This Mental Health Awareness Week, we want to encourage everyone to focus on getting creative, writing things down, taking a break and sharing their feelings. There are many proven mind and soul benefits of journaling, such as reducing anxiety, helping you to focus on your thoughts and feelings, improving mental clarity and organising your thoughts.
To help and encourage you to be kind to your mind, we’ve put together some creative journaling spreads for you to try.
All you need to get started is some brush tip pens, a dotted notebook and washi tape.
Mindful mapping calendar
Our mindful mapping calendar fits a whole year into one journal spread for maximum mindfulness. All you need is calm-inducing colours, decorative washi tape and a handful of things you want to track throughout the year.
We’ve gone with illness, periods, full moons, daylight savings and extreme weather, but other things you could track include alcohol consumption, screen time or exercise. This makes it so easy to keep on top of what’s going on throughout the year, how well you’re doing at meeting your goals.
Gratitude tracker
The gratitude tracker helps you take a moment to remind yourself to be thankful. It’s important to reflect on what has happened during the day so that they all don’t slip into one. The learnings column encourages you to make the best of situations that at first don’t feel positive. We can take learnings from many different situations so it’s therapeutic to keep an eye on your take-aways from the day. The mind, body, space and soul sections are for quick 15-minute self-care tasks you can do throughout the day. 
Digital detox bingo
Taking a break from tech and reducing screen time has a positive effect on mental health and we all know we spend too much time on social media. Digital detox bingo helps you put down your phone, get off Facebook, swipe up and out of Tinder and leave that group chat of friends from school. Take one card a day and learn new skills, take up a hobby and give your eyes a rest.
Mood tracker
What better way to be kind to your mind than colouring in thunderclouds with pretty shades? The mood tracker allows you to focus on how many happy and sad days you have by assigning a mood to a colour and filling in each day with the relevant colour. Once you work out how much time you spend being sad/happy/meh you’ll start to see mood patterns and can try to make active day-to-day changes to improve your mood.
You will need:
- Brush tip pens
- A dotted notebook
- Washi tapes
- Stickers (optional!)
For more content related to mental health, read about how it can help to write it down by writing a letter or doing some creative writing.
