Four years ago, I learned I have a serious case of Major Depressive Disorder. I started seeing a therapist and taking a nightly dose of Fluoxetine (also known as Prozac). I still do both of these things, and they are two of the most important decisions I ever made in my life. They made me want to live again.
But professional treatment isn’t the entire equation. I had to make huge changes in the way I approach everyday life, and in the ways I treat myself. One of the simplest, most powerful techniques I’ve discovered is positivity journaling, and I want to show you how.
Sometimes during the winter when the skies are grey and the air is smoggy, Utah feels like a barren, frigid wasteland. The goal of positivity journaling is to rewire your brain so you spend less time suffering in self-pity, and more time enjoying what’s beautiful in life.
Start with a notebook. It can be blank, or one of those day planners no one uses anymore. Your first step is to structure the pages so each one can have the date, 3 bullet points, and 2 paragraphs of writing on it. Optionally, leave extra space for stickers, newspaper cut-outs, and any other decoration you might want to add.
With a premade planner, I type up a page layout in Microsoft Word and print out dozens of them, 4 to a page. I cut those apart and I tape or glue them to each page of the existing planner. It’s a waste of paper, and the planner will start to bulge because you’re essentially tripling its page count.
To that I say, yes! My positivity journal should be huge and overflowing! (I don’t tape all the pages at once, though, because I’m honestly not sure if they would fit. We’ll see as time goes on.)
Now that you’ve got everything laid out, keep your positivity journal in a place where you’ll naturally see it every day. I suggest a nightstand or next to the shower. It’s important that you fit positivity journaling into your daily life organically. You want to be diligent about doing your daily writings, but not beat yourself up if you ever forget.
The important part should take less than 10 minutes every day:
- Fill in each of the 3 bullet points with a person, object, or event that you’re grateful for. These can be really basic things like “my parents” or “my girlfriend” or “my laptop,” but never write the same thing twice. The more you practice thinking of new things to appreciate, the more your mind opens to the true variety and abundance of good things out there.
- Describe (in a short paragraph) one nice thing you or someone else did today (or yesterday, if you’re journaling in the morning like I do). Sadly, the default way of living, is to run around never acknowledging the things other people do until one of them hurts us personally. While we need to fight injustice wherever it happens, we also need to cultivate healthy minds, and those need balance. Don’t ignore the positive sides of the people around you.
- In another paragraph, try to write a visceral description of a moment you really enjoyed recently. What happened, and how did it make you feel? Try to preserve every part of that moment.
Then you’re done! A few things to remember: never write anything that upsets you in your positivity journal. If you find journaling more comprehensively to be useful, do it in another notebook. If you keep everything happy in the positivity journal, something amazing happens. After a week or two, when you’re feeling down, you can flip through it and see pages and pages of reasons to feel hope. It’s better than any self-help book, because it’s yours. To me, this is sacred, and I hope you’ll feel the same about your own positivity journal.