Mindfulness turns down the pressure that you feel regarding future concerns or past regrets.
It pulls you entirely into the present moment, allowing you to appreciate and savor your experiences.
The concept arises from meditation practices in which you focus on the here and now without judgment
Mindful breathing and guided imagery can release stress from the body and help you relax.
Writing exercises, also known as mindfulness journaling, can produce similar results.
With the right mindfulness journal, you can battle feelings of anxiety and find more gratitude in daily life.
- Why You Should Use a Mindfulness Journal
- 8 Of The Best Mindfulness Journals
- 1. The Mindfulness Journal: Daily Practices, Writing Prompts, and Reflections for Living in the Present Moment
- 2. The Joy of Now Journal: Mindfulness in Five Minutes a Day
- 3. A Year of Mindfulness: A 52-Week Guided Journal to Cultivate Peace and Presence
- 4. The 90-Day Mindfulness Journal: 10 Minutes a Day to Live in the Present Moment
- 5. The Mindfulness Journal for Anxiety: Daily Prompts and Practices to Find Peace
- 6. The Mindful Life Journal: Seven Minutes a Day for a Better, More Meaningful Life
- 7.. Let That Sh*t Go: A Journal for Leaving Your Bullsh*t Behind and Creating a Happy Life
- 8. Practice You: A Journal
- Let Go of Burdensome Thoughts and Emotions
Why You Should Use a Mindfulness Journal
Journaling is similar to keeping a diary. Daily or near-daily writing about your life, problems, hopes, and dreams has been the refuge of ordinary and famous people alike for centuries.
Instead of letting your feelings and problems slosh around your brain unexamined, you can apply your full mental powers to processing everything.
Mindfulness journaling makes this possible. The technical and linguistic tasks of writing require the powers of your left brain.
When you complete a mindfulness writing prompt, you also get to access the right brain’s emotional and intuitive abilities.
The writing prompts ask you what you are feeling and permit you to grapple with your feelings in a safe space.
The activity has a powerful effect because your left brain has analytical powers. By placing your emotional life under a microscope, you mitigate the knee-jerk reactions of the reptilian brain that is all about flight or fight.
Your body associates both responses with stress, but journaling provides a way to escape an unproductive cycle of anxiety and aggression. Instead, you get to enter a realm where problem-solving, or at least acceptance, becomes possible.
Tapping into both sides of your brain simultaneously will help you with:
- Clarifying thoughts
- Identifying feelings
- Knowing yourself better
- Reducing stress
- Solving problems
- Settling disputes
- Mending troubled relationships
- Setting and meeting goals
- Overcoming resentment
- Letting go of unnecessary guilt
- Celebrating achievements
- Dealing with doubts
When pursued consistently, the activity produces cumulative physical, spiritual, and emotional results. The many benefits of journaling include.
- Improved memory
- Release from stuck emotions
- Relief of anxiety
- Promotion of better sleep
- Temporarily lowered heart rate and blood pressure
- Better immune system function
If the thought of staring at a blank page stresses you out, don’t worry. Authors and publishers have many mindfulness journals on the market.
They include inspiring quotes, daily affirmations, and writing prompts to get you started. Browse the following list to find the best mindfulness journal for you.
8 Of The Best Mindfulness Journals
1. The Mindfulness Journal: Daily Practices, Writing Prompts, and Reflections for Living in the Present Moment
Using The Mindfulness Journal, you can build a mindfulness habit that makes you appreciate every single day.
The journal provides 365 daily writing prompts divided into 52 weekly mindfulness topics. This gives you seven days to fully immerse yourself in each topic.
Also, the prompts are unique enough so you’ll never feel bored while journaling. These prompts are fun, engaging, and will help you gain an appreciation for the world around you.
Each prompt is on its own separate page, so you’ll have lots of room for reflection and space to write down ALL your thoughts.
2. The Joy of Now Journal: Mindfulness in Five Minutes a Day
This full-color journal draws your attention to the present. Lovely illustrated pages stimulate your senses while quotes inspire you to think in refreshing ways.
The author designed the writing prompts to take your thoughts in new directions instead of staying stuck on past mistakes or future worries.
This title provides directions for meditations as well. Guided meditation will prove especially helpful if you feel stymied about what to write.
Taking the time to relax into your thoughts and withhold judgment, if even for a moment, will eventually get the words flowing on the page.
3. A Year of Mindfulness: A 52-Week Guided Journal to Cultivate Peace and Presence
Practice makes perfect, and a full 52-week journaling experience can wipe away old and limiting mental habits.
Weekly themes guide you through exercises meant to train you to appreciate what’s good in your life and take care of yourself. You can write daily in this journal to leave you with more significant insights about your experiences and personal needs by the end of the year.
