Diy Therapy Journal Goodnotes

Setting Up a Personal Therapy Journal in GoodNotes

I spent about three weeks building out a Diy Therapy Journal Goodnotes before I stopped overthinking it and just used it. The whole process involves creating pages, setting up covers, and organizing sections that actually make sense when you're trying to use them during a session or when you're journaling at home. It's not complicated, but there are some things that make it significantly easier if you know them upfront. GoodNotes is a PDF annotation app. You import a document and then you can draw on it, type into it, or add sticky notes. That's basically it. The app doesn't come with a therapy journal template built in, so if you want one, you either download someone else's or you build it yourself. I built mine because every template I found online had either way too many pages or was missing the parts I actually needed.

Diy Therapy Journal Goodnotes

Here's how the whole thing works in practice. First you need to decide what kind of journal you're making. There are two main approaches. One is a structured daily log with prompts like mood tracking, trigger identification, and reflection sections. The other is a freeform page where you just write whatever comes up. Most people start with structured because it feels more productive, then abandon it because filling out twenty fields after a hard day is exhausting. I went with a hybrid. The core structure covers three sections. Mood check-in with a simple scale and a few emoji options. A space for whatever I wanted to write, unstructured. And a weekly review page where I could look back at patterns without having to dig through forty individual entries. The layout is twelve pages total. Six daily pages with consistent fields, and six weekly review pages. Simple enough to keep up with, structured enough to actually be useful later. To build this, open GoodNotes and create a new notebook. Set the page size to A4 or Letter depending on your device. A4 tends to look better for portrait-oriented journaling. Then you create your cover page. GoodNotes has a shape tool and a text tool. Use the shape tool to make a rectangle with rounded corners, fill it with a solid color you don't mind looking at for months. Add a title with the text tool. That's your cover.

After the cover, duplicate pages to build your sections. The daily pages should have a date field at the top. Some people like pre-printed dates but I prefer leaving it blank so I can write whatever date format I'm using that week. Below that, a mood section. I drew three rows. Each row has a small square checkbox next to a label. Low energy, neutral, high energy. Under that, a prompt area. I typed three questions: what happened today, how did I feel about it, what would I do differently. These change weekly so I remake them rather than trying to overwrite old ones. The weekly review page is different. It has a larger blank area at the top for any thoughts, then a grid below for pattern tracking. I use the grid tool in GoodNotes to make a four by seven grid. Each column represents a day. Each row represents a category I'm tracking. Sleep quality, anxiety level, medication adherence, social interaction. You can type into the grid cells or just note things with the pen tool. This is where the journal actually becomes useful instead of just being a diary you dump in and forget about. Once you've built the pages, save the notebook and export it as a PDF. This is important because it means you can then reuse the file, share it with a therapist if you want, or import it into another app. GoodNotes lets you export from the file menu. Choose PDF and make sure the quality setting is set to high. The resulting file is usually between five and fifteen megabytes depending on how many drawings you have.

Now, here's something most people miss. GoodNotes handles layers poorly when you have too many overlapping elements. If you use a lot of shapes, text boxes, and handwritten notes on the same page, the app starts lagging significantly. I learned this the hard way after creating a twenty-page daily spread with six layers per page. My iPad froze every time I tried to flip through it. The workaround is to flatten your page when you're done building it. Select all elements on the page, right click, and choose merge into one layer. This reduces the file size and makes navigation smooth again. Another thing that trips people up is the pen settings. GoodNotes has about fourteen different pens. The gel pen is the default and it's fine for casual writing but it doesn't look great when you're trying to make something that feels like a real journal. Switch to the fountain pen or the brush pen for headings and section titles. The ink flows smoother and the lines look more intentional. For everyday notes, stick with the gel pen or the fineliner. The brush pen dries slower and smudges if you're writing with your hand above the line. You'll also want to organize your notebook folders properly. GoodNotes supports folders inside notebooks. Create a folder called Daily Logs and another called Weekly Reviews. Drag your pages into the appropriate folders. This makes navigation faster and keeps the app from looking like a messy digital junk drawer. When you have fifty pages all on one screen, finding anything takes longer than it should.

There are some limitations worth being honest about. GoodNotes doesn't sync perfectly between iPad and iPhone in all cases. I've had entries appear on one device but not the other despite iCloud being enabled. The solution is to manually export and re-import the PDF to both devices rather than relying on automatic sync. Also, the pen tool doesn't have undo for individual strokes. If you write something and then realize it's wrong, you have to erase the whole stroke or start a new one. This seems minor until you're three pages into a session and your handwriting is getting sloppy because you're second guessing everything. Another limitation is the lack of native encryption. Your therapy journal lives in GoodNotes and if someone gets access to your device, they can open it. GoodNotes does have a password feature now but it's not as robust as a dedicated journaling app with end-to-end encryption. If privacy is a real concern for you, consider scanning pages and storing them in a password-protected folder on your computer instead. The real value of a Diy Therapy Journal Goodnotes isn't in the fancy layouts or the perfect calligraphy. It's in having something tangible you can write in without the distractions of a phone. No notifications popping up. No algorithm serving you content while you're supposed to be sitting with your thoughts. Just you and the page.

If you want to download something ready-made instead of building this yourself, there are several sources. Etsy has tons of GoodNotes templates ranging from free to about fifteen dollars. Reddit communities like r/goodnotes and r/therapy post their own creations occasionally. I wouldn't recommend paying more than ten dollars for a template since you can build something comparable yourself in about forty minutes. The most practical advice I can give is to start simple. Don't create a fifty-page masterpiece on day one. Start with five daily pages and one weekly review page. Use it for two weeks. Then add pages based on what you actually need. Most people find they only use about thirty percent of whatever elaborate journal they initially build. The rest sits empty because it's too much effort to fill out after a long day. GoodNotes itself costs about eight dollars on the App Store. The free version is severely limited with a two hundred megabyte cap. If you're serious about maintaining a therapy journal long term, the paid version is worth it. The unlimited storage and additional pen tools make a noticeable difference over time.

I've been using my current version for about six months now. I go back through the pages when I feel stuck or when a therapist asks me to bring up specific patterns. The weekly review section is the part that pays off. You can literally see three months of data scrolling past you and it changes how you view things that seemed huge at the time but were actually part of a larger trend. That's the point of keeping a physical record in a digital space. Build what you need. Keep it simple. Use it consistently. Everything else is decoration.