How to Journal for Anxiety: A Complete Guide
The benefits of journaling for mental health are always discussed—but how does it work? This article covers how to journal for anxiety, and how Kin's AI helps.
As helpful as it is, journaling can feel overwhelming—especially for those already dealing with anxiety. To help, this article will break the process down, and cover how AI can make it even easier.
As scientific understanding expands, and economies become more competitive, mental illness and mental health conditions have become bigger and bigger challenges to our well-being.
According to the WHO, anxiety disorders affect approximately 300 million people globally,1 with rates rising particularly sharply among young adults and professionals experiencing mental distress.2
While various coping strategies exist for managing anxiety symptoms, journaling for mental health is one of the most accessible and scientifically supported methods. Based on research including randomized controlled trials, journaling helps create a safe space for self-reflection and emotional processing,3 making it a powerful tool in supporting mental well-being.
When done properly, the benefits of journaling are a key companion to other approaches like therapy from a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) or health professional, or medication.
But what is proper journaling?
To understand that, journaling, and its link to anxiety, must be explored.
What is Journaling?
Journaling is the process of writing down thoughts, feelings, and experiences in some way. This is commonly done to help people describe their emotions and feel more able to understand them.
It’s a highly personal process that looks different for most people, but in the end, it’s still all about helping people make sense of themselves.
Understanding Anxiety and Journaling
Anxiety manifests both mentally and physically, and like journaling, it does so differently for different people.
While some anxiety is normal and even helpful in certain situations, those who experience excessive anxiety can attest to how it interferes with daily life, relationships, and overall well-being.
This is where journaling helps. Attempting to describe anxious thoughts and anxiety-inducing situations in words encourages people to view them objectively, and think about the root of the feelings to describe them fully. This process can help someone realize when and why their anxiety has become excessive, and can even lessen the anxiety itself in some cases.
Regular journaling can build the habit of approaching anxiety with a logical cause-and-effect mindset even without writing in a journal, and this can help people remember to lean on their coping strategies before their anxiety worsens.
Let’s look at what kinds of journaling help build this mindset and habit.
Core Journaling Techniques for Anxiety
Various types of journaling have proven particularly effective for managing symptoms of anxiety, with each having its own individual appeal and mental health benefits:
Freewriting
Freewriting, expressive writing, or stream-of-consciousness writing is perhaps the most famous and popular form of journaling.
Freewriting involves someone just writing out whatever they feel like, without any worry for topic, grammar, spelling, language, or even sense—there’s no wrong way to do it. A topic could even be chosen for a session if desired; it’d still count.
While it can take some getting used to, freewriting can help people express negative thoughts and release anxious feelings by encouraging raw thought patterns to be recorded without any kind of conscious filter. This can even reveal feelings, thoughts, or emotions that weren’t clear previously.
As such, it's particularly effective for overthinking, as it helps move anxious thoughts from your mind onto paper where they can be examined more objectively through self-awareness.
Worry Logs
Worry logs and thought records are exactly what they sound like—a digital or physical note of every worry or important-feeling thought that someone thinks of each day, added when they think of it.
These logs provide structured ways to track anxiety triggers and individual anxiety symptoms, meaning self-check-ins for mental health states and progress become easier, as data on past and present worries are on hand.
Regular journaling like this also quickly builds a familiarity with these symptoms and their triggers, so people can more easily recognize and mitigate their anxiety.
The 3-3-3 Rule:
The 3-3-3 rule involves writing down 3 things that can be seen, 3 that can be heard, and 3 parts of the body that can be moved. It’s a coping strategy and grounding technique to help take someone out of a spiralling tirade of anxious thoughts.
Similar to its sibling, the 5-4-3-2-1 rule (where someone names 5 things they can see, 4 they can hear, 3 they can feel, 2 they can smell, and 1 they can touch), these popular techniques can be incorporated into journaling easily.
Doing this helps take someone out of their thoughts, so they can approach their journaling in a less anxious and more objective state. It also helps them associate the rule with feelings of anxiety so that they’re more likely to ground themselves unprompted in the future.
