Journaling and Perimenopause: A Surprisingly Useful Tool for Mental Health

Your Inner Life Is Louder Right Now. That's Worth Writing Down.

Perimenopause has a way of amplifying everything internal. The anxiety you managed easily before feels bigger. The emotions that used to pass quickly now seem to linger or arrive without obvious cause. The sense that you are changing, not just hormonally but in terms of what you value and who you are, can be disorienting when it's not articulated.

Journaling is not a cure for any of this. But it is one of the few free, immediately available practices with a genuine evidence base for mental health, and it connects directly to what is actually happening in your inner life during perimenopause.

If you tried journaling once and it felt like homework, that may be because no one told you there were different approaches, and some work much better than others for the kinds of experiences perimenopause brings.

What the Research Shows

The research on journaling for mental health spans several decades and multiple forms of writing. Psychologist James Pennebaker's foundational work on expressive writing in the 1980s and 1990s found that writing about emotionally difficult experiences, even for just 15-20 minutes per session over a few days, produced measurable improvements in psychological wellbeing, immune function markers, and cognitive processing of stressful events.

More recent research has refined the picture. Journaling appears to be most beneficial when it moves from pure venting into some degree of meaning-making, understanding the event, connecting it to a broader narrative, or identifying what matters in light of it. Writing that stays purely in the emotional release without any reflective component can sometimes amplify distress rather than reduce it.

For anxiety specifically, which many perimenopausal women experience as a new or intensified symptom, research on worry journaling shows that scheduled writing about worries can reduce their intrusiveness during other parts of the day. Containing anxiety into a specific time and container tends to reduce its tendency to leak everywhere else.

Why Perimenopause Specifically Calls for This Practice

Several things happen during perimenopause that journaling addresses directly. Identity shifts, as roles and relationships evolve. The children who needed you intensively may need you differently now. The career identity that consumed your 30s may feel less central or may be actively changing. The body you knew well is behaving in ways you didn't predict.

These shifts generate a lot of material that benefits from external processing. The brain loops through unresolved questions more efficiently when you write them out than when you only think them. Writing imposes a sequential structure that thinking doesn't always have, and that structure is part of how journaling supports cognitive processing.

The anger, grief, relief, and occasional humor that move through perimenopause are also worth giving space to. Many women describe this period as one in which they feel things more intensely than before, and having a private space to put those feelings without editing for others is genuinely valuable.

Approaches That Work Well

Free writing: set a timer for ten to fifteen minutes and write without stopping, without editing, without rereading as you go. This is the most direct form of expressive writing and is closest to what Pennebaker's research examined. Write whatever comes. Don't worry about it making sense.

Prompted journaling: some people find an open blank page paralyzing. A specific question creates a useful container. Useful prompts for perimenopause: What am I carrying that I haven't named? What is changing in me that I haven't let myself acknowledge? What do I want my next ten years to feel different from? What would I tell myself five years ago?

Gratitude journaling: noting three to five specific things you're genuinely grateful for (specific is key: not 'my health' but 'the walk I took this morning and how my joints felt easier than last week') has a different mechanism than expressive writing. Research suggests it shifts attentional patterns over time toward noticing positive experiences. This can be a useful complement to heavier emotional processing.

Symptom and mood journaling: distinct from personal journaling, this tracks what's happening physically and emotionally each day. This kind of logging is closely related to what tracking apps do.

Getting Started

Ten minutes is enough to start. You don't need a beautiful journal or a perfect pen, though if having those things makes it more appealing, use them. What you need is a few minutes where you won't be interrupted and something to write with.

Paper tends to produce more reflective writing than typing for most people, possibly because typing is faster and more associated with task-oriented output. But digital journaling works too if that's what you'll actually do.

Starting with prompted writing rather than an open page reduces the friction significantly. A single question each day for the first two weeks builds the habit before you worry about what kind of journaling you're doing.

Consistency matters more than length. A five-minute entry most days is more valuable than a two-hour session once a month.

What to Watch Out For

If journaling consistently leaves you feeling significantly worse, more anxious, more distressed, or more stuck in rumination, this is worth paying attention to. For some people and some types of experiences, unguided expressive writing amplifies rather than releases distress.

If you're processing genuinely traumatic material, working with a therapist who can guide the processing is more appropriate than solo journaling. Trauma is not the same as difficult emotion, and the distinction matters for what kind of support is helpful.

Journaling is not a substitute for professional mental health support. If your mood during perimenopause is significantly affecting your daily life, journaling can be a useful supplement alongside therapy or medical care, not a replacement for it.

Track Your Patterns Over Time

One of the most useful things journaling does is make patterns visible over time. When you can look back at entries from six weeks ago, you may notice that the anxiety you wrote about at 3am has shifted, or that a particular situation keeps recurring in your writing as a source of stress.

PeriPlan lets you log your mood, energy, and symptoms daily alongside your workouts and check-ins, so the broader pattern of your wellbeing during perimenopause becomes visible over time. Combining that kind of structured tracking with your more free-form journaling gives you both data and depth.

When to Check With Your Doctor