Instant Happy Journal

By Liz
Journal review: Instant Happy Journal by Karen Salmansohn
Official FC rating:

You know what I am? A bundle of god damn stress and anxiety at least 80% of the time. For example, if I am cooking a meal that involves meat, you can bet that I am calling my mom at some point during the cooking process to make sure I haven’t messed up.

I also can be so negative because of my anxiety. I’ll come home from work and 2-3 hours later I will think to myself, “I hope I didn’t come across as awkward during that meeting…I should have said this…I should have done that.” It gets exhausting, so when I came across the Instant Happy Journal on Blogging for Books, I figured “hey, why not? Maybe this will make me more ~positive~.”

The journal, which has lovely little designs and pretty colors, contains questions, quotes, and other prompts for each entry. When I received this journal in the mail (like…nearly two months ago…) my goal was to write in it every evening for one whole month.

Ooh, ahh, pretty cover!

Pretty outside and inside! 

Being the way that I am, I constantly felt like there was a certain way I had to use the journal. At first I wrote in each page consecutively, but occasionally the prompts felt weird. Sometimes they wouldn’t be applicable to my day. Was I supposed to write about something from my past? Would that make me more positive about this particular day? Annoyed, I eventually took to flipping through the entire journal to find a prompt that ~spoke~ to me. I liked this method better and stuck to it for a while. I felt like I was breaking the rules though, even though journals don’t really have rules (blame this on my Virgo nature??)

Another frustrating aspect was how god damn little space you have to actually write. When the prompts were particularly through provoking, it was annoying that I had to condense my thoughts to 5 lines. Remember when a teacher would say 1,000 words, no more and no less for your essay? That’s what this felt like sometimes.

Now the big question remains, did the Instant Happy Journal make me instantly happy? Nah. Part of the problem could be that I didn’t end up writing in the journal every day. On days that were stressful or busy, I didn’t feel like writing. Ironically, the days when I most wanted to write were days that were generally positive days for me. Like if I did well at work, or ran farther than normal- that’s when I wanted to use the journal.

Even, though I kind of feel like this is more like Instant MEH Journal, I give it four stars. All in all, this is a fun journal. I like the prompts, the colors are cheery, and the idea of it is nice. I’ll continue to use it over the course of the year, but I’ll try to get better about actually using it daily.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.