Positive Journaling For Honouring Our Happiness
How to make a happiness journal? How do you even start journaling for happiness? What is happiness journaling, and why nobody helps you understand how to stick to journaling and allow its magic to affect your life?
Welcome! This post is for you if..
- …you love journaling and are looking for new opportunities to make a happiness journal.
- …you wonder how to begin writing in a journal.
- …have no idea how to stick to journaling.
- …have no idea how to journal for happiness.
- …but you love all things journaling or at least are willing to dive into the deep paper world of (pretty) empty notebooks.
After spending two days listing all of the 110 types of journals one could keep, I realized I had missed expanding on the most important one – The Happiness Journal.
Today you and I are chatting about the best ways to journal for happiness, how to make journaling a habit, and most importantly – how to find happiness through journaling.
What is a Happiness Journal?
Happiness Journal is where one could record their happy moments and keep track of all positive things they encounter in their day-to-day life. This journal also touches on gratitude, self-care, and being kind to oneself and the others around.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you sign up or make a purchase I might get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my business. See full disclosure.
Why Is Positive Journaling So Important?
Positive journaling has too many benefits to fit them in a few small paragraphs.
What I believe is the most crucial point of journaling in a positive way is that it gives you a perspective of your life.
A Short Personal Story Of How I Realized I Am a Horrible Person
Here’s a short story of how I moved from journaling to positive journaling (yes, these are two different types of journaling).
I am a passionate journaler. And even if I don’t manage to keep as many journals as I wish, I stay very consistent with piling them everywhere I live. About two years ago, I visited my hometown and was eager to flip through some of the journals I still had there.
I found an old journal I had for a few years while I was already an adult and was still living with my mom. It was a cute pink journal that I had bought with Cosmopolitan magazine’s issue (yes, there were times when we were buying this paper stuff from places outside our homes, #shockface).
As I was flipping through that old journal, I easily fell for the opportunity to explore my past through my eyes of a young woman in her early 20s.
And I was disgusted!
No wonder I had left the place and never wished to come back. I sounded like the most negative person I had ever met (and I have met many toxic people).
Page after page, I was complaining about my job, relationships, friends, life, parents… Nothing was okay, and I was in a rush to blame everything and everyone from the very first sentence of each journal entry.
Well, I thought, no wonder I was so unhappy. Happiness doesn’t go where it’s unwanted and unnoticed.
I had so many nice memories from those days, but they took a few rows here and there. The rest was filled with details of every little problem I had encountered on that day.
Is Your Journaling a Disaster?
I realized I am horrible at journaling, and made a promise to never allow myself to write if it will be a constant criticism.
You see, I’m not saying I wouldn’t journal if I’m bothered by something. It’s just that I wouldn’t focus on making fuss about that thing. But I will stay away from the page in moments of rage… because expanding the negativity won’t help me see the positive side of this world.
I still keep that tiny Cosmopolitan journal. It reminds me that journaling only isn’t so good for mental health.
Journaling needs a purpose, and you and I are obligated to find that purpose for ourselves.
Do you journal the same way?
Do you tend to flip page after page whining about the same thing, wondering why journaling makes you feel exhausted and what the secret to positive journaling is?
How Do You Make Journaling A Daily Habit?
What if you want to be one of those people who wake up, brush their teeth, pour some hot coffee in a hygge style mug, and sit on the kitchen table with a pen and a journal in front of them?
What if you have no clue how to do all that? And it’s not that you don’t want to. You are motivated but lack the time. Try to implement these little tips and see what happens.
Make Time For Journaling
Want to do something? Make time for it.
Wake up early, ask your spouse to give you ten minutes of quiet time, or stay away from your phone in the evenings and sit to write.
Sounds easier than it is, doesn’t it?
Well, you want to put effort into creating time and space for journaling. Give it attention, or you will never find the perfect time and space to do it.
Adjust your habit to your life. Here’s how…
Stack Habits Together
Habit stacking is a popular way of developing new routines and sticking to healthy habits.
For example, let’s say you’d like to really be that person from above and journal every morning. Here’s what you might want to tell yourself when you wake up.
“After I get up, I will brush my teeth. After I brush my teeth I will brew some coffee. After I pour the coffee in my coffee mug I will sit in the kitchen and journal for ten minutes.”
It works! You will brush your teeth for sure (I hope?). You will also most likely make yourself your first cup of coffee for the day. Just stack the habits together, and you will find yourself flowing from performing one habit after another.
My last tip to stick to journaling is something I discovered recently, yet I can’t believe how stupidly obvious it is.
Be Prepared So You Don’t Forget
Imagine you manage to convince yourself to get up at 5 a.m. You brush your teeth since you were one year old, so that’s a no-brainer; you do it.
