The document discusses the benefits of maintaining a daily journaling routine, particularly for reducing stress and achieving health and wellness goals. It highlights various forms of journaling, such as food journaling and gratitude practices, emphasizing their positive impact on mental health, self-discipline, and creativity. The author shares personal experiences and practical tips for integrating journaling into daily life, underlining its role in enhancing overall well-being.

1. Jennifer
One Daily Routine that Could Boost your Life
weightlesschronicles.com/one-daily-routine-that-could-boost-your-life-2
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2. There is one daily routine that has saved my sanity and reduced my stress the most since
COVID-19 hit. Even better, you can complete this daily routine in just minutes a day!
What if there was a single activity that could help you get clear on your goals, reduce stress,
solve problems and reduce disagreements with others? What if this same daily routine
could help you with your health goals, especially weight loss and controlling symptoms of
chronic illness?
Over the years, many people have asked me what is the ONE THING that helped me lose
100 pounds over 20 years ago. As you can imagine, there isn’t a single thing that is
responsible for my lifestyle change. However, one of the very first things I did was keep a
food journal.
Keeping a food journal has been statistically shown to help dieters lose weight, per the
American Society for Nutrition. In addition to creating more awareness around how much
food you are eating, it can also help you identify what and why you are eating.
Personally, I didn’t get very fancy with my food journal. I simply used a blank notebook
and pen, and noted down meals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc, along with amounts of food I ate. The trick
to my success with noting down my food was I wrote it down as soon as I finished eating,
as opposed to at the end of the day. Occasionally, I would look back at my day of eating and
review when I tended to overeat (usually during the later meals).
You may be thinking that you will just use an app to track your food, such as MyFitnessPal
or Lose It instead of a food journal. According to this study, there are some negative
nudges within some food tracking apps that could make this type of tracking more difficult.
These nudges could be ease of entering packaged foods as compared to homemade foods,
obsessing over every bite, and perceived social stigma around tracking their food intake.
The same study also identified 4 specific barriers to food journaling using a digital method,
which are:
1. Knowing what and how much to enter in the journals
2. Low reliability on food database info
3. Food context (at a party or restaurant- when do you enter)
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3. 4. Missed entries which resulted in dropping the habit altogether.
While I don’t keep a food journal anymore, journaling has helped me immensely during
the added stress of living in pandemic while assisting my kids with distance learning and
having my husband work at home. In addition to allowing me to strengthen my creativity
muscle, journaling was instrumental in helping me stay positive and grounded.
Health Benefits of Journaling
Maybe you think journal writing is only for writers or even for the “dear diary” teenage
years? Actually, numerous studies have shown the health benefits of journaling for
everyone. Some of these benefits include:
Higher IQ
More mindfulness
Achieve goals
Boosts memory
Better EQ
Strengthen Self-Discipline
Improve Communication Skills
Heal Trauma
Improve Self-Confidence
Spark Creativity
Increase Immunity
Sleep better
In particular, there are a number of research studies showing how journaling may improve
mental health, especially symptoms of depression, anxiety and more.
I would like to highlight the importance of journaling for achieving goals. Food journaling
is just one way to do this, but there are other ways to achieve goals. Forbes shares that 43%
of people who wrote down their goals achieved them. Those are pretty high numbers! The
act of writing stimulates the reticular activating system (RAS) in the brain. The RAS is like
a filter and it sorts the things that are written down as being important.
Want to learn how to plan out your goals for the next 90 days? Your 90 Day Plan is a
training designed to help you do this for the low cost of $19.
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4. Map out your goals inthis training
What about memory? If you have ever written down a grocery or to-do list, you know the
importance of writing things down for short-term memory. However, journaling could also
boost your long-term memory. It does this in several ways- cataloging your emotions or
thoughts in time allows you to recall more clearly the events of your life, and it allows you
to envision future goals as well.
As a woman of a certain age, I very much want to keep my memory sharp. Plus, with all of
the additional journaling I have done, both when studying abroad and during the
pandemic, I have lots of writing to fondly look back on.
Types of Journals
Gratitude practices
More than any other practice, journaling can improve your overall happiness, especially
when your focus is on gratitude.
Studies have found that giving thanks and counting blessings can help people sleep
better, lower stress and improve interpersonal relationships. Earlier this year,
a study found that keeping a gratitude journal decreased materialism and bolstered
generosity among adolescents.
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5. Your gratitude practice does not need to be ostentatious to provide you these benefits.
Every night, I would write down 3 things I was grateful for over several years, and I rarely
struggled to sleep that night. To be honest, I sometimes struggled to find 3 things to be
grateful for, but I always came up with something.
Emotional release
A journal for emotional release requires you to pay attention to thoughts, emotions and
challenges, and could be a good way to process through grief or trauma. A mood journal is
similar, but focuses specifically on emotions.
Beth Jacobs, PhD, lays out seven skills of journaling for emotion management:
distancing yourself from your emotions
defining what emotions mean for you
releasing stuck emotions
learning to focus while experiencing overwhelming emotions
using organization to clarify emotions
regrouping after you’ve had an emotional setback
maintaining your new skills.
Also known as Expressive Writing, journaling for emotional release involves writing about
your deepest thoughts and emotions around an emotional challenge in your life. The goal is
to gain insights and see new connections.
