Are you looking to more directly affect your subconscious mind before it hits the pillow and the proverbial hay? Want to learn some of the best nighttime journal prompts for improving your mental health and wellbeing?
Then look no further, for today we will be exploring 10 of the best prompts for you to finally take hold of your life again.
1. What's On Your Mind Right Now?
This is one of those night journal prompts that can be an incredibly useful way to actually find out how you are feeling before bed. Sometimes when we try to fall asleep, those creepy crawlies that lurk in the folds of our mental health can come calling.
In processing our present feelings through nighttime journaling we can work to ensure that we are not haunted by anything from the day. Using evening journal prompts like this can also be a valuable way to rid yourself of any anxieties you might have experienced during the day.
2. How Do You Feel Right Now? Where in the Body?
This is one of those bedtime journal prompts that gets you in the mood to really explore your physiological and psychosomatic self, to properly learn how to keep a journal.
In exploring your present emotions alongside the physiological symptoms, you can better associate these emotions with the impact they have on your physical self. This can allow you to feel genuine connection today and forever more, so long as you nightly journal in a stable bedtime journaling routine.
Journaling prompts scarcely come along that attempt to center you in the present moment more than this one.
3. What Was Your Most Prominent Emotion Today?
Trying to journal before bed and explore the most prominent emotion you felt in a day can be a great way to review how you felt overall. Once you have sussed out precisely how you felt today, you can review this feeling and how it sits with how exactly you want to feel in the future.
Not only will you be able to use these kinds of journal prompts to help your future self, but offloading such emotions in written form can often help you to fall asleep faster.
4. What Was Your Favorite Part of Today?
What better way to rid yourself of those pesky negative thoughts that keep you up at night than to write about your favorite parts of the day you have experienced?
The biggest challenge in the face of negativity is to feel positivity. This is Self Care 101, ensuring that you know when to look evil in the face and when to let it soothe you.
Make sure your current evening routine features some kind of journaling that enables you to express gratitude for the things you are experiencing from day to day. Studies have shown that this kind of gratitude journaling can be amazing for mental health.
5. What Was Today's Biggest Challenge?
Alternatively, it might be useful, instead of searching for the good in your day, to explore the negative thoughts and feelings you have felt. What better way to ensure more positive dreams tonight and happiness in the near future than to work through the negativity that you experienced in the day?
Go out and buy a cute leather journal for self-awareness through nightly journaling before bed. Process today's biggest challenge before you lay your head to ensure a clearer and cleaner sleep.
6. Describe Your Day Using One Word
Alternatively, if words are failing you in this instance, just use one word to try and capture the whole day. Sometimes, it can be difficult to collate your feeling and even to know how you actually felt about anything.
Attempting to summarize it all in one word like so can be a helpful way of sidestepping our brain's defensive mechanisms, ensuring that we get to the heart of the problem without needing a psychotherapist.
This is why people often look at journaling as a very real substitute for these kinds of therapeutic techniques, especially as it's at your own behest, coming from yourself, and is eons more affordable.
7. Did You Feel a Genuine Connection Today?
With the sheer amount of methods of connection and social inter-connectivity going on within and without the workplace, it is no wonder that as a society we feel lonelier than ever before. The sheer number of options can be overwhelming, hence why people are more and more often drawn to base pleasures.
Thus, mapping out a genuine connection that you have had in a day that has stuck with you can be a great way to tie an anchor to the connections that have mattered most to you. This will hopefully allow you to make more of them in the future.
8. What are you worried about? What would you tell a friend who has these same worries?
In a similar vein to therapizing yourself, you can use this technique to pat yourself on the back and offer yourself condolences much as a therapist or an absentee parental guardian might.
By performing this kind of ritual, you can almost encourage an out-of-body experience, allowing you to truly interact with yourself. This is very much in the spirit of some of the best metafiction and postmodernism, so any fans of Italo Calvino ought to be rejoicing.
9. Write About Something You Need To Let Go Of
In a similar way that you might try to isolate the physical feeling of one of your anxieties by writing about that and then trying to find it in your body, you can also do so with something you need to let go of.
This could very well be representative of anxiety or paranoia that you have been frequently experiencing, but the key point is that it should be something you wish to let go of - it could even be a bereavement. If you do it right, you should feel it physically leave your body once you have properly written through it.
10. What Do You Need To Do More or Less Of?
This can very easily be one of those things that you are left worrying about for hours while under the moon's gaze. So, by letting go of it before you attempt to sleep, you can also let go of the worry and the anxiety of turning over and over what you could be doing better in life.
We have all been there and now, thanks to journaling of this kind, you do not have to suffer anymore.
Final Words
So, there you have it! Hopefully, you are now feeling ready and able to grab your life by the horns and shake it to and fro viciously like a bucking bronco.
FAQs Nighttime Journal Prompts
SHOULD I JOURNAL RIGHT BEFORE BED?
There is no set time of day that is better for journaling than others, so whether or not you should journal before bed will depend on your purposes. It is, however, during these times directly before or after sleep that our minds are perhaps most receptive to external influence, occupying a borderland between consciousness and unconsciousness. If then your aim with journaling is to more directly influence your subconscious habits and behaviors, you might be best advised to do so before bed or just as you have awoken.
WHAT TIME OF DAY IS BEST TO JOURNAL?
While there is no set time of day that is ultimately best for journaling - and the time of the day that you journal will depend on your purposes - there are certain times that are perhaps best for certain things. If, indeed, your intentions with journaling are to more directly affect your subconscious habits and formed behavior, then perhaps doing so before bed will allow you to ponder upon your writings as you nod off to sleep, absorbing what you have learned for future use.
