If you’ve recently started therapy, or you’re thinking about it, there’s a good chance you’ve wondered what to do with the six days between sessions. An hour a week is genuinely not a lot of time. You and your therapist can only get so far before the session ends and you’re back in your car, half-processed, sitting with things that didn’t quite get resolved. That gap is real, and it matters.

Journaling between sessions is one of the most consistently useful things I’ve seen people do to get more out of therapy. Not because it’s some mystical practice, but because it keeps the work going when your therapist isn’t in the room.

Here’s what I tell people who are skeptical: you don’t have to be a writer. You don’t need a beautiful notebook. You don’t need to write every day, and you don’t need to produce anything coherent. The point isn’t the writing. The point is that the act of writing slows your thinking down enough to notice what’s actually happening inside you.

Why the gap between sessions is where the real work often happens

Therapy sessions are, in a sense, the debrief. The actual living happens between them.

You get triggered at work on a Wednesday. You have a hard conversation with your partner on Saturday. You lie awake at 2 a.m. Sunday thinking about something your therapist said three sessions ago that you weren’t ready to hear yet. None of that lands in the session unless you’ve tracked it somewhere. And human memory, especially around emotional events, is notoriously unreliable. We flatten things, round off the edges, forget the specific moment that actually mattered.

A journal is just a holding space. You’re not trying to analyze yourself or arrive at conclusions. You’re trying to catch what your brain would otherwise smooth over by the time Thursday rolls around.

The research on expressive writing is pretty compelling. James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, spent decades studying what happens when people write about difficult emotional experiences. Consistently, people who wrote for even 15 to 20 minutes over a few days reported fewer physical health complaints, less distress, and better mood outcomes than those who didn’t. The mechanism isn’t mysterious: putting language to an experience gives the brain a way to process and organize it, rather than just re-experiencing it on a loop.

What to actually write about

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This is where most people get stuck. They open a blank page, think “I should write about my feelings,” and then feel nothing or everything simultaneously.

Start with specifics, not abstractions. Instead of “I’ve been anxious this week,” try: what happened Tuesday afternoon when you got that text from your mom? What did your chest feel like? What did you do right after? Specificity cracks things open in a way that general reflection almost never does.

A few things that tend to work well:

Write immediately after something emotionally notable happens. Not an hour later, not the next morning. Right in the moment, even if it’s just a few sentences on your phone. That raw version is almost always more useful to bring to therapy than the tidied-up retrospective version.

Write after your therapy session, not just before it. This is genuinely underused. You just spent an hour going into difficult territory. Something will surface on the drive home, or at dinner, or right before you fall asleep. Write that down. Those after-session reactions often contain the most important material.

If you’re doing CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), your therapist is probably already having you track thought patterns. A journal plugs directly into that work. You can use something like The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety (Amazon link, site may earn a commission) as a structured framework if open-ended writing feels too unguided. Some people do much better with prompts. There’s no shame in that.

The thing no one tells you about journaling and therapy

Here’s an opinion a lot of people push back on: I think journaling without therapy can actually be counterproductive for some people.

Hear me out. Unguided rumination, where you turn a painful thought over and over without any new perspective entering the loop, looks an awful lot like journaling, and it doesn’t help. If every journal entry is just you confirming how bad things are, or constructing elaborate explanations for why your childhood shaped you in exactly this way, you may be doing a lot of writing without much actual processing. You’re rehearsing your story rather than examining it.

This is exactly why journaling works better as a companion to therapy than as a replacement for it. Your therapist is the person who can look at what you’ve written (if you choose to share it) and notice the thing you can’t see because you’re too close to it. The journal creates the material. The therapist helps you interpret it.

If you’re not yet working with a therapist, Psychology Today’s therapist directory is one of the most practical starting points. You can filter by insurance, location, specialty, and therapy type. NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) also has a helpline and resource database if you’re not sure where to start.

Making it a real habit, not a guilt project

The number one way journaling fails is when people decide they’re supposed to do it every single day at the same time in a beautiful Leuchtturm1917 notebook. Then they miss a day, feel bad about it, miss a week, and give up.

Write when something happens. Write when you’re confused about how you feel. Write after sessions. That’s it. Three targeted entries a week will do more for your therapy than seven dutiful morning pages about your coffee and your vague sense of unease.

If you want a guided option, there are some genuinely good therapy-companion journals out there, including CBT-based workbooks and mindfulness journals that offer structured prompts specifically designed to support therapeutic work. Something like a mindfulness and self-reflection journal (Amazon, site may earn a commission) can take the pressure off having to generate everything from scratch. Especially early on, that structure is a gift.

Keep entries short enough that you’ll actually write them. A paragraph is fine. Really.

This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute mental health, medical, or clinical advice. If you are in crisis or experiencing a mental health emergency, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) or go to your nearest emergency room. Always consult a licensed mental health professional for care specific to your needs.

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Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, we earn a small commission from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. We only recommend products that genuinely support the topics covered in this article.