If COVID-19 resulted in job loss for you, there is good news! In a study from the Academy
of Management, those who wrote about their feelings and thoughts surrounding their job
loss were reemployed more quickly than those who wrote about time management or
nothing at all.
Wreck journal
Wreck journals are journals that give you tasks to do each day of the journal. Some of these
are writing while others may be drawing, coloring, or even ripping out the page and
throwing it away.
These journals are especially good for opening up creativity. Part art book, part journal,
and part stress-relieving destruction, this journal is especially good for kids.
Get the wreck journal that sold over 10 million copies: https://www.amazon.com/Wreck-
This-Journal-Duct-Expanded/dp/0399162704
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6. Devotional journal
Devotional journals are one of the most
popular selling journals. In them, you
will find a scripture, passage, or quote
and then given the space to write about
your thoughts related to the daily
thought or passage.
These journals might be most helpful
for you if you are looking to expand
your spiritual practices, or even explore
new ones.
Here are some of the best-selling
devotional journals to peruse on
Designs by Planner Perfect.
Bullet journal
Bullet journals are distinct from
planners, diaries and goal setting
systems, in that they combine all 3 in
one. This can be a bit overwhelming for
the uninitiated.
Bullet journals traditionally come with
blank, graph-lined pages, and require a bit of organization and thought to set them up
properly. If you have an artistic sensibility, you might enjoy using fancy colors, fonts, or
symbols. But, you don’t have to.
This Buzzfeed article shares how to set up a bullet journal.
Should You Use Journal Prompts?
During the early months of COVID-19, I was losing my creative motivation. I felt like my
life revolved around being the homemaker, head chef, assistant educational support, and
professional cleaner at home. Not to mention I had to shift some of my business goals and
networking due to canceled speaking engagements.
During that time of overwhelm and on the brink of burnout, deciding what to choose for
my daily journaling routine was out of the question.
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7. Luckily, a friend of mine introduced me to Suleika Jaouad’s isolation journal prompts,
which carried me through almost 90 days of creative writing. She provided prompts on
everything from childhood experiences to drawing your foot to how to reframe your
quarantine experience. I like that she invited contributors from different walks of life-
including writers, artists, musicians and fellow creatives.
There are many websites with free journaling prompts laid out for you, such as Daring to
Live Fully, quarantine prompts from Roaming Riley, or even these self-discovery prompts
from PsychCentral.
The benefits of using journal prompts is you only have to think about the writing, and you
can choose the prompt focus on the above themes. Here are some weight loss prompts,
gratitude prompts, and devotional prompts.
The cons of using journal prompts are they have an end date. And, then you either have to
choose new prompts for yourself, or even purchase the offering from the website you found
it on.
When you think about your journal writing routine, decide how long you want to stick to it
for, and then you can decide if you want to use prompts based on that timeline.
Where to Do your Journaling
If you have ever walked down a Michael’s Store aisle during New Year’s, you will see the
power of journaling for goal achievement and happiness. Did you know that as of 2019, the
hobby and stationery industry is now worth a whopping $113,118 million?
With so many options to choose from when it comes to where you journal, how do you
choose the right one for you?
First of all, avoid the temptation to choose a journal that suggests a specific result in a
certain amount of time. For example, the One-Minute Happiness journal, the 5 Minute
Productivity journal, the 6 Minute Diary for More Mindfulness, Happiness and
Productivity. See a trend here? Any journaling practice will naturally increase happiness,
productivity and mindfulness, yet when you will see that result will vary based on you.
Secondly, avoid journals that have overly complicated layouts or take too much time to
complete. I picked up a lovely Nighttime Reflections journal, but then found out there are a
minimum of 4-5 pages with multiple prompts on each page to complete. Considering some
of my previous daily routine involved writing 3 things I am grateful for, or writing 20
minutes on a specific experience, this appears to take more time than I have available on a
daily basis.
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8. Finally, think of the optimal environment in which you can commit to a daily routine of
journaling. Is it on your favorite chair with a cup of tea? Is it in your bed just before you fall
asleep? Is it in your car while you are waiting to pick up your child(ren) from school?
Depending on which location you envision using this journal, you might need a hardcover
journal, wide, spiral-bound journal, or even portable one with attached pen.
I should note that I have a distinct journaling practice for my personal goals and my
professional goals, and use different books and processes for each. For personal goals, I
prefer a blank journal with lined pages and a soft cover with a picture on it that makes me
smile. This journal comes on road trips with me, too.
For professional goals, I use a hardcover or spiral bound book with at-a-glance months and
different themes. I have been successful at using planning by moon cycles (this is my
favorite), and have allowed some of that business planning to direct some of my personal
activities through a digital calendar. However, I mastered the hardcover journal first, and
rarely go digital with any of my journaling. Instead, my digital calendar is reserved for
future planning.
Establishing a daily routine of journaling can significantly boost your life by improving
happiness, reducing stress, strengthening self-discipline and self-confidence. When it
comes to establishing your own daily routine of journaling, pay attention to which type
of journal you want to start, whether journal prompts are helpful for you, and where
you want to journal every day.
Do you currently include journaling in your daily routine? Why or
why not?
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