Keeping a journal is a wonderful activity for women with ADHD, it allows you to reflect on your life regularly. It becomes more obvious where your challenges lie when you must put your experiences down on paper. As a woman with ADHD, there can be a huge amount of activity going on in your mind daily and unless you make some effort to do a mind dump to get rid of it, it will just stay there. When you keep a journal, it provides you with an avenue to get the mind clutter out of your head and down on paper. Some of the mind clutter will just be thoughts that you want to write down and let go but others will be valuable insights which will help you to determine how you are progressing and identify challenges that you are facing and need to overcome. You might be surprised three years from now when you look back on today and see how far you have come. This might sound all well and good, but for women with ADHD it can be tough to get started: what do you write about? Should you use a notebook or something fancy like a leather-bound journal. Starting with the benefits of journaling for ADHD, it’s important to know why you should consider journaling when you have ADHD. Here are 3 reasons why you will want to start journaling if you have ADHD, or if you are worried that you do have ADHD
Clarifying Your Thoughts and Feelings – A women with ADHD has a constant carousel of ideas and thoughts going on in their mind. These ideas can be great, inspiring, and creative. At the same time, they can be fleeting and easily forgotten by women with ADHD. Being unable to remember every idea can add to the stress of having ADHD. Using journaling can help with adding clarity to your thoughts and feelings by getting them out of your mind and onto paper. Sometimes, being able to look at your thoughts and feelings on paper can make them easier to understand and to see the full picture of what is going on. Having these thoughts written down can also serve as a reminder when you are working on and thinking of bigger projects. The brain dump method (later in how to journal) is a great method for getting these thoughts out of your mind to increase clarity.
Get To Know Yourself – Women with ADHD struggle with slowing down and reflecting on past experiences. Those with ADHD are constantly on the go, moving to the next thing, and don’t have time to fully process everything going on. Because of this, people with ADHD may struggle with knowing who they truly are, what they enjoy, and their values. Taking the time to process things through journaling can be a great way to combat this impulse to be constantly on the go. Often times, journaling is a reflective process that aids people with ADHD in slowing down.
Reduces Depression, Anxiety & Stress- Many women with ADHD will also experience anxiety or depression. What typically happens is a women with ADHD feel so overwhelmed with the different aspects of their life that they are unable to manage everything, leading to great stress, anxiety, depression, and mental health challenges. Although journaling is not a replacement for mental health treatment, it has been shown to be helpful with reducing stress, overthinking, and difficulties sleeping. Journaling gives a women with ADHD the chance to express their negative thoughts and feelings, look at things from a different perspective, and buffer against their experience of stressful life events.
FREE JOURNAL PROMPTS HAND OUT TO GET YOU STARTED JOURNALPROMPTSFORADHDMINDS.