Therapy Journal: How to Keep a Journal That Supports Your Therapy

A therapy journal is a journal specifically designed to support and extend your therapy work. It's not a diary where you recount your day, and it's not a place to vent without direction. It's a structured tool for reflection — a way to capture what happens in your sessions, process it between appointments, and arrive at your next session better prepared.

If you've ever walked out of a therapy session feeling like you had a breakthrough, only to struggle recalling what that breakthrough actually was a few days later, you already know why a therapy journal matters. Research suggests that we forget up to 80% of new information within 48 hours unless we actively engage with it. Your therapy sessions are no exception.

A therapy journal bridges the gap between sessions. It takes the insights, emotions, and realisations that surface during your 50-minute appointment and gives them a place to live — a place you can return to, build on, and use as fuel for real change.

Why Keep a Therapy Journal

Keeping a therapy journal is one of the simplest things you can do to get more out of your therapeutic work. Here are six reasons it makes a difference:

• Remember what you discussed. Studies on memory retention show that we forget the majority of what we hear within days. A therapy journal captures key insights while they're fresh, so you don't lose the substance of your sessions. Even a few bullet points written right after your appointment can preserve details that would otherwise fade. For more on this, see our guide on how to remember what you talk about in therapy.
• Track progress that's hard to see day-to-day. Growth in therapy tends to be gradual. When you're in the middle of it, it can feel like nothing is changing. A journal gives you a written record that you can look back on — and the difference between what you wrote three months ago and what you write today can be striking.
• Prepare better questions and topics for your next session. Instead of spending the first ten minutes of each appointment trying to remember what you wanted to talk about, you can arrive with a clear agenda. This makes your sessions more focused and productive.
• Process emotions between sessions. Therapy can bring up intense feelings that don't resolve neatly within the hour. Writing about those feelings gives you a way to continue processing them safely on your own, without letting them build up until your next appointment.
• Notice patterns across weeks and months. When you journal regularly, themes start to emerge — recurring triggers, habitual thought patterns, situations where you get stuck. These patterns are gold for therapeutic work, and they're much easier to see on paper than in your head.
• Give your therapist better insight into your between-session life. Your therapist sees you for a fraction of your week. A journal captures what happens in between — the moments where you applied a new skill, the days where old habits crept back in, the situations that caught you off guard. Sharing even a summary of your journal entries gives your therapist a richer picture to work with.

What Makes a Therapy Journal Different

You might already keep a journal or diary. That's wonderful — but a therapy journal serves a distinct purpose. Here's what sets it apart:

• It's focused on your therapeutic work. Rather than writing about anything and everything, a therapy journal centres on the themes, goals, and insights from your sessions. This doesn't mean it's rigid or clinical — it just has a clear through-line connecting your entries to your therapeutic process.
• It connects back to session content. Each entry has some relationship to what you've discussed with your therapist, whether you're reflecting on a past session, preparing for an upcoming one, or noticing how session insights show up in your daily life.
• It includes both reflection and intention. A therapy journal isn't just about looking backward. It also looks forward — what do you want to work on? What will you try differently? What do you want to bring to your next session? This combination of reflection and intention is what makes it such a powerful tool.
• It can adapt to your therapy type. Depending on whether you're doing CBT, psychodynamic therapy, ACT, or another approach, your journal can include different techniques and structures. A CBT-focused journal might emphasise thought records, while a psychodynamic journal might lean toward free association and dream analysis.

How to Structure Your Therapy Journal

One of the reasons people abandon journaling is that they don't know what to write. A simple framework built around your session schedule can solve that. Here's a structure that works well for most people:

Pre-Session Entry

Before your session (even 10 minutes beforehand), write briefly about what you want to discuss. Ask yourself: What's been on my mind? What happened since last time that I want to explore? Is there something I've been putting off bringing up? This turns your session from reactive to intentional.

Post-Session Entry (Same Day)

This is the most important entry. As soon as you can after your session, write down the key insights, anything that surprised you, and what you want to remember. Don't worry about being thorough or eloquent — bullet points are fine. The goal is to capture content before your memory starts editing it. This is also a natural time to note any therapy homework your therapist suggested.

