5 Minute Daily Journaling Technique to Calm Overwhelm

Inside: A 5-minute daily journaling technique that helps release emotional overload by getting thoughts and feelings out of your head and onto paper.

Do you ever feel like your mind is running a mile a minute? Or do you feel so many emotions that you don’t know where to start? You don’t know what to do, how to feel better, or how to calm down. 

Today I’m sharing a simple journaling technique that only takes five minutes, but it’s really effective, and it’s going to help you calm those thoughts and emotions, so that you can be more in control as you try to figure out what your next steps are.

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Today, I’m going to share a really quick exercise that’s perfect for busy ladies like you—highly sensitive introverts who need a way to unload their emotions and clear their minds but who don’t have a lot of time. It is just a five-minute quick journaling technique. I’m going to walk you through the technique and explain why it works.

Step 1: Find a Quiet Space

Okay, so you want to find a place where you can actually focus. When I want to journal, I have to leave my house because I have four kids. It’s a small space, and it’s usually too loud for me to focus. However, I also enjoy journaling outside. 

I usually get up in the morning and get outside right away. So I’m outside at 7:30, sitting in the backyard at a picnic table with my classical music going – like classical piano music. I get my journal out and will journal for a little bit. 

I want you to figure out what that looks like for you. Get your pen and journal, and decide where you will be. You need to be able to focus and be uninterrupted for at least five minutes. Once you have that situated and you’re all set and ready to go, I want you to set a timer for five minutes. Just five minutes.

Step 2: Write for 5 Minutes

Now, the next step is to start writing down everything on your mind. Don’t censor yourself, don’t edit yourself, don’t overthink it. Just stream of consciousness, write down anything and everything on your mind – whatever you’re feeling, whatever you’re worried about. 

Even if you have a list of things to do today. Whatever it is that pops into your head as you start to write, just get it on the page. A little bonus tip here: if you are a person who says, “I have no idea what I want to write about,” I’m going to share a tip with you that I learned from reading this book called “The Artist’s Way,” and it’s to start writing “I don’t know what to write.” 

Keep writing “I don’t know what to write” until you figure out what you want to write about. I know that sounds silly, I know it sounds weird, but I promise you it works. I have done this time and time again, where I sat down, I was like, “You know what? I don’t really have anything to write about.” 

I’ll start writing, “I don’t have anything to write about, I don’t know what I’m going to write about today,” and usually, within about 15-20 seconds, my pen is going, the words are flowing.

Give yourself five minutes to write anything and everything that is in your mind or heart. When the timer goes off, you can stop right there. Okay, because just getting it out of your head is helpful and beneficial all on its own. But if you have some extra minutes, you have some extra time, either right then or later on in the day, I want to tell you this other step that’s going to help you get a little bit more out of it. 

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Step 3: Dig a Little Deeper

Go back to what you just wrote and reread it, looking for a couple of things. First, you’ll be looking for feelings. If you say, “I feel really sad,” “I’m frustrated,” or “I’m excited,” look for emotions or feelings. 

A caveat here: there’s no right, and there’s no wrong here. I’m not going to come and tap you on the back of your hand if you mark something wrong. Just figure it out for yourself it will be fine. 

You should also look for thoughts. If you keep repeating the same thing, keep track of that. For example, I was journaling a while ago and kept talking about how I felt like I couldn’t breathe. 

I talked about how I felt like I was being suffocated. I couldn’t breathe, I was locked in a cage, I was trapped in a box. I kept saying things like that over and over again. So that would have been a thought that I kept repeating.

The third thing to look for are questions you’re asking yourself or unresolved issues. I’ll give you an example: I have been trying to figure out, “What do I want my life to look like?” What is my big picture? I’m constantly asking myself what I want or what I like. 

I like to have people mark these in different ways because you want to be able to differentiate between them. It can be whatever you want it to be. You could circle the emotions, underline the thoughts, and put a star next to the questions or what feels unresolved. 

I just use three different colored highlighters or pens. I like the Zebra Pen Midliners, they’re like a pen on one side and a highlighter on the other. I will highlight the emotions in one color, the thoughts in one color, and the questions and unresolved things in another color. 

The goal is that you’re able to very clearly look at what you wrote and find your feelings, or find your thoughts, or find the questions. I strongly suggest that for this optional step, you don’t do it right away. 

You want to have some time away from what you’ve journaled, away from what you’ve written, because you want to come back with fresh eyes and a clear perspective. Once you’ve marked everything, you want to organize the marks that you made. 

I like to find an empty space at the bottom of my journal entry. I’ll have one column for writing emotions, another for writing thoughts, and another for marking questions or unresolved issues.

You don’t really need to do anything else. All of that is sufficient for getting some calm, getting some peace – and unloading things.

Step 4: Journal Some More

If you want to take things a step further, the next (optional) step is to look at your emotions, look at your thoughts, look at things that are unresolved, and pick one of those things to focus on to journal about more. 

Maybe you notice that you’re feeling tired, frustrated, and bored. So you decide to explore why you’re feeling bored. Take some time another day to journal out why you’re feeling bored and take a look at that. Maybe you’ve noticed a repeating thought like in my example. 

When I noticed that I was talking about “I can’t breathe, I feel strangled, I feel trapped.” I was like, “Okay, LaToya, what, the what?” And I actually took a few days to journal: Why do I feel like I’m being suffocated? Why do I feel like I’m stuck? Why do I feel trapped? What do I want to do about that? 

These can serve as prompts for further exploration in your journaling. If possible, it’s a good idea to have someone help you process these things—a friend, a mentor, a therapist, or a coach. 

Why this Technique is Helpful

I know you’re probably thinking, “That’s more than five minutes!” I know, but it doesn’t have to be. You can take five minutes to do your brain dump and be done, and just the simple act of getting it out of your head is going to be great. 

When you are brain-dumping and just writing down everything that’s coming into your mind, it just clears the fog in your brain. It’s going to clear the mental clutter, it’s going to clear the emotional clutter and get it out of the way so that it’s not taking up space in your head, in your heart. 

You won’t need to spend energy thinking about it because you’ve already done something with it. It’s on the page, and you can either deal with it later or not.

Sometimes, all I need to do is get it out of my head and out of my heart, and I’m good. I don’t have to go back and do anything with it. But if you want to or feel like you need to, those extra steps will come in.

You’re trying to take one baby step towards exploring your emotions more deeply. So you’ve got your brain dump. Next time you have time, you can mark it up. Next time you, go back and journal some more. 

Sometimes, I just take a week or two to brain dump, then mark it up for another week or two, and then go back and organize it later. You will be amazed at the patterns that emerge. I can actually see myself going from feeling suffocated and stuck to enjoying and being excited about life again.

As you work through this process, I’m giving you permission (not that you need it) to journal imperfectly and messy. Scratch things out, draw lines through them, and rip out the page if you don’t like it, but just get your things on paper. 

It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about being pretty, it’s just about being really practical and effective, because even just a few minutes a day will make a big difference in how you feel. And you know how I know that? 

Because I journaled every morning, for about 10 days, and then I got to day 11, and I thought, “You know what? I don’t actually have anything that I need to sort through, I’m feeling great, so I’m going to skip it.” 

And you know what happened on the day that I skipped it? My poor brain had so much in there that I could not focus. What did I do the next day? I got my butt up, I got my journal out, and I started writing. And I had more peace and I was able to focus better. So keep that in mind because you can have the same thing.

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