Share Me!

Hi pals! In today’s blog post, we’re going to go over journaling, journaling for self-love, and 5 effective self-love journal prompts you can use tonight, tomorrow, or whenever you’re ready. Let’s dive in!

*This post may contain affiliate links. By using the links on this article, I get a small amount of commission that I put back into my blog and Youtube channel. This does not compromise my integrity and I only recommend things I actually believe in or find of good quality*

What is journaling?

Journaling is simply the act of you putting your thoughts out onto some form of media. There are different ways of journaling for different purposes, and there’s no “right way” to do it.

For example, you might journal by writing in a physical journal about your day, what happened, your thoughts and feelings. Someone else might journal by using an online journaling platform, and they might prefer journaling in the morning to organize their day and be productive. Other people might journal by painting a picture that represents their emotions about the day. Alternatively, you could follow a guided journal with a specific goal in mind such as tracking your health, practicing gratitude, or anything in between.

What’s most important to know is that no matter how you journal, it’s perfect the way it is. As long as you get what you want out of it and enjoy it, who cares how exactly you journal?!

 

What are self-love journal prompts?

Self-love prompts are questions that’ll get you thinking about the topic of self-love, and your relationship with yourself. These questions might be difficult to do, or take time, or bring up emotions, or maybe they’re actually super easy for you to do. But the goal is to help you grow and start/continue to love yourself.

Unlike other prompts, these are specifically tailored to make you reflect and think about self-love and the way you see and treat yourself.

Why you should journal

The simple answer is that you simply get a lot out of it. Regardless of why you journal or for what purpose, you are going to gain a lot of insight on yourself, your habits, your thoughts, your feelings, and it can be a phenomenal way of healing, staying organized, and growing as a person.

Why you should do self-love prompts

In a world of Instagram models, incredible new ways of altering pictures, a huge fitness industry, social media, and everlasting unrealistic expectations put on peoples’ visuals and characters, we all could improve our self-love.

All of us suffer from poor self-image and self-hatred, whether it’s about our looks or our abilities.

Many people describe this as imposter syndrome. A feeling that we’re not up to par with other people around us and that we don’t deserve our accomplishments.

Humans have actually always been like this. Since we used to live in smaller tribes before, we always compared ourselves to others and wanted to be the best or improve because we didn’t want to fall behind others and get kicked out of the tribe.

And this still exists even now, just in a different way. Instead of tribes, we have nuclear families, social circles, workplace cliques, school cliques, social media, online groups, and much more. We still feel this need to compare and ensure we don’t lag behind others.

However, by practicing self-love prompts and being reflexive and self-aware, we can better cope with these natural tendencies.

I learned about this in the book “The Happiness Trap” by Russ Harris. It’s a phenomenal book that talks about how the way most of us go about achieving happiness ends up making us even more miserable and anxious. He goes into great detail about why that happens, and then how to fix it using ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). It’s a great read if you’re looking for a self-help book that doesn’t tell you to just eat rainbows for breakfast and be happy no matter what. Click on the link below if you’d like to purchase it!

When should you do these self-love prompts?

That depends entirely on you! If you’re freshest in the morning, then do it in then. If you like journaling at night and are able to reflect more then, do it in the evening.

When you do it is completely up to you, but make sure to pick an optimal time, as you may need to sit down and think about these questions for a bit.

Also, feel free to take a few days or weeks to think about any of the prompts. You do not have to answer all of these in one night. Take your time and really relish in the self-reflection and growth. Rushing through these activities and thinking that’ll make you love yourself is not a realistic expectation, and if you try it, I can almost guarantee you won’t get much out of this.

So, after all this talking, let’s get into the actual journal prompts!

Your 5 effective self-love journal prompts:

1. What do you like about yourself?

I want you to make a list of everything you love about yourself. This includes your talents, things you’re good at doing, things you like about your appearance, and everything else you can think of.

