What to write in a journal: 7 simple formats

The simplest answer to what to write in a journal is one thing from today you are still thinking about, how it made you feel, and, if it was hard, why it got to you. That is a complete entry, and it can be three lines long. In a 2008 study, people who wrote for just two minutes on two days reported fewer health complaints a month or so later than people who wrote about neutral topics. Below are seven simple formats with example entries, what to write when nothing happened, and a plan for your first week.

What should you actually write in a journal?

Start with whatever is still on your mind tonight. Skip the full recap and go to the part that stuck. The argument in the parking lot. The email you reread four times. The ten minutes of sun on the walk back from lunch.

Then give it a basic shape. The research points to three parts.

1. What happened, in a sentence or two.
2. What you felt, named as exactly as you can.
3. What you make of it. Why it landed the way it did, or what it might mean.

The third part is the one most people skip, and it matters. In a 2002 study, Patricia Ullrich and Susan Lutgendorf had 122 students journal for a month about a stressful event. Students who wrote about their thoughts and their feelings developed more awareness of what they had gained from the event. Students who wrote only about their feelings reported more severe illness symptoms during the study than the other groups (Ullrich and Lutgendorf, 2002).

James Pennebaker saw the same pattern in the words people used. When he and Janel Seagal analyzed expressive writing with text-analysis software, the people who benefited most used plenty of positive emotion words, a moderate amount of negative ones, and more and more cognitive words, the vocabulary of working something out, over the days they wrote (Pennebaker and Seagal, 1999). They concluded that forming a story is the critical part.

Here is what that looks like on an ordinary Wednesday.

Priya’s leaving party at work. I said the right things and then went quiet for the rest of the afternoon. Felt flat, a bit left behind. I think it’s because she was the one person I could be blunt with, and I hadn’t noticed how much I relied on that until today.

Four sentences: an event, a named feeling and a because. For why this kind of writing helps, and how small the effects really are, see does journaling actually work.

How long does a journal entry need to be?

Shorter than you think. One line counts, and a few lines is a good entry.

The classic research exercise asks for 15 to 20 minutes of writing on three to five days (Baikie and Wilhelm, 2005). But Chad Burton and Laura King tested the lower edge of that dose. People wrote about a personal trauma, a positive experience or a neutral topic for two minutes a day, on two days. Four to six weeks later, both the trauma writers and the positive-experience writers reported fewer health complaints than the neutral group (Burton and King, 2008). It is one study, so treat it as a floor that seems to work rather than a promise.

A larger analysis points the same way. Lin Guo’s 2023 meta-analysis of 31 randomized trials with 4,012 people found that the benefit of expressive writing did not change with the number of sessions or the type of instructions. What did matter was spacing. Studies with one to three days between sessions produced stronger effects than studies with longer gaps (Guo, 2023).

More is not always better, either. In a preliminary six-week study, Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues asked students to count their blessings, the things they were grateful for, either once a week or three times a week. Well-being rose only in the once-a-week group. The authors guessed that the more frequent group got bored and the practice lost its freshness (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and Schkade, 2005).

So write a little, fairly often, and don’t force a format that has gone stale.

A journal entry that exists beats a perfect one you were going to write tomorrow.

Seven simple journal formats, with examples

You don’t have to pick one forever. Plenty of people drift between formats depending on the day. Each of these takes between one and ten minutes.

1. The one-line note

Write a single line when something happens, while it is still fresh. The point is to catch material before it fades.

11:40. Manager moved my review to Friday. Stomach dropped.

Walk home, smell of cut grass, first time all week I wasn’t thinking about work.

Mom called. Didn’t pick up. Not sure why.

You will forget more of the day than you expect. In four studies, Ting Zhang and colleagues at Harvard found that people underestimate how interesting their ordinary moments will be to reread later, and linked this to too much faith in their memory of everyday events (Zhang et al., 2014). In the evening, come back to the note that still bothers you.

This is the format Auserene’s quick notes are built around. You type half a sentence on the Today screen, add a mood if you want one, and move on with your day.

2. Happened, felt, because

The three-part entry from the first section. Use it for anything that is still on your mind at night.

