I’ve written a lot about the benefits of journaling for mental health and wellbeing, but did you know it can help your creativity too? Even if you’re not a writer and writing isn’t related to what you otherwise enjoy making, journaling is a useful side practice that will support and develop your creative work. Below, I’m sharing five ways a regular journaling practice can help your creativity. This list isn’t exhaustive, but if you’re new to regular journaling, I hope it encourages you to give it a try 🙂
1. Practice creating a habit
If we want to create a body of work, improve, explore our creative identity and evolve, we need to show up and make things on repeat. We need to make creating a habit. It’s much easier to fall out of habits than it is to create or restart new ones, but the act of creating new habits is something we can practise. When we journal regularly, we are doing just that. Even if journaling doesn’t feel related to your creative work, you are practising habits, consistency, and overcoming resistance. That all makes a difference.
2. Explore helpful and unhelpful beliefs
Journaling is invaluable for unpacking beliefs you might have around your creative work, helpful and unhelpful. By making time to explore these beliefs, you get to know them, can reinforce those that are constructive and challenge those that aren’t. Sometimes we spend so long in the work, we forget to take a step back and zoom out to look at how we’re approaching the work, and the bigger picture overall. Journaling helps us do that, and it can help us gain and invaluable perspective on what we’re doing.
3. Plan and explore new projects and ideas
Journaling offers us the opportunity to go wild and dream and scheme for the future. It gives us the chance to explore what a new project would look like, to try out different versions, to ask “what if?” without the pressure of committing.
Have you ever been tempted by a shiny new project idea when you’re already working on something else? Me too! We can also use journaling to get these ideas out of our heads and onto paper (or screen), making room to finish what we’ve already started while also capturing them for later.
4. Get comfortable with expressing yourself
Self-expression doesn’t come naturally to everyone. If you feel self-conscious or even critical about what you create and find that this gets in the way of your creativity, journaling can help. Just like practising creating a habit, journaling is good practice for self-expression. There’s no pressure—you’re not going to show your writing to anyone—but you do get used to sharing what you write with the person who might be your toughest critic: you. Even if writing is a far cry from the type of creative work you do, the more you produce, the more normal it will feel. Starting a regular journaling practice will normalise producing some kind of output and create a solid foundation for the other things you want to create.
5. Explore topics you don’t usually like to think about (but still matter)
We all have aspects of our creative work and life we overlook, either because it feels uncomfortable to face them head on, or because we aren’t aware of their importance and how they affect us. These areas might include money, our creative network, mindset, self-care, and more. Journaling helps bring these things to our awareness so we can face them head on and give them the attention they might need.
If you would like a year’s worth of journaling prompts for creatives, I invite you to look at The Year of You for Creatives: 365 Journal Writing Prompts for Doing Your Best Work. Inside, you’ll find 365 daily journaling prompts that guide you through different elements of your creative work so you can build a strong foundation, improve your craft, and develop a practice that works for you. Every month, you’ll explore an important aspect of your creativity, from mindset and growth, to your working environment, community and support, money, self-care, and much more. Find out more and get your copy here.