Gratitude Journaling
Gratitude journaling is again what it sounds like—writing down things that spark gratitude and thankfulness in life.
While this might seem counterintuitive for anxiety management, shifting focus away from worries toward positives can help some people escape the negative mindset anxiety can cause for long enough to begin to examine and deconstruct it. Others find pairing this with positive affirmations and online positive affect journaling to further enhance your stress management practices.
Regular journaling in this way also builds the habit of looking for positives every day, rather than dwelling on negatives—which can be a partial cause of anxiety.
Thought Challenging
Thought challenging is based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) principles, and involves writing down anxious thoughts to then systematically examine their validity. For each anxious thought, write:
The thought itself
Evidence supporting the thought
Evidence against the thought
Whether the thought is a balanced perspective, and what a balanced perspective might look like if not
This cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) technique helps develop coping skills and a more balanced perspective on anxiety-provoking situations. This is because it essentially trains someone through regular journaling not only to debunk their most common anxious thoughts, but to approach all anxieties with skepticism.
Getting Started with Anxiety Journaling
Beginning a journaling practice for anxiety management is easier than it seems.
Start by finding a preferred medium to journal in (i.e. a notebook, an app, or just paper). Then, create a dedicated space and time for journaling that feels safe and will be uninterrupted.
As journaling becomes a habit, it’ll be easier to do it in more distracting environments. For now though, an ideal place might look like a quiet corner of home, a favorite café, or even during a morning commute.
In the same vein, choose a time where consistency is likely. It can be helpful to attach journaling to an already existing routine, like breakfast or setting the dishwasher, to help encourage consistency.
It's normal to feel resistance at first. Many people worry about ‘doing it wrong’, or feel uncomfortable confronting anxious thoughts. Remember that there's no wrong way to journal – the most effective approach is the one that is enjoyable enough to do regularly.
If it’s really hard to start, journal prompts like "What triggered my anxiety today?" or "How did my physical health feel affected when I was anxious?" can help. This isn’t something that must be kept neat, either—doodle in the margins instead of writing, if that helps maintain a regular journaling practice.
Lastly, keep in mind that journals by nature will contain private and personal thoughts. Whether using a physical notebook or digital platform, ensure the chosen journaling method provides a level of privacy that is comfortable.
If it doesn’t, locks can be purchased for notebooks, and apps like Kin have been designed for private journaling.
Common Challenges and Solutions
There are a few common things that can stop new journal users from creating a consistent and helpful habit:
Writer's Block is a common obstacle, particularly when anxiety is high. Combat this by using prompts (like the ones lower down), starting with simple lists, or even drawing if words feel too difficult.
Perfectionism can paralyze journaling efforts, and even cause Writer’s Block. It’s important to remember that a journal is a purely personal thing—it doesn't need to be polished or profound, because no one else will see it. Some of the most therapeutic entries might be messy or seemingly mundane.
Difficult emotions often surface during journaling. While this can feel overwhelming, confronting these emotions in writing actually helps process them more effectively. If certain topics feel too intense, take breaks and consider seeking professional support.
Advanced Journaling Strategies
As you become more comfortable with basic journaling, several advanced strategies can deepen its anxiety-managing benefits:
Emotional awareness exercises involve detailed documentation of physical sensations accompanying anxiety. This helps build the mind-body connection and often leads to earlier recognition of anxiety symptoms.
Trigger tracking takes worry logs a step further by analyzing patterns over time. Understanding what consistently triggers your anxiety allows for more proactive management strategies.
Solution-focused entries move beyond processing anxiety to actively planning responses. For each anxiety-provoking situation, document potential solutions and coping strategies.
Progress monitoring helps maintain motivation by tracking improvements over time. Regular reviews of past entries often reveal positive changes that might otherwise go unnoticed. Bullet journaling can be particularly effective for this, and is worth exploring once journaling feels comfortable.
