How Long You Should Journal For To See The Best Results
Journaling is a way to connect with your deepest thoughts and work through and negative or limiting beliefs you may have. Journaling can take many different forms including writing, typing, drawing or even meditating on a journal prompt.
Journaling for 15-20 minutes, five times a week, over a 12 week period will be enough time for you to fully experience the benefits. Although you can see results immediately after each journaling session, you’ll need to keep up the habit to see long-lasting results.
If you’re looking to start your journey to daily journaling, I have a whole section dedicated to different journal prompts depending on your mood and where you are in life. My article, what journal prompts are and how to use them will also be a good place to start.
Writing can seem like an ancient talent in these digital days. But I’d strongly suggest physically writing when journaling so you can be most present with your thoughts and feelings and see better results, faster.
Benefits of journaling
As I’ve said before, there’s countless benefits to journaling on a regular basis, including:
- Helps deal with emotions
- Helps manage and reduce anxiety, stress and depression
- Creates awareness of your true thoughts and feelings about a situation
- Encourages you to open up and be honest with yourself about how you truly feel. You may not be able to express your emotions in words but by describing the situation and your reaction can be just as beneficial.
- Speed up physical healing – Women with breast cancer
- Can track patterns and improvements if you regularly feel a certain way after a specific event or activity you do, it’ll soon be obvious what that is when you’re journaling on a regular basis and you can work towards resolving that issue
- Improve problem solving skills by working through any negative thoughts you have about something
- Help recover from traumatic experiences – It’s been noted that journaling for 15-20 mins, on 3-5 occasions have significantly better physical and psychological outcomes than those who don’t journal about the trauma they’ve been through. It can also help you make sense of the event and destress you so you can move on.
- You can face future similar situations a lot easier as you’ve already worked through and addressed your feelings so next time you understand what to do to not be in the same position
How can I get the benefits of journaling quickly?
This, of course, depends on what benefits you’re aiming for.
You can usually feel the benefit of journaling right after you’ve finished a 15-20 minute session. However to continue to experience the benefits, journaling daily rather than weekly can speed up the process. Also, the more often you journal the more long-lasting benefits you’ll experience.
To really understand how fast you’ll feel the benefits of journaling, depends on what you’re working through and your goals. If you want to become a more positive person, daily gratitude journaling will certainly make you happier by the end of the week.
Whereas if you’re aim is to overcome a traumatic event, this will no doubt take longer and take more commitment from you.
The best way to have the benefits quickly is to make journaling part of your normal habits. All habits are formed by a cue, action, reward. The cue will prompt you to take action, and the reward it what you’ll feel once you’ve completed the action.
For example, the cue might be, as soon as you arrive home from work or when your morning alarm goes off. The action is 15-20 minutes of journaling. Your reward can be whatever feels best for you. This might be a gorgeous diary or pen, a well prepared coffee or your favourite snack.
When is the best time to journal to see results?
The best time to journal is when you’re most likely to do it over a long period of time.
I love journaling first thing on a morning with a freshly made cup of coffee. There’s something about having time for just me on a morning before the craziness of the day kicks in makes me feel so much more calm and ready for the day ahead. In all honesty, that might be the bigger reward than a decent coffee!
You might find journaling before bed perfect for you because it empties your mind from that day’s stress, worries or negative feelings.
There’s no “right” time of day to see the results of journaling. It’s like going to the gym, the fact you went was good enough, not because you went at a certain time!
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