How To Get the Most Out of Journaling Even if You Don’t Do It Every Day
The science behind why skipping a day or week shouldn’t make you feel bad.
I’ve been journaling since I was thirteen. But if you ask me whether all the boxes of used journals I have at my parents’ place have an entry every single day, the answer would be no. No matter how badly I’d want to be consistent, I still skip days (sometimes even weeks and months). On some days, different commitments come up. On others, I’m just too exhausted to put pen to paper. Either way, I haven’t been able to stick to the daily journaling habit as strictly as I’d like to.
If you go by the advice often prescribed by writers and speakers in the self-help field, you could say I’m a failure. That because I miss days, I’m not eligible to get all the benefits from journaling.
Speaking from experience, that’s not true. Journaling has helped me reflect on a lot of decisions and improve myself based on the outcome. It has helped me perform personal annual reviews to understand my goals better and accordingly set new-year resolutions. It also pulled me out of some of the darkest phases of my life. Even though I don’t do it daily, journaling has helped me become more comfortable in my identity.
