2meirl4meirl

Your journal, ideally, will serve 3 different purposes as you learn to manage your depression/anxiety/etc.

First, it establishes a routine of organizing your thoughts. It doesn't matter what you write about in this stage. Just be genuine and write how you're feeling that day, what you wish had happened, what actually happened, what you think you could have done better, what you're proud you did well, what you plan to do tomorrow, etc. The point is the routine, and you can fall back on this purpose whenever you want.

Second, when you're feeling up to it, is to journal so that you have something to catalogue your experiences, so you can identify negative or self-destructive patterns. Not every journal entry has to be useful for this purpose, keeping the routine can be hard so do the bare minimum when that's all you can do. But if you have the means, this is what you would bring to a therapist so they can give you more personalized advice that's grounded in science, or just generally give you insights that you couldn't have made on your own, or give more credit to the insights that you've made for yourself. You won't have to hand over your book, you can select passages to read them or gove them a summary

Third, once you feel like you're managing your mental health well and the journaling process feels secondhand, you can translate it to other things in life. You can take your developed skill of self-reflection and have journals for anything in your life that you want, and those journals will all improve your organization and lighten your mental load. Examples: Have an upcoming family gathering that you're stressed about? Make a journal about who's going to be there so you can dump that mental load onto paper and get it out of your head. Got an idea for a cool project but can't work out the details? Journal your thoughts and get them more organized. Ideas are ephemeral until you start to carve out a rigid form for them. You'll find more and more that writing things down, not just for note taking but for the art of writing them down, will RADICALLY change how your thoughts are managed, and you'll have the power to guide that change yourself.

You could write about all or none of these, and you're going to be dipping into reasons 2 and 3 before you know it. But if it feels indulgent to write about yourself at all, let me tell you that it's not. The way I see it, self-improvement is never indulgent because it improves your capacity to help others, and journaling is a scientifically recognized tool for self improvement. You'll likely find your own reasons for why it helps you once you've been journaling for a while. It's different for everyone, but it works.