Reduce Your Social Anxiety with These 20 Journal Prompts

A List of 20 Journal Prompts You Can Use to Manage Social Anxiety

Not sure how to get started using anxiety journal prompts? Journaling improves your health mentally, emotionally, and physically.

For those with even a little exposure to journaling, this comes as no surprise. Journaling is a great way to express pent up emotions and deal with problems (past, present, and future).

If you’ve never kept a journal before, you may wonder how to get started with anxiety journal prompts.

Fortunately, it’s easy to jump right in.

How to Get Started Journaling

Step One: Pick the Method that Works for You

You may not know what that is yet, but don’t let that stop you. There’s no harm in trying out different techniques; this is what it is meant for after all.

Start by picking a method that feels appealing.

Do you want to buy a journal?

Do you want to keep it simple with a spiral notebook?

What about online journaling (such as Blogger or LiveJournal)?

You could even open a blank document on your computer and start there. What you write on doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you’re writing, so don’t get too hung up on this step.

Just pick a method and go.

Step Two: Just Write

It doesn’t have to be grammatically correct. You don’t need to worry about spelling. Most importantly, you don’t need to worry about impressing anyone or shocking anyone.

This is your private journal, just for you, so you can say anything you want. In fact, that’s the key.

Express yourself openly and honestly.

Just write!

It’s amazing how something so simple can make such a huge difference in your life.

Step Three: Be Consistent

You don’t have to write every day, unless you want to.

But if you’re only pulling your journal out once every four months, you’re not going to see the same benefits to your emotional health.

Try writing several times a week, even if it’s short. Studies show regular journaling reduces stress and anxiety.

Step Four: Be Open to Alternatives

There’s no right way to keep a journal. Some people keep multiple journals. You might find you need an anxiety journal, or a grief journal.

You might want journals for things that interest you, such as a nature journal, travel journal, or artist’s journal.

Be free to express yourself in ways that make sense to you. You might even keep a journal in which you create an alter ego of yourself.

You might want to add drawings to your journal. These don’t have to be artistic; even stick figures and other simple drawings, combined with words if that appeals to you, can be a helpful way of expressing a thought or emotion through art.

What about making a collage, drawing a mandala, or creating lists? If it feels right to you, then it is right.

Motivate Yourself by Writing a Journal Entry About a Day That Hasn’t Started

Are you unsure how to motivate yourself? If you want to enjoy the life you desire, you need to take steps to create the life that you want.

There are many self-help books on the market but very few actually give you the tools to enjoy life on a daily basis.

What many of these books fail to convey is that in order to act on your desires, you need to experience the good feeling that goes along with doing those things that will make you happy.

Below are some tips to help you learn how to experience that feeling by writing a journal about your day in advance.

Writing in a Journal

Not sure how to motivate yourself to achieve your goals and feel good about your achievements? An interesting option is to write out your day in advance in a journal format.

This will get you feeling like you are already experiencing the day that you are writing about and therefore you will see results.

You will be more likely to actually live this day if you have already experienced it in some way.

How to Write

Here is a quick tip on how to motivate yourself. You might write something such as,

“I started out my day today feeling great as I got out of bed. After this I had breakfast with my family and we all had a lovely conversation. Around noon I went to the gym and worked out. It feels so good that I am actually doing what I can to better myself.”

Plan Your Day

You could go on for the entire day and plan it out perfectly to fit your desires.

After you have written out your perfect day in journal format, it is time to bring it into existence!

This is the most exciting part. A lot of people find it easiest to break it down into steps.

Maybe you could write out a list that would contain the following,

1. Get out of bed in a good mood.

2. Eat an amazing breakfast with my family.

3. Go to the gym.

It is also important to use feeling words that mean something to you such as amazing, great, positive, healthy, etc.

This will help keep you motivated when you read out your list and make it more likely that you will follow through with your plans.

The last and final step is to actually do these things on your list one day soon in the future! You will feel the positive benefits of your actions if you carry them out.

Why not give writing in your journal in advance a try tomorrow. See if you can’t plan your day by experiencing it before it has even begun.

Life is meant to be lived the way that you want; you just need to have the motivation by knowing what the reward will be.

The video below goes over some quick exercises you can do to journal about your anxiety.

Anxiety Journal Prompts

When I first heard about anxiety journal prompts, I thought of the types of journals I kept as a child.

“Dear Diary” accounts would have been a better way to explain them. I never kept at it for very long, because I would grow tired of writing about mundane things that had happened.

At the same time, if I ever chose to write about my feelings or emotions, I felt too worried that someone would end up finding my diary and reading it.

If you’ve had those thoughts too, I encourage you to learn more about how journaling can aid your mental health.

Try not to think of it as a diary. Instead, it’s more like an ongoing workbook to sort through your feelings.

Just as sharing your thoughts and feelings with a therapist helps you to organize them and find solutions, so does writing them down.

Below are a list of prompts to help you sort through your feelings if you live with social anxiety.

Most of these are not specific to social anxiety, but you may find that themes about being socially anxious pervade your answers.

These more general prompts will help you to narrow down what’s going wrong in your life, and how you might go about fixing it.

Journaling will help you to manage stress.

For each answer that you give, your mindset should be one of how can I make things better for me?

If you’ve spent a long time living with social anxiety, you might feel like you don’t deserve better.

Try to set that aside and really imagine your best life.

Can you change your circumstances or your thoughts to improve your situation? I want you to start imagining that things can be better and you can have it all.

In this way, your goal will be to start creating a new story for yourself that solves the problems that you have.

You will see that journaling is about becoming mindful of your situation, and how you can improve on it.

List of Social Anxiety Journal Prompts

1. What are the three things that scare you most and why?

2. What are the five moments in your life that made you the happiest?

3. What is your great challenge in your life right now?

5. What one thing would you most like to change about yourself?

6. What are your happiest and saddest childhood memories?

7. If you could have any career, what would you want it to be?

8. What trait do you admire most in others?

9. List 10 things that you can start doing now to take care of yourself.

10. What are your 10 worst habits, and how do they impact your life?

11. If you knew this was your last day on earth, how would you want to spend it?

12. Purge your mind of all your worries by listing everything that is churning through it.

13. What did you accomplish today?

14. What are 20 things that make you smile?

15. What are 15 songs that help to change your mood?

16. What are 3 things you would do if you were not afraid?

17. What is one adjustment you would like to make to your morning routine?

18. What is one adjustment you would like to make to your nighttime routine?

19. Where is one place you would like to travel?

20. Was today a difficult day? If so, why? How can you prevent days like this in the future?

Action Prompts

1. Write a thank you letter to your biggest supporter and mail it.

2. Choose one problem in your life and answer questions you imagine a friend would ask you about it. Consider it from all angles and be open to solutions.

3. Write about how you would spend a day doing things that make you feel excited, engaged, and fulfilled. Choose one item from the list and add it to your day today.

Other Articles About Journal Prompts

• Art Journal Prompts for Anxiety
• How to Create a Mental Health Bullet Journal
• How to Engage in a Gratitude Practice

WANT TO REMEMBER THIS? SAVE 20 JOURNAL PROMPTS FOR ANXIETY TO YOUR FAVORITE PINTEREST BOARD!

Reduce Your Social Anxiety with These 20 Journal Prompts