Why journaling is one of the healthiest ways to start 2026

From citizen.co.za

By Hein Kaiser

Journaling is making a comeback and could be a powerful tool for your mental health. Here's why and how to do it

There is a powerful tool that lives its best life between your fingers. As the adage goes, it’s mightier than the sword. But a pen is also an instrument of reflection, as much as it could be for power. A pen can slow you down, make you think – and when you journal, it can gift you the same stillness that meditation delivers.

Journaling, according to reams of research, helps with self regulation, self realisation and sometimes, pulling yourself towards yourself.

The habit or hobby has become popular again. It involves keeping a diary of your days, what you did and how you felt. It’s old school, but it’s found a new cool. It’s never too late to pick up a pen and jot down life’s nuggets and charcoal bits.

                                                                  Pen to paper with thoughts. It’s good for you. Picture Hein Kaiser

Get your reasons shuffled and aligned

Think about why you really want to journal. Research by PositivePsychology showed that journaling is most effective when it is intentional rather than just creating another habit.

Writing with a clear purpose improves emotional processing and reduces stress. Writing in a journal can be a place to untangle your thoughts.

The first sentence in your journal should be the reason you started in the first place. Read this line every time that you want to give up and instead watch some TV.

Choose your format

It’s the 21st century and we are no longer limited to pen and paper.

You can journal with your laptop, phone, tablet or even talk your way through it with a voice recorder that transcribes it later.

Studies referenced by The Papery note that people are more likely to maintain journaling habits when the tools they use feel enjoyable and personal. Any format can work if it first your lifestyle. The best kind of journal is the one that you’ll use.

Keep it straight and simple

A journal is not a legal filing system, nor is it meant to be a library with complex references and page annotations. Too many complications will tire you before January is done.

Research about habit formation has shown that simplicity increases follow-through. Keep it simple and create a daily ritual of a short daily reflection, a brief weekly summary and a monthly check-in.

Research cited in behavioural journaling studies indicated that structured reflection improves clarity and momentum by reducing decision fatigue around what to write each day.

Choose your format. Paper, a diary or even your PC. Picture Hein Kaiser

Prompt yourself

This can be a powerful tool at the end of each year. Reviewing your reflective writing has shown that prompts guiding you through it can help identify emotional patterns and cognitive blind spots. It’s said to be more effective than just jotting down random stuff.

A prompt framework means that you list emotional states, behaviours and other states of being to make it easier to refer back to at the end of the year. It helps journals reveal what worked, what didn’t and why.

This creates an opportunity for a reset before the New Year and can help resolve issues before January rolls around.

Make it easy to build the habit

Ambition to complete or sustain a task sounds impressive, but success lies in the small things. Repetition is what it’s all about.

Research summarised by PositivePsychology highlighted that even five to ten minutes of expressive writing can deliver measurable mental health benefits. Journaling does not work because it is time-consuming, but because it is regular. Remember, you are doing this for yourself.

Don’t make it simply event based

Simply noting when you woke up, what you did and what happened during the day will get you yawning super quickly. Journaling should be about values, and that is what you need to be writing down, too.

Studies on values-based journaling have shown that linking writing to personal values improves motivation and long-term behaviour change. Values like health, creativity or better interpersonal connections should be written down with intent.

It turns journaling into a decision-making tool rather than a record-keeping exercise.

Tweak it

Don’t wait until the end of the year to review what you journaled. Research has shown that some of the biggest benefits appear when reviews happen more often. Quarterly or monthly reviews allow you change direction, refine goals or even change your journaling style entirely.

Flexibility helps keep the project alive, identify emotional patterns and what stresses you out with mundane regularity.

https://www.citizen.co.za/lifestyle/why-journaling-one-of-healthiest-ways-start-2026/

The Christmas diary of a parish priest, from Church burglaries to deathbed vigils

From telegraph.co.uk 

Father Ben Bell shares the joy, challenges and sense of belonging the festive period brings

The role of a parish priest is rarely predictable. One of the questions I’m asked most often is what, exactly, I do.