How AI Can Enhance Anxiety Journaling
Modern AI technology has been transformative to traditional journaling practices. AI-supported journaling tools can offer unique advantages, such as pattern recognition in anxiety triggers, emotional tone analysis, and personalized prompts based on your writing history.
Digital journaling platforms with AI capabilities can provide insights that might be difficult to identify manually. For instance, AI can analyze writing patterns and can access entire journal histories at once to identify correlations between activities, situations, and anxiety levels. This can then be reported in very simple insights and suggestions by the AI to help with goal setting, building a positive mindset, and personal growth.
However, privacy remains paramount when dealing with personal mental health data. Look for platforms that prioritize data security and give you control over your information.
How Kin Supports Anxiety Journaling
Our own personal AI, Kin, has been designed with Journaling in mind and can support anxiety management. While Kin’s most revolutionary technology revolves around its advanced memory system, its Journal feature makes full use of it.
Kin’s dedicated Journal feature allows users to type or speak a journal entry at any time, guided by optional journaling prompts. Kin then parses the finished entries locally on the user’s device, picking out keywords like people, places, and situations to add to its interconnected memory of the user.
This ever-growing memory can be analyzed by Kin, allowing it to pick up on trends, patterns, and behaviors that may be contributing to its user’s anxiety, among other things.
Then, within the Chat feature, Kin can make these insights known to its user, and interactively discuss how it reached those conclusions, explain things with web search capabilities, and work with the user to build action plans to change habits and prepare for common anxiety triggers.
Kin can even create custom push notification reminders to help users build new habits, or just remember things they may forget.
With all of that personal information available to it, privacy and data protection are foundational to Kin's design—more about that can be found here. In short, though, all of a user’s journal entries and personal data are stored and processed on the user’s device, wherever possible, and only temporarily handed off to approved third parties when necessary.
Everything Kin knows about someone is viewable and deletable at any time through the app. Similarly, it’s robustly encrypted so that not even we can read it. Users control their data, not us, so they’re able to trust Kin and be honest, which allows Kin to provide the best emotional support.
Get Started Today
Sound helpful?
Kin can be downloaded here. Once in, complete the message below and send it to Kin to begin journaling for mental health and anxiety together:
“Hey, Kin. I’ve been struggling with anxiety a lot lately, and I’d like to start journal entries about it with you. The best time for me to journal is _____. How should we start?”
Journal Prompts for Anxiety
As promised, here are the journal prompts:
Effective Journaling Prompts for Anxiety
To get started with anxiety journaling, consider these proven prompts:
"What's the worst that could happen, and how would I handle it?"
"What are my anxiety symptoms telling me about my needs right now?"
"What actions can I take today to support my mental health?"
"When did I handle a similar situation well in the past?"
"What would I say to a friend feeling this way?"
Self-Care Integration Prompts
Journaling works best when combined with other self-care activities. Consider documenting:
Sleep patterns and their impact on anxiety levels
Exercise and movement activities that help reduce stress
Mindfulness or meditation experiences
Nutrition and its effects on mood
Stress manifestations in your body (tension, headaches, etc.)
Sleep Hygiene Prompts
Poor sleep hygiene often exacerbates anxiety, so use your journal to track:
Bedtime routines that work best for you
Sleep quality and duration
Factors that help or hinder your sleep
Morning energy levels
Late-day caffeine or screen time impact
Anon (2023). Anxiety disorders. www.who.int. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/anxiety-disorders [Accessed: 01/10/25]
Ames, M. et al. 2023. The Mental Health and Wellbeing of Young Professionals. www.aacu.org. Available at: https://www.aacu.org/research/mental-health-wellbeing-young-professionals [Accessed 01/10/25]
Sohal, M.; Singh, P.; Dhillon, B.; Gill, H. 2022. “Efficacy of journaling in the management of mental illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis”. Family Medicine and Community Health. Available at: www.doi.org/10.1136/fmch-2021-001154 [Accessed 01/10/25]
Journaling is the worst. I hate it so much. Major waste of time.