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Journal prompts

• How do I feel?
• What made me feel this way?
• How does my body feel?
• What am I thinking about?

Gratitude journaling

So far it’s been quite negative based, a lot of focusing on how we’re feeling right now, which is obviously good. But it’s also important to do the positive side of journaling too, there are many types of journaling we can use to achieve this.

Gratitude is one of my favourite because it gets you to focus on all of the things you have in your life to be grateful for and trust me once you get going there are a lot. Some days it’s really hard just to find one. But if you just think about everything around you so for example, living in a house, having family members and friends, a nice warm cup of tea, a comfortable bed to get into at the end of the day or whatever it is. It can be literally as simple as the normal everyday things that we often take for granted. I’m sure we can all think of five things every day that we’re grateful for. That’s something that I love to do.

Lastly, this is one that’s particularly good before bed, is a brain dump. If you’re anything like me, you’ll get into bed and your mind decides that it’s time to wake up and it literally will just start overthinking every single conversation that day going over it, thinking about what I said, what I didn’t say, what I shouldn’t have said and then the same for every single thing I did. It’s so exhausting.

The brain dump really helps me with this because I get my journal and I write it all down. Every single thing that’s come to my mind, no matter how big or small I write it down. Then I close my journal, I put it in the drawer, I close the drawer and I say that’s it now it’s gone, it’s it’s not on my mind anymore. It’s in a journal and if I need to pick it up tomorrow because maybe there is something important that I need to remember, then I can do because it’s written down and I’ll remember it.

There’s nothing worse than waking up at three o’clock in the morning and having a really good idea or remembering something that you’ve got to do and then being afraid that if you fall asleep, you’re going to forget it. So it can be used for things like that as well. If you’ve got any ideas or any new worries come up or whatever it is use your brain dump to figure out all of those things, get it off your mind and onto paper.

I’ve been journaling for probably about seven or eight years now, pretty much since I started my journey with my counsellor and then my own self-help journey and became really aware of everything out there. But there wasn’t one journal that had all of these things that I found really useful that I’ve just talked through today.

Once I published my book, quite a few people were coming to me asking if there is a journal for the book because the book is really helpful but I feel like a journal with it would be really good too. So basically, long story short, I decided to make my own journal with all the prompts that I know I need and that I know work best for understanding and managing anxiety. It goes really well alongside the book and helps you to implement all the tools and strategies that we talk about in the book.

I now use the Stand Up To Anxiety Journal every single day. I have done since I published it over a year ago and I find it so helpful and so many people that have ordered it do as well. If you haven’t already got your copy, make sure you go over to Amazon and order your copy, just type “Stand Up To Anxiety” and the book and journal will come up if you haven’t already got them. Or you can go to my website and there’s a lot of information about it on the website if you want to read a little bit more first.