My answer usually involves some mixture of plate-spinning, presiding at services and pastoral encounters that can sound faintly implausible.

December, however, brings a sudden clarity. “It’s your busy time of year, isn’t it?” people say. So I decided to keep a diary, to record what the festive season actually entails, and what it asks of a priest, a church and a community.

Christmas is the busiest time of year for Father Ben Bell, pictured in St George the Martyr Church in London Credit: Rii Schroer

10 December: Fireworks for the homeless

The day began with Morning Prayer at St George’s, joined by a handful of colleagues in the sustaining discipline which roots parish life in prayer and scripture. The theory is sound – the practice rather less so, given the insistent mental catalogue of urgent tasks in the run up to Christmas.

Dave has slept rough for the past 20 years and visits us most days for coffee with seven sugars. He used to steal our candles for light and heat, so I bought him a gas heater and gave him cylinders every few days. A couple of weeks ago, he asked me out of the blue if I could buy fireworks for him if he gave me the money – he wanted to do something to remember the anniversary of his brother’s death.

I said yes, confident he wouldn’t come up with the cash. That’s now come back to bite me. This morning, he slapped a bundle of notes on the table, saying, “I just want rockets and air bombs.”

11 December: A troublesome street preacher

I unpacked the new figures for our nativity scene. They’ve been lovingly made by a community of French nuns and are beautiful. That is apart from the donkey, whose eyes look a little frightening. He’s been sitting on the vestry table, glaring at me all morning, to the point that I had to turn him around. I think we’ll go traditional and put him “out the back” of the stable, where his intense glare can’t unsettle members of the holy family.

We had a regular visitor asking if I could help with something to eat. I walked down to Tesco with them to get them a sandwich and a drink. On the way back, I passed the street preacher who’s been setting up next to the church, drowning out any sense of reflective space with amplified warnings of eternal damnation.

I went to talk to him about possibly moderating his approach, or at least his decibel level, but he would only converse via his PA system, resulting in a bizarrely amplified one-sided conversation. Ironically, despite the assumption that we might be on the same team, he wasn’t remotely interested in supporting us in creating a quiet space for our lunchtime Mass, preferring instead to continue shouting at passers-by about the consequences of their choices, as if volume were a reliable indicator of theological truth.

At Evening Prayer, the Advent antiphon (a short chant or verse) tonight is about the Key of David – opening doors that are shut. I thought about all those in our parish who have experienced endless doors being shut in their face. It’s why we try and keep the church doors open.

12 December: ‘George Clooney’s glove’

After long and complex negotiations with my team, I’ve secured consent to use confetti cannons at our primary school’s nativity service. This won’t be my first deployment of confetti cannons in church, hence my colleagues’ reticence – they reminded me that we’re still finding pieces of coloured tissue paper in the building’s crevices after a spectacular celebration of Easter. My offer to bring in my leaf blower to aid the clear-up operation was met with expressions of disdain.

I popped down to the food cooperative and encountered Jenny, one of our long-standing volunteers, wearing a diamanté glove on one hand à la Michael Jackson, whilst sorting through a crate of Brussels sprouts with the ungloved other. When I questioned the meaning of this sartorial choice, she explained that she’d met George Clooney at the National Theatre two evenings ago and shaken his hand, and the glove was preserving the moment for posterity.

It’s this sort of cheerful incongruity that makes parish life endlessly surprising and occasionally incomprehensible to those outside it.

Father Ben Bell with Jenny (and her ‘George Clooney glove’) at the cooperative  Credit: Rii Schroer

Evening Prayer was themed on that great Advent carol, O Come, O Come Emmanuel. I’m reminded that the incarnation happened in the mess of real life, not in the aesthetically pleasing version we curate for carol services. This is, frankly, a relief.

13 December: A bell-ringing crisis

Our prayers this morning focused on those for whom Christmas is a difficult time of year – which is to say, a considerable portion of humanity, though we tend not to mention this during the more determinedly cheerful carol services. I will seek to find a carol or poem that speaks to this, a little at least.

