Margaret Ngumi
PMHNP-BC — board-certified psychiatric nurse practitioner
How to Journal When You Don't Know What to Write
Almost everyone who has tried journaling has had the same experience. You buy the notebook. You sit down with good intentions. You write the date. And then you sit there, pen hovering, while the blank page quietly informs you that you have nothing to say.
So you write "I don't know what to write." Maybe you do that for three days. Then the notebook goes in a drawer, and you add journaling to the list of things you're apparently bad at.
I want to be clear about something, because I see this constantly in my work as a psychiatric nurse practitioner: you are not bad at journaling. You were handed a tool with no instructions. A blank page is not a prompt. It's a test with no question on it. Of course it's hard.
Here's why it's hard, and how to get unstuck.
Why the blank page beats you
When you sit down to "journal about your feelings," your brain is being asked to do two difficult things at once: find the feeling and find the words for it. That's a lot. If you're tired, overwhelmed, or emotionally flooded — which is usually exactly when people reach for a journal — that double task is too much. So the mind does what minds do under load. It goes blank.
The blank page also carries a quiet expectation: that what you write should be meaningful, or insightful, or at least coherent. That expectation is the enemy. You don't owe the page anything good. You just owe it something true.
The fix for both problems is the same: stop trying to summon thoughts from nothing. Start by answering a question.
The one rule that changes everything
A question does the hard half of the work for you. It points your attention somewhere specific, so your brain isn't searching the entire universe of "how I feel" — it's just answering one small thing. "How do I feel?" is impossible. "What's one thing that drained me today?" is answerable.
This is the entire reason guided journals exist. They're not a gimmick. They remove the exact step that ends most journaling attempts.
12 prompts for when you have nothing
Pick one. Don't read all twelve looking for the "right" one — that's the blank-page problem in a new costume. Pick the first one that makes you feel a small flicker of something, and write for as long as that flicker lasts. Two sentences is a complete entry.
1. What's something I'm pretending is fine that isn't fine?
2. If a friend had my exact day, what would I want to say to them?
3. What did my body feel like today? Start at your jaw and work down.
4. What's a sentence I almost said today but didn't?
5. What am I tired of? Be specific — not "everything," but one thing.
6. What's something I'm looking forward to, even slightly? If nothing, write that.
7. Who was I trying to be today, and for whom?
8. What would I do tomorrow if no one would be disappointed in me?
9. What's a small thing that went okay today? It can be very small.
10. What do I keep meaning to deal with and keep not dealing with?
11. If I could say one thing to someone and they couldn't respond, what would it be?
12. What do I need right now that I'm not asking for?
Notice that none of these ask you to be wise. They ask you to be specific. Specificity is the skill. Insight, if it comes, comes later — and it comes from the specifics, not instead of them.
Three things that make it stick
Lower the bar until it's almost insulting. The goal is not a beautiful entry. The goal is to not quit. Two minutes counts. One sentence counts. A journaling practice you keep is worth infinitely more than a profound one you abandon.
Write messy. Cross things out. Don't punctuate. Contradict yourself in the same paragraph — you are a contradictory person, that's accurate. The page is not being graded.
Don't journal to reach a conclusion. A lot of people quit because they expect journaling to end in a tidy realization, and when it doesn't, they feel they did it wrong. You didn't. The point of journaling isn't to solve the feeling. It's to get it out of the closed loop in your head, where it just runs in circles, and onto something outside you, where you can finally look at it.
If the blank page keeps winning
If you've tried the prompts above and a blank notebook still defeats you, the problem isn't you — it's the format. Some people genuinely need more structure than a list of questions they have to remember to use.
That's the reason my best friend Eva and I built Just Write — a 180-page guided journal with the prompts already on the page, organized around the things that are actually hard to write about: grief, heartbreak, self-love, the work of meeting your younger self. You never face a blank page. You face a question, and questions are answerable.
But the prompts above are free, and they work. Whether you use our journal or a notebook from a drawer, the principle is the same: don't start with nothing. Start with a question.
Margaret Ngumi, PMHNP-BC, is a board-certified psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and co-creator of the Just Write guided journal. Learn more about Margaret and Eva →