scraps #2 - Gratitude journaling
This is a free series of scraps of things I wrote that never found a home. I'm proud of them, but they didn't fit into what I was doing at the time. So I'm sharing them here.
I never expected gratitude journaling to be such a central part of my self care, and so important to my mental health.
I’ve tried to journal in many ways and nothing really hit - I find it hard to write about my day without a framework, but I also find it hard to decide on a prompt for a day, so I never really journaled. I wrote to do lists but that was about it.
I found it easier to track things than journal. Track my mood, track my physical health symptoms, track whether I was taking my meds, things like that. It gave my space to think about myself and how I was doing but it didn’t give me so much room that I found it intimidating. I know that, at a minimum, I could tap some pre-defined labels on my tracking app and be done.
I then started adding gratitude journalling, and I can’t remember why I tried it or who suggested it to me. I stick to one thing a day, at the end of a day. Some people do 3 things first thing in the morning. For me, sometimes 3 feels like a lot of pressure, and my anxiety of ‘doing it wrong’ or ‘failing’ means I’ll find it hard to do on days where my brain is being loud and spikey. I also prefer looking back over a day and finding the good things, and ending a day with time spent with myself, and the things the day has brought me.
It’s also really good to break doom-scrolling. At 8pm every night, my phone sends me a notification that I need to track (I use Bearable #NotSpon) which means I get an adorable lil bear in my notifications, It means I stop what I’m doing and track what I’ve set up to track, and then I can evaluate what I want to do next. Do I want to go back to what I was doing? Do I want to change to something else? Do I need to take my meds, do I need food or a drink? It’s such a little thing, but that small interruption, followed by reflection of my day, can be really powerful in setting up my end of day activities to be what I need.