I spent the morning writing the nativity script for tomorrow’s carol service. Eighty biscuit-fuelled wrigglers will be singing their hearts out – so much joy, so much chaos. I’ve learnt to keep these scripts simple: shepherd appears, angel appears, everyone sings.

The theological profundity will be discovered in the joyful singing, inevitable tantrums and utter chaos of the service. Still, it’s our hope that many of these children will have enjoyed their day of singing and will want to come back in the new year to audition for our junior choir, the Borough Choristers.

The church’s nativity set has been lovingly made by a community of French nuns Credit: Rii Schroer

The bell-ringing situation has become critical. We don’t have our own in-house team and, predictably, most churches have their carol service on the same day, so finding willing ringers is increasingly challenging. We do, however, have one faithful ringer who tolls the tenor bell beautifully before funerals. The issue is that tolling a single bell before a carol service sounds identical to a funeral announcement.

Still, he comes and faithfully rings the bell 200 times, as he has done for many services this year, to mark the 200th anniversary of the modern railway. The connection between bell-ringing and train enthusiasm isn’t immediately clear until you spend time with campanologists.

14 December: A profound sense of belonging

This morning began with the discovery that someone had broken into the church overnight and stolen our sanctuary lamp, leaving wax spilled everywhere – not the ideal preparation for worship. Yet an hour before the service, a number of our teenagers arrived for altar server training, and the morning service proceeded with its usual energy and remarkably high attendance.

Our congregation is a wonderful mixture of people who’ve made St George’s their spiritual home – long-time parishioners alongside those who’ve joined us in the past couple of years, creating a community that’s genuinely growing rather than simply maintaining.

Father Ben Bell is frequently reminded that the incarnation happened in the mess of real life Credit: Rii Schroer

Refreshments afterwards revealed what the service had already shown – people genuinely enjoying being together. Watching this diverse assembly interact with such obvious affection and ease, I find myself wondering, “Where else in London would all these people have such a profound sense of belonging to one another? Where else would their paths even cross?”

The answer is almost nowhere, which makes the church either a beautiful anomaly or a reminder of who we actually are. Probably both.

15 December: Winter partying with Tina Turner

During Morning Prayer, we prayed for Dave during the intercessions. Wondering if “rockets and air bombs” is an appropriate way to remember the dead. Decided it probably is.

Earlier in the year, I offered to host a carol service for a local charity working with pensioners, an offer made in a moment of seasonal generosity that I’m now questioning. After considerable back and forth, the proposed traditional carol service has metamorphosed into a “winter party” in our crypt, complete with a music hall singer banging out Tina Turner covers.

Evening Prayer consisted of O Rex Gentium (O King of Nations).

16 December: Death, love and God

The barrage of turkey and tinsel was punctured by a call this afternoon to say that a parishioner was in his final hours. I hastily grabbed my purple stole, some holy oil for anointing and my prayer book, and made my way past the Christmas parties spilling out onto Borough High Street to the stillness of his ground-floor flat.

As I stood next to his bed, his wife quietly keeping vigil, I was reminded of the inevitability of death and the invitation of the Christmas angels to not be afraid.

Surely, there is joy in embracing what we have no control over. I often encounter a deep sense of peacefulness in the rooms of the dying – such a contrast to the street preacher’s apocalyptic shouting earlier. He died soon afterwards, and we will now find time to plan a funeral amidst the hectic festivities that once focused on the unlikely birth of the divine in human flesh.

‘The gift underneath the Christmas busyness is Emmanuel, God with us,’ says Father Ben Bell Credit: Rii Schroer

Through all this, I hold fast to the reading from John’s prologue that is read each year at Midnight Mass. It’s about the Word becoming flesh – God didn’t wait for us to have our liturgy sorted before showing up. Probably just as well.

Come what may, we’ll get on with telling the story of God born among us. And somehow, amidst all the chaos and bizarre requests, that story still has the power to stop me in my tracks.

