How To Start Journaling

For six years, I have journaled every day. In 2026, even if it isn’t every day, you should start journaling too.

This guide has advice you haven’t heard before, because you wouldn’t be reading this if the suggestion to ‘make time every morning’ and ‘start with a sentence a day’ actually bore fruit.

In truth, if journaling is meant for you, it will eventually stick. I say this as someone whose starting days felt like reusing the same piece of tape. Equipping myself with the common and conventional journaling advice wore down the adhesive so much that for a long time, journaling simply would not stick.

Copying and pasting suggestions that didn’t resonate with myself was far from the transmutative hopes I had for journaling; instead of truly engaging and embodying the craft, I was filling a Pinterest board with words, rituals and meanings that weren’t mine. In cultivating my own personal relationship with journaling, I created the most sacred ritual in my life.

There are five suggestions that I expand upon in this guide that I have developed over the past six years. At the bottom of this newsletter, I have compiled a graphic of all thirteen journaling prompts for your first entry which I am so excited for you to try.

Happy reading and writing,

Jada