Happened: snapped at Sam over the dishes. Felt: irritated, then guilty, then tired. Because: it wasn’t the dishes. I’ve been carrying the deadline all week and he was the nearest person.

If you only have the energy for one of the three, write the feeling, and make it specific. “Bad” tells you nothing next month. “Embarrassed and a bit resentful” tells you a lot. In a brain imaging study led by Matthew Lieberman, labeling the emotion in an upsetting image reduced the amygdala’s response compared with other ways of processing the same image (Lieberman et al., 2007). There is more on finding the right word in name your feelings.

3. The day in episodes

When the day blurs, walk back through it in order, in short chunks, and give each one a word.

Commute: fine, podcast. Standup: tense, the client thing again. Lunch at desk: flat. 3 p.m. call with Jo: actually fun. Gym: skipped, guilty. Dinner with roommates: relaxed, laughed at the TV.

This borrows from the Day Reconstruction Method, Daniel Kahneman and colleagues’ way of getting honest reports of how people’s days felt. Participants rebuild the previous day piece by piece, with steps meant to reduce recall bias. With 909 employed women, the method’s results lined up closely with data collected in the moment (Kahneman et al., 2004). For a journal, going episode by episode stops one bad meeting from becoming “today was awful,” and it shows you where the good minutes were hiding.

4. Three good things, and why

Write down three things that went well and, for each, why it went well. That is the exercise as UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center describes it (Greater Good in Action).

1. Finished the slides before lunch. Why: I turned my phone over and did the ugly first draft.
2. The barista remembered my order. Why: I’ve been going there for a year, which is its own small thing.
3. Called Dad. Why: I put it in my calendar instead of waiting to feel like it.

In a 2005 placebo-controlled online study, Martin Seligman and colleagues found that three of five happiness exercises lastingly increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms (Seligman et al., 2005). Three Good Things, done for one week, was one of the two with long-lasting effects. A 2012 replication by Myriam Mongrain and Tracy Anselmo-Matthews was more sobering. The exercises raised happiness, but so did a “positive placebo” exercise designed only to bring positive information about the self to mind, and the exercises did no better than the control condition on depression (Mongrain and Anselmo-Matthews, 2012). Writing down good things seems to lift mood, but the specific exercise may matter less than its reputation suggests.

One caution from the research. Lyubomirsky’s group found that people who analyzed their happiest moments in writing ended up with lower well-being than people who simply replayed them (Lyubomirsky, Sousa and Dickerhoof, 2006). The “why” here should be one short line. Record the good thing, then leave it alone.

5. The step back

For the thing you keep circling, write about it as if it happened to someone else. Use your own name or “you.”

Maya is upset because the group chat went quiet after she shared her news. Maya tends to read silence as a verdict. What would she tell a friend in the same spot? Probably that people are busy on a Tuesday night, and to wait until tomorrow.

Ethan Kross and colleagues tested this in seven studies with 585 people. Thinking about yourself with your own name or non-first-person pronouns, rather than “I,” helped people step back from their feelings. Before a stressful speech, people who did this felt less distress, and independent raters judged their performance as better (Kross et al., 2014). Reach for it when your journal turns into the same worry written six ways. Our piece on rumination vs. reflection explains why circling feels productive and isn’t.

6. Tomorrow’s list

When the thing keeping you up is what is coming rather than what happened, write a specific to-do list instead of an entry.

Thursday: email Raj the revised numbers before 10. Book the dentist (call, not online). Buy Dad’s birthday card on the way home. Ask Lena if the Friday deadline can move.

In a sleep lab study at Baylor, Michael Scullin and colleagues had 57 young adults write for five minutes before bed. People who wrote a to-do list for the next few days fell asleep faster than people who wrote about tasks they had already finished, and the more specific the list, the faster they fell asleep (Scullin et al., 2018). Five minutes, then close the notebook. More on this in racing thoughts at night.

7. The best possible future

Once in a while, usually on a slow weekend, imagine that the next few years go about as well as they realistically could, and describe it.

Two years from now I’ve moved somewhere with more light. I work four days a week and actually use the fifth. I still see Ana every Sunday. I’ve stopped apologizing in every email.