In this season where everyone tells me, “It’s your busy time of year”, what they don’t see is that the busyness is just the wrapping. The gift underneath – in Dave’s remembrance, in the dying man’s peace, in Jenny’s Clooney glove, in children’s voices raised in song – is Emmanuel. God with us. Even here. Even now.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/23/parish-priest-christmas-diary/

Country diary: Welcome to the woods where bomber aircraft once hid

From theguardian.com

By Jennifer Jones

Speke, Merseyside: Walking through Stockton’s Wood today, you’d never know it played such a vital role in the second world war

                                Silver birch with 'intruder' Scots pine in the background, in Stockton’s Wood. Photograph: Jennifer Jones

For most visitors, the Tudor house of Speke Hall, with all its rich history and magnificence, is the star of the show here. But right next door, Stockton’s Wood has a history all of its own.

Today, on a chilly winter day, there’s no escaping that right now this ancient woodland is an important “deadwood” site. It’s rich in veteran trees and fallen branches, and has a stunning diversity of mosses and fungi. Pausing by a fallen oak, I count slime mould pimpling the bark, several species of small but perfectly formed bracket fungi, and candlesnuff fungus, fungal mycelium lurking where once sap flowed. A wind-thrown silver birch is caught in a sycamore’s embrace.

But read the signs, and this wood will tell its stories of the past. A handful of coppiced trees whisper of previous management, possibly to provide wood for the residents of Speke Hall. Ancient oak, pencil-thin silver birch and occasional beech give way to small groups of Scots pine. These pines were planted to indulge the Victorian passion for game shooting (which Speke Hall hosted), providing cover for the birds. Thankfully, that practice is long gone, and the pines’ canopy now is much higher, embossing the sky with their evergreen heads.

Stockton’s Wood in 1952, with the manufacturing factories behind, and hangars used to store parts. Photograph: Historic England

The wood’s most remarkable story is connected to its location, today sandwiched between the relict grounds of the former Speke Airport and the modern Liverpool John Lennon Airport.

During the second world war, Speke Airport was requisitioned to become RAF Speke. A nearby shadow factory manufactured military aircraft, and Stockton’s Wood was used to hide parts and even whole planes. Possible aircraft hidden here included P-51 Mustang fighters and Halifax bombers. But this history the wood keeps a secret, as decades of vegetation growth have returned the land to its sylvan state. Hearing another jet rise noisily from the airport, it seems astonishing that similar craft were once squirrelled away here, unseen.

The wood is easy to miss as you drive by, and that invisibility served it well in wartime. As I leave, a suite of molehills reveals snowdrop bulbs, reminding me of the ivory mantle coming in the new year.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/23/country-diary-these-woods-have-a-secret-the-bomber-aircraft-that-once-hid-here

Dear diary: What makes a good journal?

From hindustantimes.com

ByKritika Kapoor

Planners aren’t just about tracking goals today. They’re scrapbooks, mental health journals, and doodle canvases too. So, who plans these planners?

                  The best journals are designed to prompt you to meet your goals easier. (ODD GIRAFFE)

It’s almost 2026. The air is crackling with promise. A shinier version of ourselves feels just around the corner. The one who wakes up early, goes to the gym, meditates, hydrates, moisturises, meets weekly work goals and keeps the plants alive. And what better symbol of this fantasy self than the first blank page of a brand-new diary?

New Year planners are in shop windows, on Insta ads, in Secret Santa shopping baskets. Black, leatherbound, boring? No chance. It’s possible to kick 2026 off in soothing pastels, with cute doodles already in the margins. Journals can have both, matte minimalism and loud florals. The inside can have productivity prompts, reflection check-ins, meditation cues, mood meters, finance trackers and mini-therapy exercises. And one page of stickers, because what’s the point otherwise?

     Undated planners take the pressure off. You don’t have to be regular. You just have to show up. (Twillo Story)

We’ve never Dear-Diaried harder, and the market knows it. Of course, we’ll probably flake on them (like our goals) before January even ends. Or leave them untouched because they’re too pretty to ruin. Or use once and realise we’re not emotionally prepared for this level of self-reflection. So, what makes for a good journal? The answer involves – surprise, surprise – some degree of planning.

