How to Start a Journal

Nobody needs help writing the first entry. You buy a notebook or open an app, you write a page, it feels good. The trouble starts around day nine, when you're tired, nothing happened, and the notebook is in another room. Most of what follows is about getting past that point.

Write in whatever you already carry

Paper is lovely. It's slower, there are no notifications, and handwriting makes you pick your words. But a notebook only works if it's within reach when you have five spare minutes, and for most people the thing within reach is a phone.

So pick the one you'll actually have. If that's a notebook on the nightstand, good. If it's your phone, use a journal app rather than your notes app, mainly so entries get dates, stay private and don't mix with shopping lists. You can switch later. Don't spend a week comparing apps; that's a week of not writing.

Decide when, not how much

"I'll journal every day" doesn't survive a busy week. "I'll write after I brush my teeth at night" often does, because the toothbrush reminds you. Tie it to something you already do every day: the first coffee, the train home, getting into bed.

Keep the bar low. Five minutes, or three sentences. On a good day you'll write more without trying. On a bad day, three sentences is still a day you showed up.

Your first entry

If a blank page freezes you, fill this in. It takes about five minutes.

• Today's date.
• Right now I feel… (one or two words is enough)
• What's on my mind is… (two or three sentences, however small)
• One thing from today I want to remember:
• Tomorrow, I'd like to…

That's an entry. Tomorrow, do it again, or write about whatever's louder. Nobody will grade it, so spelling, grammar and half-finished thoughts are fine.

What to write when nothing happened

Most days are ordinary, and that's fine: ordinary days are the ones you forget first. Some ways in:

• What took up most of my head today, even if it was something small?
• What did I keep putting off, and why?
• Who did I talk to, and how did it go?
• What annoyed me? What made me laugh?
• What am I worried about this week? How likely is it, honestly?
• Describe the room you're in. Something else usually comes up within a few lines.

There are 120 more in our journal prompts, sorted by what kind of day you're having.

A few ways of doing it

There isn't a right one. Try a couple for a week each.

• Freewriting: set a timer for ten minutes and don't stop typing. When you run out, write "I don't know what to say" until something comes.
• Morning pages: Julia Cameron's idea from The Artist's Way, three pages by hand first thing in the morning, mostly to clear your head.
• Bullet journal: Ryder Carroll's system of short notes, tasks and events. Good if you think in lists.
• Mood notes: one word for how you feel and one line on why. After a month you'll see what your bad days have in common, which you can't see from inside them.
• Something narrower: a gratitude journal, a dream journal or a travel journal. A smaller job is easier to keep.

Does it actually help?

Some of it is well studied, and the honest summary is: yes, a little, for most people. In the best-known experiment, Pennebaker and Beall (1986) had students write about a hard experience for 15 minutes on four days in a row. Over the following months they went to the student health centre less often than students who wrote about trivial things.

Hundreds of studies followed. A 2006 review of 146 of them found the effect is real but small, so don't expect it to fix anything on its own. Two smaller findings explain why it can feel good right away. Putting a feeling into words lowers the brain's alarm response to it (Lieberman, 2007). And people who wrote down tomorrow's to-do list before bed fell asleep faster than those who wrote about what they'd already done (Scullin, 2018).

A journal isn't therapy. If you're struggling, write, but talk to someone too.

When you miss a day (you will)

Don't try to catch up on the days you missed. Writing up a whole week from memory is a chore, and chores are what make people quit. Just write about today, even one line.

Streaks help some people and stress others. If a broken streak makes you want to give up, stop counting. What matters is that you keep coming back to the journal, not how many days in a row you managed.

Every few weeks, read back over what you wrote. It's the part people skip, and it's where you notice things: that Sundays are always heavy, or that the thing you were dreading in March went fine.

How WOYM helps

I make WOYM, so take this part with that in mind. I built it around the week-two problem. A new entry opens with a couple of questions (planning ones in the morning, reflective ones in the evening) that you can answer or delete. You can pick a mood for each entry, then filter search by mood to read all your rough days side by side. There's a daily reminder, a writing streak with a nudge at 9 PM if it's about to end, and habits you can tick off next to your journal.

It's free with unlimited entries, on iPhone and the web. Premium adds things like dictation (it types as you talk) and Fix English, which corrects your grammar and shows why.