In Laura King’s 2001 study, 81 students wrote for 20 minutes on four days about a trauma, their best possible future self, both, or a neutral topic. Writing about the best possible self was less upsetting than writing about trauma, was linked to a rise in well-being, and was associated with fewer illness reports five months later than the control topic (King, 2001). Use it on days you want to write without digging into anything painful.

What do you write on a day when nothing happened?

Write the nothing. The days that feel too ordinary to record are the ones you will most enjoy finding later.

In the Zhang study, students made time capsules at the start of summer, with entries such as a recent conversation and the last social event they went to, and rated how interesting they expected to find them. When they opened the capsules three months later, they were more curious about them and found them more interesting than they had predicted (Association for Psychological Science, 2014). In a later study, people were especially likely to underestimate the pleasure of rereading an ordinary day with their partner, as opposed to a special one (Zhang et al., 2014). A plain Tuesday is the entry you are most likely to enjoy rereading.

When the page is blank, try one of these.

1. One sensory detail. Rain on the bus window, someone’s coffee, a kid singing two rows back.
2. One conversation, even a short one. What was said, and what you didn’t say.
3. One word for your mood, and one guess at the cause. Restless. Probably the three days indoors.
4. What you are looking forward to, or not, this week.
5. The honest version. I don’t want to write tonight. I’m tired, and I think I’m avoiding thinking about the apartment viewing. That last clause is usually the entry.

Some nights, write one line and stop. Guo’s analysis suggests coming back in a day or two matters more than length.

Should you use journal prompts or just write freely?

Either works. In Guo’s meta-analysis, the type of instruction didn’t change how much expressive writing helped. What matters more is whether the writing moves from feeling toward sense-making.

Prompts help most at the start, when the blank page is the problem. They help less when they are generic (“What are you passionate about?”) or when they keep you staring at the same pain (“Why does this always happen to me?”). A good prompt is about your actual day and can be answered in a few lines. Our list of evening reflection questions is sorted by what each kind of question does.

Free writing suits people who already have something to say. Set a timer for five or ten minutes and don’t stop until it goes off, which is the one firm rule in the standard research instructions (Baikie and Wilhelm, 2005).

An app can make starting easier. It can’t make the writing honest, and our comparison of paper vs. digital journals found that format makes little difference to the benefit.

What should you avoid writing?

No topic is off limits, but a few patterns are worth catching.

Watch for feelings with no story attached. Pages of “I’m so angry, I’m so angry” can backfire, as they did for the feelings-only group in Ullrich and Lutgendorf’s study, who reported more illness symptoms. If you notice it, add one sentence that starts with because or I think.

Watch for the same worry, rewritten nightly. If the entries for the past week could be swapped without anyone noticing, switch to format 5 or format 6.

Leave good days mostly unanalyzed. A line, a photo and a name are enough.

Write as if nobody will read it, and keep it somewhere nobody can. You will be more honest.

A hard entry can also leave you shakier right afterward. That dip is common in the research and usually passes, as we explain in does journaling work. If writing keeps leaving you worse day after day, or brings up more than you can carry alone, stop and talk to a doctor or therapist. If you are in crisis, our crisis resources page lists people you can reach now.

How to start journaling: your first week

1. Tie it to something you already do every evening, like brushing your teeth, rather than “sometime tonight.” There is more on cues in habits that stick.
2. Days 1 to 3: one-line notes during the day, then one happened-felt-because entry at night. Five minutes, no more. In Auserene, the notes go on the Today screen, and the free evening walk-through takes you back through them on your own.
3. Day 4: try the day in episodes.
4. Day 5: three good things, one line of “why” each.
5. Day 6: rest, or write one line.
6. Day 7: reread the week. Circle any word or name that shows up more than once. That is your next topic.

After that, keep the formats that felt easy and drop the rest.

A few lines, most days

What to write turns out to be the easy part. Something happened, you felt something about it, and you have a guess as to why. The hard part is believing that three sentences on a Tuesday are worth the bother. The research suggests they are, slowly and modestly, and that the plain Tuesdays are the ones you will be gladdest to find again months from now.