So you can write anything from you like your eyes are pretty, to you’re great at cooking, to you’re a really effective communicator. Write down everything that makes you amazing.

You can decorate this list if you want to make it prettier. You can add pictures, stickers, drawings, designs, or anything you want to it. Or you can add nothing if you’d like.

Once you’re done, ensure that you keep this list somewhere safe. I want you to keep it because if you’re ever feeling insecure or frustrated with yourself, I want you to take this paper out and read what you’ve written about yourself.

I’m not expecting you to change your perspective or your mood by just reading this paper, but just acknowledging that there are a lot of great things about you is really important, even if you can’t see them or care about them at that moment.

2. What do you hate about yourself?

For this prompt, I want you to write a list of the things you don’t like about yourself or that you’re not good at. I know this sounds a little counterproductive, but let me explain why this is so important.

I believe in realistic self-love. Meaning, I’m aware of all the things that make me great, but I’m also aware of my limitations and flaws. And if I can fix those flaws, I work hard to do so. If I can’t, I learn to accept them as part of myself.

I think a lot of the current narrative around self-love is to love yourself no matter what and to only focus on your good traits and turn a blind eye to your bad ones. I don’t think that’s realistic or healthy.

We all have faults and flaws, and to grow as individuals we need to able to be retrospective about those things and take responsibility when needed.

If you think a flaw of yours is your ability to communicate your emotions, would you find it more useful to just love yourself for those traits and let them continue to negatively impact your relationships, or would you rather acknowledge that trait and create a plan to improve it and thus, grow as a person?

So I want you to make a list of all the things you don’t like. When you’re done this list, I want you to categorize it between 1. things you can change and that seem appropriate and healthy to change, and 2. things you can’t change or that are unhealthy to change.

So I’ll give you an example using myself so you can understand better.

2 things I don’t like about myself are:

• I have a really poor memory that impacts my daily life
• I don’t have much of a jawline

So, when I look at these things I think “what makes sense to improve on, what’s healthy to improve on, and is improving even possible?”.

For memory, I think it is healthy and beneficial to my overall wellbeing to improve. I can do this by keeping a daily journal and trying out different techniques for remembering things.

Now for the jawline, I don’t see any benefits of changing aside from aesthetics and my own confidence which IS important. However, jawline exercises don’t work (I’ve tried), and the only other option is surgery which I don’t want to do. So, in this case, improvement isn’t possible and this is a negative trait is something I’m simply going to have to accept.

So do you see the difference there?

The reason I want you to do this is that it’ll show you what you simply need to accept as part of yourself, and love it because you can’t change it vs what you don’t like that can be fixed and is beneficial to fix.

For the traits that are beneficial and possible of improving, I want you to also write out a plan for HOW you’ll improve those things. This will prevent you from going into a negative headspace about how many things you hate about yourself, and instead, make this a productive activity that can help you grow and actually improve self-love.

3. When has one of the strengths you outlined in prompt #1 drastically improved a situation/fixed a problem/helped someone/helped yourself?

Go into detail about how exactly you did this and how you felt after you did it.

4. What’s a trait you really value seeing in someone and makes you think they’re awesome? Write about a time you showed that same trait.

Reflect on whether you give yourself the same amount of credit for that trait as you do others and whether you think they do it better than you.

5. Share a moment where you did something really kind for yourself.

If you can’t think of anything, plan something out that you can do tonight or tomorrow that will bring you happiness, peace, comfort, and self-love. For example:

• letting yourself sleep in a bit more because you’ve been really tired recently
• making yourself your favorite meal
• saying “I love you” to yourself in the mirror
• getting some fresh air
• etc.

Alternatively, if this is particularly hard for you, consider reading this blog post and doing these prompts as a moment you were kind to yourself.

 

In Sum

So I hope you folks enjoyed these prompts and find them helpful. Let me know which one’s your favorite in the comments below and good luck on your self-love journey!

All my love,

T