How Daily Journaling Helps Me Calm the Chaos in My Creative Life
At a Glance
Today, we’re talking about a powerful tool to help with mental health and work/life balance—Journaling.
Journaling can help you reduce your stress and plan your creative future.
Let’s discuss how journaling can positively impact your creative life and reduce the noise.
As a creative, I have a lot going on in my life, and I need a filter.
For me, it’s journaling.
Beyond the normal pressures of life: relationships, bills, unforeseen problems, health, etc., creatives deal with their art and how to bring it forth into this world.
For me, I love what I do. But there’s always so much going on in my head between creative projects at work, creative projects and home, and everything else that it’s hard to know where to start.
Just over a year ago, I started a practice of journaling every day. It’s simple, and it fits easily into my daily routine. Research has shown that journaling reduces your stress, helps you reflect, boosts self-awareness, and creates a record for you to look back on later in life. For creatives, there are even more benefits related to our processes.
Most people think that journaling looks like someone hunched over a giant tome of a book scribbling away for hours on end. While that’s one way of doing it, it’s certainly not the only way.
Today, let’s talk about the five ways journaling can help you become a better balanced creative as well as three places to get started with journaling of your own.
5 Ways Journaling Can Help You Become a Balanced Creative
1. Self-Reflection and Growth — As someone who values the importance of improving myself a little every day, journaling is primarily a tool I use to help me grow. By writing down my thoughts, I can identify where I am in my journey as a creative and human being. I can see where I’ve been, recognize the patterns, and adjust my next actions to keep me on the path I want to go down.
2. Stress Relief and Mental Clarity — Journaling has helped me find myself when I was lost. It helped me put the stress onto the page and leave it there. I’ve worked through personal trauma and tough life issues simply by writing them into existence. By naming my emotions and my thoughts and seeing them in front of me, they weigh a little less on my mind. The issues aren’t immediately gone, but they’re visible. I gain clarity on what they really are and can then figure out how to solve them.
3. Idea Generation and Problem Solving — As a creative, journaling also helps me think through my creative processes. I keep several journals for different things. It’s common for Architects to carry sketchbooks to document ideas and draw them into life. I treat my design journal in this way. It’s a place for my mind to wander creatively. While a personal journal may focus on problems related to my life and mental health, a creative journal could focus on design, art, ideas, and creative problems.
4. Balancing Personal and Professional Life — Journaling isn’t just about acute stress relief at the moment. It can also be a way to recognize the separation or integration between everything in our professional and personal lives. When you write down your thoughts from each day, you start to see patterns over time. You start to recognize when you “need more sleep” or “need to spend more time at home.” They may not always be easy to spot in the moment. But journaling over periods of time will reveal them like a spotlight.
5. Creating a Lasting Record — Creatives will adapt and grow in their careers and lives. Journaling helps you keep a record to look back upon years from now. You’ll be able to recall fond memories, problems you overcame, and sensibilities you used to have as a creative. As you evolve as a human, you’ll appreciate the growth even more. A journal can act as a record in the library of your life.
3 Formats to Get Started with Journaling Quickly
1. One Line a Day Journal — My personal preference for consistent journaling is one line a day. I was first introduced to this idea by writer and stoic Ryan Holiday. He posted something about the one-line-a-day journal he uses, and I picked it up for myself.
It’s simple. It’s quick. It’s effective.
All you do is write about a sentence or two once per day (I typically do right when I wake up about the day before). Each page has enough space for 5 thoughts. Each of those thoughts is connected to a new year. So in theory, you’ll start the journal and keep it for five straight years. It clearly delineates the thoughts, and once you loop back around the second year, you can see what happened to you on that day from the year (or years prior).
This is extremely low friction and highly recommended.
2. Quarterly Check-In — Another go-to way to journal is the quarterly check-in. This could be a bit more structured to help you with goal setting or goal tracking. It could help you understand your needs and wants at regular (but distant) moments throughout the year.
I find this helpful because it allows you to keep your year flexible enough that you can shift to opportunities that pop up in your life, but regular enough so you don’t regret missing out on your overarching goals over the course of the year.
3. As Needed Entries — Creative life is chaotic. Sometimes you just want to get out the ideas, the emotions, the problems and see them in a tangible form. Journaling as needed could look like carrying around your notebook at work. It could look like typing a note to yourself on your computer.
The only thing to be cautious of with as-needed entries is that they can become so irregular and unorganized that you have no idea where to start, stop, or find them. But, if you’re dealing with a creative or life problem, write it down somewhere!
SideNote: While I think that physically writing down your ideas with some kind of pen or pencil on paper is the best method for journaling, it’s not the only one. Typing into a Notion doc. Writing in a Notes App. All great ways to get the job done. It’s just a matter of knowing why you’re journaling and what you want to do with the entry long term.
Final Thoughts
Journaling is a powerful tool that can help creative pros manage the chaos of their creative lives on a daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis.
There’s no right or wrong way to journal. But I’ve found that journaling in general, writing my ideas into the world, has done wonders for my creative process and my mental health. I would not be able to have succeeded in many of the ways I have as a person without reflecting on my writing.
Journals aren’t perfectly written, full-length books. They are representations of who you are at any given moment in time. Rough around the edges, but ready to improve.
TL; DR
The Importance of Journaling
5 Ways Journaling Can Help You Become a Balanced Creative
Self-Reflection and Growth
Stress Relief and Mental Clarity
Idea Generation and Problem Solving
Balancing Personal and Professional Life
Creating a Lasting Record
3 Formats to Get Started with Journaling Quickly
Quote of the Week
Motivation for the days ahead of you.
“Having the courage to reckon with our emotions and to rumble with our stories is the path to writing our brave new ending.”
— Brené Brown
That's all for now.
Stay creative, my friends—and have a great week!
