It’s not easy to stay motivated and energetic all of the time. There are days when you’re capable of conquering the world and days when you just don’t feel like doing anything.
Although you’ll still have days where energy and motivation are low, it’s much easier to cultivate a positive mindset and sustained ambition when you’re enthusiastic and engaged in your life.
Journaling can have a profound effect on keeping motivation and energy levels high. By documenting how you feel and what goes on and learning from it, you can craft a life that incites vibrance and keeps you stimulated.
Incorporate these journaling techniques to ensure
you remain motivated and energetic enough to pursue success relentlessly.
Document Goals in Your Journal
It’s easier to stay motivated when you’re striving toward something meaningful. Whether you’re shooting for emotional stability, a better career, or something else, having goals that matter to you and a practical plan for achieving them can be all you need to stay inspired and move forward.
Your journal is a great place to document your goals. You can talk openly and honestly about what you want to achieve. You don’t have to worry about someone dimming the light on your goals because they think they’re unachievable. Instead, you can cling to your goals without judgment.
Feel free to document short and long-term goals. For example, you could write down a goal such as saving enough money to buy a car. If you’re set on raising this money during a certain timeframe — say a year — you can divide the total amount over 12 months. Each week you can write down how much you saved and how that compares to your end goal. Inevitably, the more entries you write, the closer you’ll be to your goal.
On the other hand, if you want to drink a gallon of water each day, you can journal each day and track how much water you drank each day. Each month you can see how often stayed on track, which will make you more mindful in your daily life.
Reflect on Each Day
Things happen every day that impact our energy and motivation levels. It’s important to reflect on these things and all else that happens each day to learn more about how you can stay energetic and motivated despite what happens during your days.
Using journaling for reflection is common. When you’re going through the day, you may not have the retrospect that’s necessary to understand factors that may have affected your mood or energy. After writing through your day or thoughts, though, you may be able to connect the dots on potential energy drainers.
When you touch on something that impacted your energy or motivation, dig deep into why. Why did that particular incident have such an influence? Then, talk about how you can handle the situation better next time. What are the exact steps you’ll take if faced with what happened again?
Reflect and devise plans for maintaining high levels of energy and motivation despite what the days bring.
Incorporate Gratitude Mapping
Gratitude mapping is not only a mindful journaling activity for better sleep, but it’s also good to do to be more enthusiastic and engaged in life. It’s easy to be consumed by all that isn’t going the way you want it to. But that only results in an inherently negative mindset and outlook on life.
On the other hand, a variety of previously published research shows that gratitude can evoke positive thinking, enhance happiness, and regulate stress hormones to reduce fear and anxiety.
You can incorporate gratitude mapping into your journaling routine. Express what you’re grateful for in different areas of your life, such as people, experiences, places, and skills. Do this as often as possible to stay focused on all the good things in your life and find solutions for what’s troubling you.
Try Sleep Journaling
Sleep deprivation can affect your health in many ways. For instance, it can lead to decreased eye function, glaucoma, and diabetic eye problems. Mental health conditions can also worsen. It can also limit your cognitive function, negatively impacting your focus, decision-making, and emotional stability.
With all that sleep deprivation can do to your health, your energy and motivation levels are likely to be low too. How can you feel highly motivated and energetic when you’re exhausted and experiencing health issues because of it?
You could try the innovative practice of sleep journaling to help. Sleep journaling is different than a sleep diary. The latter tracks your sleep habits while the former records what you’re thinking and feeling just before you go to sleep.
A combination of both will be the most effective in helping you diagnose sleep issues and devise a plan to overcome them. Journaling about your sleep can lead to better sleep quality that, in turn, unlocks greater vitality.
Track Your Activities and Habits
The causes of low energy vary. For instance, you could be burnt out from work. Demanding relationships could be draining you physically and mentally. Diminishing mental health and illnesses can cause low energy. Lifestyle habits, such as poor diet and smoking can too.
Activities that can restore energy and motivation include:
- Exercising regularly;
- Using vacation and sick time;
- Healthily coping with stressors;
- Limiting tech and social media usage;
- Taking short breaks throughout the day.
Trying as many of these activities as you can is ideal. But you should also document the effects of these activities on your energy and motivation in your journal to track how they do or don’t change things for you.
With a record of how specific activities influence vitality, you can incorporate the ones that improve your liveliness more often in your day-to-day. You’ll also show yourself more appreciation and love for how far you’ve come.
Experiment With Creative Writing Prompts
There are all kinds of journaling prompts to choose from — each one can help you in different facets of your life. Creative writing prompts, in particular, can have an interesting effect on motivation and energy levels.
Creative writing prompts are ideas or scenarios that force writers to use their imaginations to craft a story, personal narrative, poem, or journal entry. These prompts make you think outside the box and go deeper. They require you to go beyond what you know.
In doing creative writing prompts, you can stimulate your mind and inspire curiosity. This inquisitiveness can leak into your real life, encouraging you to express yourself more authentically and put your effort into what creates that fire in your belly for life.
Creative writing prompts are in abundance online. Do a Google search for “creative writing prompts” and begin compiling a list of those that interest you. Pull these prompts out whenever you want to go deeper in understanding yourself and where you want to go.
Conclusion
Journaling can be powerful in many regards when it comes to you being the healthiest, happiest version of yourself. You must stay energetic and motivated to be this version of yourself — both of which journaling can help you with.
Using your journal to set goals, engage in reflection, express gratitude, and for the other purposes detailed above will assist you in achieving high energy and motivation levels.
Author bio: Miles Oliver is an independent writer with a background in business and passion for psychology, news, and simply helping people live happy and fulfilled lives. He has lived and traveled all over the United States and continues to expand his awareness and experiences. When he is not writing, he is most likely mountain biking or kicking back with a cup of tea.
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