What is journaling, and how to do it without overthinking

Journaling sounds like a method, but it's the oldest habit there is: writing down, fairly regularly, what happened, what you thought and how you felt. There's no right notebook, no right time and no right length.

What the word did help with was getting rid of the “dear diary” feel. A journal can be a list, three sentences on the bus, one question answered, a voice note recorded in the car. The point is getting it out of your head and into a place you can come back to.

The most common formats

• Daily log: what happened, with whom, where. The simplest one, and the one most worth re-reading.
• Free writing: a few minutes writing whatever is in your head, without fixing it and without re-reading.
• Prompts: one question a day, answered honestly. Good for the days when nothing seems worth noting.
• Gratitude: noticing, in detail, something that almost slipped by.
• Mood: noting how you are, from light to heavy, and what was going on.
• Spoken: telling the day out loud and turning that into text later.

You don't have to pick one forever. Plenty of people start with the daily log and reach for the others when the log won't come.

How to journal for the first time

Promise very little. Five minutes, or three sentences, at a moment that already exists in your routine: after a shower, on the way home, while the coffee brews. Write the date and start with the last thing that happened. If you get stuck, switch to a question. If you get tired, stop. What counts is coming back tomorrow, not writing a lot today.

Mistakes that make people quit

• Promising a page a day and giving up on the first tired evening.
• Writing with a reader in mind. There won't be one.
• Copying someone else's beautiful notebook and feeling bad when yours doesn't look like it.
• Treating a skipped day as failure, instead of just writing today's entry.

Notebook or app

A notebook is great if you like writing by hand and actually carry it around. An app wins on two things: it's always in your pocket, and it lets you find what you wrote months ago. Before choosing one, it's worth knowing who can read what you write, whether you can take everything with you, and whether it works offline.

And if writing is exactly what stops you, talking solves a lot of it: tell the day the way you'd tell someone, and let the text come from that. It's still journaling.