We continue to share all kinds of information to help you to focus on your self-care. We’re having a pandemic. Work is a challenge. And even if everything is great around us – it’s hard to work in a library some days.

This week’s suggestion for self-care is pretty simple.

Grab a notebook. Or a daily calendar. Or literally anything at all that you can write on. Also: grab a pen, pencil, crayon. Again, anything that marks onto the paper.

Small caveat: you may love your phone/tablet/computer, and we support you in that. But for journaling, it’s often easier to just write things on paper. The process of doing it matters, and actually writing things down is useful for kicking your brain into a more thoughtful pattern.

Usually the hardest part is to start. So if you are the kind of person who can effortlessly whip off paragraphs and pages: excellent. Do that.

For most of us though, journaling can be easier. Write down the high point of your day in a sentence. Write down the low point of your day in a sentence.

Voila. Done.

Why is this valuable?

First: it’s good to write things down instead of just trying to remember them. You won’t remember everything correctly, you will forget details, you will shade things with too much positive or too much negative. Write it down, and then you can flip back and review your history for some perspective.

Second: it’s good to be able to remember the good stuff – because wow are those other days hard. And it can be valuable to remember that some things are hard and bad, and you still made it through.

If you want to make this a complicated practice, use lots of colors, and washi tape – definitely do that. If you want to just have the two short sentences, that’s fine. Do it in the morning, do it at night before you go to bed, whatever works for you.

The self-care, stress-busting practice of journaling can be helpful to keep you on track, and moving forward. Your library needs you. (And, of course, for all the other good reasons to do good self-care!)