Journaling for Self-Discovery: How Writing Can Help You Find Clarity + 10 Journal Prompts To Help You Get There
Love it or hate it, journaling is a big part of the healing process. I myself have struggled with this whole journaling thing for literal years. I never really got what everyone was doing, filling these journals with pages and pages of…something. One of my biggest hang-ups around it was that I would just sit down and try to reflect on my day or get out some heavy, pent-up emotions. About a quarter of the way through, I'd have filled up my shiny new journal with inane ramblings, and I’d get sick of it and hide the journal under my bed – never to be heard from again. (Until eventually we’d be moving, I’d find it under there all covered in dust, and I’d chuck it in the dumpster.)
But after many an unintelligible journal entry, I finally figured out a few key things:
Journaling is a practice. It's like meditation or yoga, you need to work at it consistently to develop a better relationship with yourself and with life.
Modern-day journaling is more than just recording the day's events like you’re some historical figure and you need to give the researchers something to base your biography off of.
If you go into journaling with a goal, a plan, and some targeted prompts, you’ll start seeing results down the line. Let's say your goal is to work on self-discovery to improve your self-esteem and get clarity about yourself and what you want out of life. Your plan should be to write in your journal for 15 minutes per day using prompts designed to help you work on just that. (Kind of like the 10 prompts I’ve provided below.)
Finally, the real power of journaling lies in allowing your subconscious thoughts to come out. We all have unspoken thoughts or memories that sit in the back of our heads, set to Shuffle like a disjointed 8th-grade iTunes playlist. If you never get these thoughts out and work through them they will never go away. Neuroscientists call this “verbalization”.
In this post, you'll learn how to use journaling for self-discovery to create clarity around your purpose in life and being the best version of yourself. You'll also find 10 journaling prompts for greater self-awareness. (Plus some details about how to work through each one.)
10 Science-Backed Reasons that Journaling Can Help with Self-Discovery and Clarity
This section is for all you nerds in the audience (jk jk I am one of the nerds). I dug through the internet to find 10 scientifically-proven reasons why journaling is an extremely helpful practice. (Plus sources are at the bottom of this page.)
If you need a bigger nudge to leap into starting your journaling practice, look no further:
Journaling Reduces Stress and Anxiety
A study published in the journal Advances in Psychiatric Treatment found that expressive writing can help alleviate stress and anxiety symptoms. Journaling lets you process and release negative emotions. This reduces your stress and anxiety levels. Like what I said above, if you never verbalize the problems they stay sitting in the back of your head, festering. Verbalizing looks like speaking it aloud, typing it out, or writing it down. (Verbalizing is what makes talk therapy effective -- it gives you the chance to speak your inner story out loud.)
A Journaling Practice Improves Your Mood
Research in the Journal of Research in Personality shows that positive journaling improves mood and well-being. Writing about positive experiences for a few minutes each day can significantly enhance mood and psychological well-being. This is why so many people stick with a daily gratitude journaling practice.
Journaling Enhances Your Self-Awareness
A study in Psychological Science showed that reflective writing improved self-awareness and understanding of personal experiences. Journaling supports self-awareness by helping you explore your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in your own judgment-free zone. You can increase your self-awareness with the 10 self-discovery writing prompts included in this post.
A Journaling Practice Can Strengthen Your Immune Function
Research in Psychosomatic Medicine showed that writing about stressful experiences can boost your immune response. Expressive writing (or writing where you let out your true feelings) is linked to improved immune function.
Journaling Boosts Your Memory and Comprehension
Journaling helps improve your working memory and comprehension skills. A study in The Journal of Experimental Psychology found that writing about personal experiences enhances memory retention and cognitive processing. This intuitively makes sense, if you’re writing about your personal experiences, you’re bound to remember them better. I think you can go one step further – the revelations you uncover about yourself and your feelings about those personal experiences have a healing effect that sticks with you strongly because you wrote it out. You know…instead of just mulling it over in the shower… I even feel like the revelations I have in therapy don’t stick with me as well as what I uncover in my journaling practice.
Encourages Goal Setting and Achievement
A study published in Psychological Bulletin highlighted the effectiveness of written goal-setting in achieving personal objectives. In short, writing about your goals and tracking your progress makes you more likely to achieve them. People say that writing down your goals makes you 42% more likely to achieve them. (This comes from research by Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University of California.)
Journaling Helps You Process Your Emotions
Research in Emotion found that expressive writing helps you process and understand your emotions better. Journaling lets you lay everything out and make sense of what you’re feeling. If you struggle to allow yourself to feel your feelings, this is something you can work through in your journaling practice – and you don’t have to feel bad, society has conditioned us to suppress our emotions. It’s called “emotional numbing”.
Journaling Improves Your Communication Skills
A study in the British Journal of Health Psychology found that a regular journaling practice can improve your verbal and written communication skills by encouraging practice and reflection on how to express your thoughts and feelings clearly. I don’t know about you, but communicating my feelings to the other humans is hard. It’s nice to get a chance to practice in my journal…
Journaling Promotes Problem-Solving Skills
Research published in Cognitive Therapy and Research suggests that writing about challenges and brainstorming solutions can enhance problem-solving skills.