Coffee is what will keep you away from turning into the grumpiest human being on the Earth, so brewing it si your only beam of light at 5 a.m. (yes, even the sun can’t be bothered to show itself so early).
By the time you finish with all that, you already feel exhausted. You sit behind the kitchen table, and you either:
- Stare at the black coffee, having just one question in your mind “Why me?!!”. Hence, no thoughts of journaling, so you forget to do it.
- Realize you had to journal, but the journal is somewhere in your bedroom/living room/far-far-far away from you. Hence, no happiness journaling this morning.
What if you had placed your journal on your kitchen table the evening before?
What if you had it on your bedside table, and the moment you open your eyes, you know what you have to do next?
Prepare yourself from the evening before. Make sure you put zero effort in the morning to start journaling. That’s the secret to sticking to it.
What Do You Write in a Happiness Journal?
Your Happiness Journal would look different than mine, and that’s okay. But there are a few points that could easily be used as a guide to happiness journaling.
Gratitude
I literally brag about gratitude in most of my posts, but that’s because it seriously crushes your problems and makes them feel tinier than they were before.
In your Happiness Journal, you want to talk about gratitude a lot. Focusing on what you have expands your opportunities to reach what you don’t have.
Expressing gratitude every single day is anyway a-must for your morning or evening routine. You could even get your own gratitude journal.
Open your eyes for the world around you, uncover what’s already here, and allow it to shine.
Daily affirmations
I wish I were more consistent with affirmations; they do wonders for me. If you get affected by other people’s words, you must try affirmations because you will be equally affected by them. But this time, that would be a good thing.
Repeating the same sentence over and over again would probably sound silly in the first few days, but who said you need to speak them out loud. Listen, I have no clue what your daily self-talk usually is, but I bet it could use some positivity. Daily affirmations are your way to change that negative rumble.
Reflection
Yes, you want to reflect because only by occasionally looking behind you could actually see ahead clearly.
What worked and what didn’t work? Why didn’t it work? What could you do better? Daily and weekly reflection is the perfect way to be realistic with yourself and learn the lessons, so you do better tomorrow.
Self-Love and Self-Care
Are you used to looking after everyone else’s needs, but by the time you finish with all those tasks, you are too tired to practice self-care?
Realistically, just going to sleep early enough is a brilliant act of self-care many of us skip, but we could also do better.
Call me selfish, but I wake up at 5 a.m. on most mornings with the only reason to attend to my needs first before attending to someone else’s needs. I simply must (yes, that’s the right word) take some alone-time in the early hours of the day, do what I feel is self-nourishing and welcome the day feeling content.
Can you relate to hectic days full of work and probably a large family that demands your attention? If you said yes, then feeling sleepy at 5 a.m. is nothing compared to the self-care and self-nourishment you could fit in those morning hours.
Kindness
Practicing self-care doesn’t make you selfish. In fact, by opening yourself to your needs, you also become more intuitive about being kind to others.
Daily acts of kindness aren’t just a challenge you could pin on your Pinterest board, but a real-life must-do.
After all, we are human beings, and showing kindness to each other is what keeps this humanity sane (especially lately).
Here Is Your Guide To Happiness
Combine all of the points above, and you got yourself a pretty decent Happiness Journal. Yes, you could totally do it yourself.
But where do you find that perfect guide to personal happiness? How do you stick to journaling, and how do you make sure you don’t skip on the benefits of positive journaling?
Inspired by my own story, my experience with wrecking a good number of journals, and sticking to my own system, I created the Inside Of My Happiness Journal.
This beauty is packed with everything: gratitude, affirmations, quotes, reflections, daily goal setting, self-care and self-love tips, acts of kindness, and even mood and sleep trackers. It simply has it all.
I spend weeks crafting it out, as I had to make sure I’m not missing out on anything. I’m proudly using it every morning and evening, and the simplicity still amazes me.
Curious to get a peek inside? Scroll some more.
Inside Of My Happiness 
Morning and Evening Entries 
Trackers 
Extra Inspiration
If you’d like to know more about this journal, please click here.
Conclusion on How To Make a Happiness Journal
Learning how to make a happiness journal isn’t just opening an empty notebook and writing pretty things inside. You want to do this intentionally and purposefully.
Journaling in general might be just scribbling things on a paper, but it has fundamental effect on your life, if you do it constantly.
Sticking to journaling is challenging, but not impossible, and it all goes down to preparation and dedication to your purpose, not to the habit of journaling.
If you are still wondering how to make a happiness journal, you could always get a ready-to-use such by visiting this page here.
How To Make a Happiness Journal | Positive Journaling For Honouring Happiness
Blogger, dreamer, procrastinator, and lover of everything soul-touching. My mission is to make you laugh, provoke your thoughts, light up your day and inspire you to fall in love with life and yourself.
