Can just a few minutes of writing each day improve your health, boost your effectiveness, and calm your mind? Is it really enough to jot down a few thoughts to sleep better, stress less, and act more mindfully? Is journaling just a passing trend—or a surprisingly simple, science-backed path to a better life? Let’s find out!
Here’s a quick rundown of what we cover:
- Why journaling is worth your time
- What the science says about expressive writing
- Michael’s Apple Shortcut for journaling
- The VOMIT method by Struthless
- Practical tips – how to start and keep journaling
Why journaling is worth your time
1. Self-reflection
Journaling gives you the space to reflect on your thoughts, emotions, and experiences, helping you better understand yourself and grow.
Some say, “Writing is thinking,” others say, “I don’t really know what I think until I write it down.” There’s truth in both.
2. Emotional expression
It serves as a safe outlet for your feelings, helping you process and understand your emotions—without fear of judgment or ridicule.
3. Stress relief
Writing can be incredibly therapeutic—it reduces stress and anxiety by giving you a space to release your worries.
4. Goal-setting
Journals are great for setting and tracking personal goals, helping you stay focused and motivated along the way.
5. Creativity
Many people use journals to brainstorm, write stories, explore ideas, or just let their stream of consciousness flow.
6. Memories
Journaling helps you capture life’s moments—big and small—and gives you something to look back on during weekly, monthly, or yearly reviews. It’s also great for documenting travels or your progress toward a goal.
7. Problem-solving
Writing about challenges can help you clarify your thoughts and uncover solutions—sometimes, just putting it on paper does the trick.
8. Mindfulness
Journaling encourages presence and awareness of your thoughts and emotions. Expressive writing helps you stay grounded in the moment.
What the science says about expressive writing
Yes! Research shows that journaling—especially expressive writing—can bring real health benefits, like lowering blood pressure and improving lung and liver function.
Studies on expressive writing (regularly writing down thoughts and emotions) have found it can:
- lower blood pressure,
- improve liver and lung function,
- boost the immune system,
- reduce symptoms of stress and depression.
For instance, a review published in Advances in Psychiatric Treatment shows that writing about emotions and experiences can lead to measurable health improvements.
Other sources like Intermountain Healthcare also report that journaling regularly can strengthen immunity and support organ function.
How does it work?
The exact mechanisms aren’t fully understood, but scientists believe that expressive writing helps by:
- reducing stress through emotional processing,
- increasing self-awareness and reflection,
- activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which promotes relaxation.
As a result, your body is better equipped to handle daily challenges, leading to better overall health.
Writing about hard experiences may also build resilience and support immune function.
Michael’s Apple Shortcut for journaling
If you’re using Apple devices, you can try a journaling shortcut developed over the years by Michał Śliwiński. The morning shortcut gives you a few reflective prompts to start your day strong and boost your mindset.
The evening shortcut helps you review the day with guided questions, reflect on how things went, and plan ahead for tomorrow.
The VOMIT journaling method by Struthless
If you’re not journaling daily yet—don’t worry. It takes time to build a habit and create a sustainable routine.
To get started, try this method based on YouTuber Struthless’s VOMIT method.
1. Vent - kick off with what makes you angry because that easily gets you going and takes the clutter out from your head. See how easy it is to write about things that piss you off.
2. Obligations - get out everything that feels like an obligation, from actual to-dos to things you want to do or think about, etc.
2.1 Collect responsibilities
2.2 Organize - put your commitments into categories, projects or tag them somehow
2.3 Prioritize - possible guiding question: What of these, if done, would make everything else easier or redundant?
2.4 Write a to-do list with sections “bare minimum” (to make tomorrow suck less) and “killing it” to be able to adapt according to your energy level) - you might want to do this in Nozbe, which will make things so much easier.
3. Mindset - adjust your mindset in order to better be able to cope with things
3.1 Reframing (possible guiding questions: How is this the best thing, that ever happened to me? How can I grow from this?)
3.2 Self-confidence - formulate affirmations like: “I am … because…” in order to collect evidence and be able to believe them as well as be encouraged to create evidence in order to be right about the statement.
3.3 Inversion - ask yourself how to make the opposite of the actual solution work in order to more easily identify the way to accomplish your goal.
3.4 Perspective - ask yourself what advice you would give if you were a well-meaning friend in order to get unstuck from details and encourage yourself to do what’s good for yourself.
3.5 Gratitude - think about things that are good. Possible guiding questions: What was something mundane, something that happened by chance and something you yourself made happen you are grateful for? Remember these don’t have to be big things. It’s great to find small events or experiences that all in all make our lives good.
4. Ideate - generate ideas to cope with whatever is worrying you
4.1 Brainstorming - if you have a problem, challenge yourself to come up with 30 possible solutions within 5 minutes, something valuable will be among them. Don’t edit within that time frame! 4.2 What would … do? - What solution would someone smart, someone you admire come up with?
4.3 Open the loop - write down the question in order to make your brain want to answer the question and close the loop again so that you passively keep thinking about it.
5. Trajectory - get a sense of whether your life is headed in the direction you want and or what you can do to make it move that way.
5.1 Direction - reflect on whether today moved you towards or away from the goal, collect evidence for that and think about what you can draw from that for your next moves.
5.2 Hidden metrics - figure out which hidden metrics you might overlook in your day-to-day hustle, achievements that are harder to measure but equally or even more meaningful to you. Possible guiding questions: What excited me today? What drained me of energy? What did I learn? At the latest after 30 days of doing this, trends should become notable.
Practical tips – how to start and keep journaling
- Be patient: building habits takes time and consistency.
- Be honest: write openly about what you feel—no self-judgment.
- Be regular, not rigid – journal as often as you want or need to.
- Try apps:
- Nozbe – for task management and note-taking – create templates or recurring tasks with journaling prompts.
- Day One – a dedicated journaling app.
- Apple Shortcuts – Michael’s journaling shortcut