A year of journaling is a big commitment, and this title recognizes that you might not have the time or energy to tackle large writing assignments every day. It contains many short exercises that can be completed quickly.
These small bites of mindfulness help you to keep going. Eventually, you can develop a healthy habit of framing the world around the present moment.
As you learn to relax into the moment, life’s day-to-day demands will cease to scatter your thoughts. Life will never be easy, but you can learn to deal with it from a peaceful core of self-understanding.
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4. The 90-Day Mindfulness Journal: 10 Minutes a Day to Live in the Present Moment
If committing to a whole year of journaling is a touch intimidating for you, then dip your toes into the practice of mindfulness with this 90-day mindfulness exercise book.
No matter how busy you are, you deserve to take a few minutes for yourself every day. The authors crafted this journal to provide 10-minute exercises that teach you how to step away from stress and reset your mind.
Beginners will appreciate the chance to take baby steps toward greater mindfulness and gratitude. Each day, some writing prompts ask you to revisit earlier themes so that you can observe your change and growth over the weeks and months.
New writing prompts and exercises are thrown into the mix as well. The authors present new material in a way that allows you to build upon past discoveries and breakthroughs.
When used in conjunction with short meditations, this journal will invite clarity and peace into your mind. You will cease to experience life passively as things whir by you. Instead, you will build a mental brake that exerts control over distractions and stress.
5. The Mindfulness Journal for Anxiety: Daily Prompts and Practices to Find Peace
Written by a National Certified Counselor, this book teaches breathing techniques and contains exercises to help you acknowledge and organize your thoughts and feelings.
The content includes lessons that aid with self-reflection so that you can improve how you react to problems and concerns.
This title reflects the specific benefit of anxiety reduction that is possible with mindfulness journaling. The text shows you how to uncover your negative inner voice and recognize how it does not serve you.
By finishing short exercises, you cultivate new thoughts that have the power to sustain you instead of drain you.
Soothing artwork throughout the pages offers another level of positive stimulation as you gain the tools to nurture inner peace. After a few days of performing the exercises, you should feel more grounded and eager to open the book every day.
6. The Mindful Life Journal: Seven Minutes a Day for a Better, More Meaningful Life
If you feel stretched too thin to manage 10 minutes a day to ground your thoughts, this journal promises to help in only 7 minutes a day. For the sake of your well-being, you surely can give this a try. Journaling could be the answer to your frustration with emotional baggage.
Providing you with enough blank pages to journal for three months, this book shows you how to dive into your feelings.
Writing prompts ask you to explore your emotions and start and end each day with grateful thoughts. The content teaches you how to identify the life forces that are either supporting your mental health or disrupting it.
As you start to fill up pages, you can go back periodically and evaluate your progress. You may spot informative patterns that reveal where you need to work on yourself the most.
7.. Let That Sh*t Go: A Journal for Leaving Your Bullsh*t Behind and Creating a Happy Life
This journal, created by Monica Sweeney, pushes you to confront your feelings. Writing prompts ask you to explore what’s upsetting you, keeping you stuck, or preventing your progress. Instead of being trapped with your negative thoughts, you can release them through written self-exploration.
This is the book to choose when you want to yell at your problems or get something off your chest. As the title suggests, the journal wants you to unload what is not working for you and forge a new path forward.
As serious as that sounds, though, you’ll still get a chance to laugh because the journal includes humorous, inspirational quotes.
8. Practice You: A Journal
So much of life involves conformity, but this journal puts the spotlight on you. The author explains how the answers to your challenges often lie in your own thoughts, but you have to find them and get them down on paper first. You will also get to write letters to your younger self and future self.
This journal offers a less regimented approach to self-discovery. Pages invite you to draw and write because you might need to express yourself with pictures in addition to words.
In between putting ink to paper, you can contemplate the teachings and questions prepared by Elena Brower, a yoga teacher and artist.
Overall, the journal gives you space to reflect on your challenges, set goals, and record your growth. You will learn to act with intention and reduce the anxiety induced by constantly reacting to stimuli. The result for you could a greater belief in your abilities going forward.
Let Go of Burdensome Thoughts and Emotions
The power of repetition cannot be denied, and mindfulness journals are ideal for replacing old mental habits and hangups with healthier approaches. Journaling gives you a refuge where you can sort yourself out.
The focus on mindfulness in these journals teaches you a lifetime skill of present moment awareness that can improve your health and overall life satisfaction.
You might eventually enjoy better social interactions and become a positive force in your family or community.
Most journals only need 10 or 20 minutes of your time each day. This tiny investment in yourself will nurture your well-being and help you have more self-awareness and gratitude for even the smallest aspects of life.
Get started today. Journaling could be your first step toward a new and rewarding approach to life.