On the same page

The journaling industry knows that all it takes is one missed day for users to believe they’ve broken their streak, making them give up entirely. In 2013, Alex and Mimi Ikonn tried a workaround with The Five Minute Journal. Slim, unintimidating, low-effort; it asked for just a few minutes each morning and night. And it did half the thinking for you: Prompts such as “I am grateful for…” and “What did I learn today?” It blew up online. Around the same time, digital designer Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal gained a cult following by giving people a flexible structure for to-do lists, reminders and goals. Then, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, published in 1992, found new life on TikTok and Instagram, with its Morning Pages promising a clutter-free brain.

They worked because they made journaling feel doable. They gave accountability a better framework than a to-do list and a brain dump. You didn’t have to write well. You just had to show up.

Indian brand Odd Giraffe followed the same formula for its planners, and infused some joy into the process. The colourful yearly, monthly and weekly journals include habit tracking and even junk journaling. Users are encouraged to doodle, paste photos and build collages. Everything comes with a prompt, because “staring at a blank page can be overwhelming,” says co-founder Karan Joshi. “People need something that simplifies their daily workload, or gives them a moment to pause and talk to their inner self.”

The trick: The less a journal demands, the more likely people are to return. “If it requires tracking endless metrics, rating emotions daily, following elaborate routines, it starts to feel like work,” says Prateek Dubey, who has worked with stationery brands such as Doodle, and is now director at Elite Global Partners.

                        Roda Notes’s weekly planners focus on key tasks, leaving room for the unexpected. (Roda Notes)

Notes, minus the noise

The other add-on: DIY decoration. On Insta, at least, journaling now means adding stickers, tabs, washi tape, pastel highlighters and glittery inks. Pretty? Yes. Productive? Not reliably. “There’s already too much noise,” says Aparna Muthu Thai, co-founder, Roda Notes. “A planner should give you clarity, not add to the chaos.” Their Tasknote focuses on what we need to do and when we need to do it. So, the journals are minimalist, in solid colours, and so compact that they fit into a pocket, and don’t take up much space in a backpack or on a desk.

Muthu Thai knows that most people underestimate how long tasks will take (what psychologists call the Planning Fallacy) and tend to plan for a future with no unexpected roadblocks. So, Roda’s planners are designed to lean into this optimism instead of fighting it. The weekly planners only leave space for key meetings and deadlines; enough to see the shape of your week without pretending you can control every hour of it. “A planner works best when it’s created with an understanding of how we actually behave,” she says.

                                        Odd Giraffe makes journals for habit-tracking and junk journaling. (Odd Giraffe)

To dos and don’ts

Not every planner is chasing productivity. Rupambika Khandai, founder of Twillo Story, wanted journaling to feel like a small daily pleasure rather than another performance metric. “Post-Covid, many of us realised that being productive isn’t enough,” she says. “It’s also important to live your daily life. I wanted to come up with something that would make people sit with themselves for a while, or for them to create something with their own hands, just a few minutes of pure sensory feeling.” Her journals have space to jot down your goals and to-dos, as well as the things you look forward to. There’s room to doodle and colour. “You shouldn’t feel derailed just because you didn’t plan a day perfectly,” Khandai says. “It’s meant to feel cosy, not intimidating.”

And it’s possible for a journal to now be deeply personal. Odd Giraffe’s wedding planners, for example, don’t just track vendors and timelines. They make space for the story: How you met, what you felt, the pictures you want to keep, moodboards that capture the day. Their travel planners pair budgets and packing lists with pages to journal experiences at specific locations. So what starts as a checklist ends up as a keepsake.

Most planners today skew towards women with playful colours. Men prefer black, straightforward diaries. (Twillo Story)

Most planners today skew towards women, with softer palettes and playful art. “Men often prefer a single, straightforward notebook,” says Dubey. Joshi adds that journaling’s rise is closely tied to social media’s self-care culture, which currently speaks more to women. “The male segment has untapped potential, for sure.”

Women tend to express more, believes Rupambika. “We’ve had some queries about why we don’t do journals for men. And while I explained to them that our planners are unisex. Men don’t use them because they’re too colourful.”

https://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/brunch/dear-diary-what-makes-a-good-journal-101766085157985.html