A Regular Journaling Practice Supports Mental Health
A study in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that journaling can be an effective tool for managing depression and enhancing mental well-being. They found that regular journaling reduces symptoms of depression and improves mental health. If you struggle with depression, like I do, the biggest struggle with this can be actually getting yourself to pick up the pen and get writing. My biggest suggestions for this are to internalize the positive impact your journaling practice can make, set a goal to write for 15 minutes daily (write it down), and schedule it into your calendar at a consistent time that will actually work for you. And then you can follow along daily with some free journaling prompts, like the ones in this blog post.
By making journaling part of your routine, you can experience these scientifically-proven benefits in your journey towards self-discovery and clarity. Seriously, everyone reading this should try it for just 30 days. I like to keep a page at the front of my journal where I jot down the things I learn about myself – kind of like a summary page. Later on, you can go back to that summary page and see how big of a difference journaling has made for you. This is why I like to include a summary page at the beginning of all my downloadable workbooks.
10 Journal Prompts for Self-Discovery, Better Self-Esteem, and Greater Clarity in Life
1. “What are your core values, and how do they align with your current lifestyle and career choices?" Reflect on what truly matters to you and how your daily actions and decisions align (or don’t align) with these values.
Identifying your core values is a huge part of my coaching program. The reason is that so many of us are living by values that we learned when we were children from the adults in our life. Without realizing it you’re living out those values – even though they don’t matter to you or align at a core level. This is one of the reasons why you’re unfulfilled by your life, even though you checked all the boxes you thought you were supposed to check.
2. "When do you feel most alive and fulfilled? Describe a moment when you felt completely in tune with yourself." Write about experiences that make you feel deeply connected to yourself and your passions.
These can look like experiences that fill you up or give you energy. These are things that, even though they may be physically tiring, leave you feeling excited and fulfilled. If you got to do this stuff at work all day, you’d be bouncing in through the door when you got home from work at night.
3. "What are the biggest challenges you’re facing right now, and how can you approach them with a growth mindset?" Identify current obstacles and brainstorm ways to tackle them while maintaining a positive, growth-oriented attitude.
Approaching life with a growth-oriented mindset opens doors to being your best self. You can actively develop a growth mindset with your journaling practice. A growth mindset looks like understanding that you can improve, grow, and change as a person. You’re not stuck being this one way forever. You can learn new things and solve problems. If you had to look for solutions to the problem you’re facing, what would those be?
4. “How do you define success, and what steps can you take to achieve your personal vision of success?" Explore your personal definition of success and create an actionable plan to achieve it.
I give you permission to define your success in terms other than money. As you work through this prompt, describe success with tons of visual imagery. Your subconscious does not know the difference between reality and imagination, so make what you write something amazing. Then, when you break it out into steps, make those as specific and measurable as possible.
5. "What self-care practices nourish your mind, body, and spirit? How can you incorporate them more regularly into your life?” List your favorite self-care activities. Develop a plan to make them a consistent part of your routine.
Make sure these are things that actually make yourself feel cared for – not just the things that Instagram has branded as acts of self-care. If you were a child or a beloved pet, how would you take care of you?
6. "What limiting beliefs do you hold about yourself? Reframe them to empower your personal growth." Identify negative beliefs that hold you back and transform them into positive affirmations that support your growth.
The things that the mean voice in your head says about you aren’t true. A lot of us have built our own cages out of the things we tell ourselves that we’re not capable of or the things that we could never change – but it’s simply not true. You can do and be and create anything in this world, it’s just your mindset that is holding you back.
7. "Who are the people in your life that uplift and inspire you? How can you strengthen those relationships?" Reflect on the supportive relationships in your life and consider ways to nurture and deepen these connections.
The only relationships you should be growing are the ones that make you feel good. These are the relationships that are mutually giving, fun, and fulfilling.
8. "What passions and interests have you neglected, and how can you make time for them again?" Revisit hobbies and interests that you’ve set aside and plan how to reintegrate them into your life.
Think back to the things you said you’d give more time and energy to, back when you were feeling super relaxed right before New Years Day. As soon as you hit the end of that first week of work in the new year, your beautiful and unique aspirations were buried beneath a mountain of email, laundry, and grocery shopping.
9. "What does your ideal day look like? Describe it in detail, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep." Envision your perfect day and consider how you can bring elements of this ideal into your daily life.
Don’t skip anything! Get as detailed as you want – it doesn’t matter if it’s “too expensive”, this is just a journaling practice, girl! Write it allll out and then see if you can make it a reality.
10. "How have you grown and changed over the past five years? What lessons have you learned, and how have they shaped who you are today?" Reflect on your personal growth journey and the key lessons that have influenced your development.
I said it before and I’ll say it again: you are capable of anything. Reflecting on your growth over the past five years can help show your subconscious what you really can do. Some negative things might start coming up when you do this. (Maybe you feel like you’ve gone backward on some things over the past five years.) Try focusing on what’s gone right, and how you can improve – instead of beating yourself up.
There you have it! Use these journaling prompts to work on your self-awareness and discovery. Try working through one each day for the next ten days. You don’t even have to have a real journal. You can do this in a Word doc or in the notes app on your phone – what matters most is that you try it out.
If you’re looking for even more clarity about yourself, check out my downloadable workbook for self-discovery! It includes two guided exercises designed to help you go deeper. (It’s free, you’re gonna love it.)
