, I was surprised to see how unkind I was being towards myself. Working on changing my self talk was one of the first steps in my healing journey (read a little more about that here, if you’d like). Working on my self talk was part of how I learned to create safety for myself, and this felt sense of safety unlocked the door to a bigger emotional healing journey.
Paying attention to the way I talked to myself and journaling and reflecting on my self talk was very helpful to me, and I hope it will be helpful to you as well. To that end, these journal prompts for positive self talk are designed to help you take an inventory of your self talk, evaluate your self talk and explore the roots of your self talk, and make a plan for creating positive self talk.
Journal prompts for positive self talk
As you work through these journal prompts, keep in mind that some of your self talk may be full phrases or sentences that you consciously say to yourself in your mind. However, some of your self talk might be fleeting thoughts that cross your mind without being fully put into words, and your self talk may even be a pattern of behavior or pattern of emotional response without accompanying words (I like to think of this as the internal equivalent of all the non-verbal cues that get exchanged when you’re communicating with someone else).
Find Freedom With These Journal Prompts For Perfectionism
I saw a Gloria Steinem quote that said, “Perfectionism is internalized oppression,” and I thought, “Ugh, that is, unfortunately, very true for me.” It took me many years to realize that my perfectionism stemmed from a traumatic childhood. In fact, it took me many years to even realize that my childhood was traumatic. (You can read a little more about that in my post on What I Wish I Knew Earlier about Healing Psychological Trauma if you’d like.) When I accepted and began to process the ways in which my childhood traumatized me, it was easier to see the ways that I continued to function by the rules of my childhood. In childhood “perfect” behavior was required from me in order to “earn” love and the right to have emotions, set boundaries, and be my own person. The rules were always unclear and ever-changing, and even if they had been clear, I would never have been able to live up to them. The end result was that I continued to endlessly strive to be more and more perfect in every facet of life to earn love and the right to simply be a human with my own emotions, body, and opinions. I’m very much still a recovering perfectionist, but I know that I have the tools now to continue to step away from perfectionistic tendencies and it’s something I’m actively working on.
These journal prompts are designed to help you explore what your perfectionism looks like and the “whys” behind your perfectionism. I hope they’re helpful to you on your journey to overcome perfectionism!
Get To The Root Of Your Anxiety With These Journal Prompts For Anxiety
When I’m feeling anxious, I’m usually tempted to “run away” from the anxiety by ignoring that it’s there. Unfortunately, this doesn’t usually help to resolve my anxiety or the underlying reasons I’m anxious, and even worse it tends to cause my anxiety to build up until it feels large and unmanageable. I have found that taking deep breathes, running cold water over my wrists and/or face, and leaning into the anxiety and expressly acknowledging to myself that I’m anxious helps. Making these coping mechanisms a habit has helped my anxiety, and learning to acknowledge and lovingly accept my emotions as they arise has helped reduce my overall instances of anxiety.
What Is Shadow Work?: How Your Shadow Self Can Free You To Live Authentically
Your shadow contains everything you don’t know about yourself, so how can you meet your shadow self?
What does “shadow self” mean?
Psychologist Carl Jung described the shadow as unconscious aspects of personality. These shadow parts of our personalities are not necessarily good or bad, they are simply parts of who we are that we aren’t aware of. The shadow self is composed of aspects of our personalities that it feels too scary to see. Our shadows are made up of parts of ourselves that we don’t think should be there for whatever reason. Our shadow selves could contain desires we don’t think we should have, emotions we don’t think we should have, and needs we don’t think we should have. The idea that these aspects of our personalities are undesirable might come from childhood, our culture, or significant experiences or relationships in our lives.
Mindfulness Prompts for Connecting With Your Body
What does it feel like when your mind and body are connected?
The way in which our minds and bodies interact with each other has a profound impact on our daily lives and our physical and emotional health. Spending some time reflecting on our mind-body connection in a big picture sense can help us to identify what’s working for us and what’s not when it comes to cultivating mindfulness in our daily lives. I invite you to explore - and journal about - your mind-body connection. If it feels helpful, use the journal questions below to start.
Reflect On Your Relationships With These Journal Prompts for Relationships
How do your relationships impact your life?
Our relationships with friends, family, co-workers, and significant others have a profound impact on our lives. Despite the power of relationships in our lives, we may not commonly take the time to reflect on how our friendships, acquaintances, and other relationships impact us and how we impact those in our lives. I invite you to take a relationship inventory by reflecting on, and journaling about, the relationships in your life.
If it feels helpful, use the journal questions below to start.
Write down the names of 3-5 people you are around on a regular basis, or the names of 3-5 people who have the greatest impact on your life right now. For each person, answer the questions below.