Mid-Week Check-In

A few days after your session, check in with yourself. How are you applying what you discussed? What's come up that connects to your session? Have you noticed any of the patterns you talked about? This entry bridges the gap between sessions and keeps your therapeutic work alive during the week. For more ideas on making the most of this time, read our guide to getting more out of therapy between sessions.

Weekly Review

At the end of each week, take a few minutes to look at the bigger picture. What patterns are you noticing? What progress have you made, even if it's small? What do you want to carry into next week? This review is also a good time to draft your pre-session notes for the next appointment.

Therapy Journal Prompts

If you're staring at a blank page, prompts can help you get started. Here are twelve prompts organised by when to use them:

Before Your Session

• What's been on my mind since last session?
• What do I want my therapist to know about this week?
• Is there something I've been avoiding bringing up?

After Your Session

• What was the most important thing from today's session?
• What emotion came up most strongly?
• What did my therapist say that I want to remember?
• What's one thing I want to try before next session?

Between Sessions

• How does what we discussed connect to what happened today?
• What coping strategy did I use today, and how did it work?
• What would I tell my therapist about this week so far?
• What am I proud of this week, even if it's small?
• What patterns am I noticing in my thoughts or behaviour?

You don't need to answer every prompt every time. Pick one or two that feel relevant, and write for five to ten minutes. That's enough.

Journaling for Different Therapy Types

The way you journal can be shaped by the type of therapy you're doing. Here are some approaches tailored to common therapeutic modalities:

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

CBT journals often include thought records — structured entries where you capture a triggering situation, the automatic thoughts that followed, the emotions you felt, and then challenge those thoughts with evidence. Tracking cognitive distortions (like catastrophising, black-and-white thinking, or mind reading) across entries helps you see how your thinking patterns shift over time.

Psychodynamic Therapy

If you're working psychodynamically, your journal might include more free association — writing whatever comes to mind without censoring yourself. Dream journals are common here too, as are entries exploring recurring relationship patterns and how past experiences connect to present reactions.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT-oriented journaling might focus on values clarification (writing about what matters most to you and whether your actions align), willingness exercises (reflecting on difficult experiences you're learning to accept), and defusion practices (noticing thoughts as thoughts rather than facts).

General Approaches

Regardless of your therapy type, certain journaling techniques are broadly useful: mood tracking across days and weeks, gratitude entries that balance your focus on problems, and behavioural activation logs where you note activities and how they affected your mood. For condition-specific approaches, see our guides on journaling for anxiety and journaling for depression.

Tips for Keeping Your Journal Going

Starting a therapy journal is easy. Keeping it going is the challenge. Here are some practical tips to help the habit stick:

• Set a reminder after sessions. Schedule a notification for 30 minutes after your usual appointment time. When it goes off, spend five minutes writing your post-session entry. This small prompt can make all the difference.
• Keep it brief. Five to ten minutes per entry is enough. You don't need to write a novel. A few bullet points or a short paragraph captures the essentials. Lengthy entries are harder to sustain and harder to review later.
• Don't judge your writing. This journal is for you, not for anyone else. Spelling, grammar, coherence — none of it matters. What matters is that you're engaging with your therapeutic work on paper.
• Use an app if pen and paper feels like friction. If the idea of a physical notebook puts you off, use a digital tool. A therapy companion app can provide structure, prompts, and session summaries that make journaling easier than starting from scratch.
• Share relevant entries with your therapist. Knowing that your journal might inform your sessions gives it purpose. You don't need to share everything — even mentioning a theme or reading a single line can enrich your therapeutic conversation.
• Review past entries monthly. Once a month, flip back through your journal. You'll often be surprised by how much has shifted. This review is one of the most motivating parts of keeping a therapy journal, because it makes progress visible in a way that day-to-day experience rarely does.

Frequently Asked Questions

This guide is for informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional mental health care.