A popular wellness practice that has spread all over the world, journaling or self-inquiry is a way of writing down our feelings, whether that is through journaling prompts or free-flow writing. You can start with writing about your day, your week, or bullet-pointing things that are at the top of your mind. Let yourself be guided intuitively, and enjoy the cathartic process of putting pen to paper. It’s a process that is especially good if you have a tendency to overthink!

After the tumultuous nature of 2020, there has never been a better time to start writing down our fears and hopes, when burnout is at an all-time high. In New Zealand, life is slowly getting back to normal and there is a definite feeling that there may be an end in sight, but that doesn’t cancel out the upheaval many of us have experienced – and are still living every day. And after a year of off and on WFH we are still having a hard time creating boundaries between work life and home life, with an inability to ‘turn off’ leaving us feeling more frazzled than ever.

Introducing: Energy journaling!

This is where a new subset of journaling known as ‘energy journaling’ has been proven to have a real impact, a method for noting which types of activities give us energy, and which ones drain us. It’s a type of journaling that is directly linked to your emotional health, helping you to see more clearly what serves you and what doesn’t. It can help you understand cause and effect in a succinct way, and can be cathartic in the same way regular journaling is, because you’re spending time thinking about the general rollout of your day.

So, how do I start?

Energy journaling – like all journaling – is a completely personal experience, and shouldn’t be treated as a chore or an essay that you have to write and revise until it is absolutely perfect. The aim is to spend just a few minutes on it, and keeping your mood light so that it just feels like jotting down a few notes. If you have even a couple of minutes between a meeting and a yoga class, just quickly note down how the former made you feel and any factors you think that contributed to that feeling. Think about how it made you feel at the time as well as your mood immediately following – did you leave excited and energised, or drained and overwhelmed?

To make things even easier for yourself, maybe consider giving your activity a scale of one to five, where five is feeling like you have a lot of energy and one is feeling very low and drained. Add a few details if you like, then move on.

Then, about once a week (or even once a day, if you have the time), review your notes and try to find any patterns that may have emerged. This can help you prepare for or celebrate the next time that activity rolls around, alleviating some of the unknown in your day. You can’t avoid a difficult team meeting, but you can enter it feeling prepared for anything, and not propped up by an overload of caffeine.

The best bit

We love the idea of searching online or in-person for a beautiful notebook or visual diary in which to jot down our daily energy musings, with some truly gorgeous options available out there. However, if the idea of opening an actual notebook and jotting down your feelings is an overwhelming step too far as you have no idea when you last held a pen, rest assured that it’s also completely fine to use your laptop or phone to energy journal. This process should be a joy, and never a burden.