How do you start journaling when you have no time?

Most advice about journaling assumes you have a quiet half hour. A notebook, a candle, a page to fill.

If you don't, the advice quietly tells you journaling isn't for you. The research says otherwise.

Do you need 20 minutes a day?

No. The 20-minute figure comes from expressive writing studies, where people write about something stressful for 15 to 20 minutes on 3 to 5 occasions. That's a short course, not a daily habit.

Even the team behind those studies, on James Pennebaker's expressive writing site at UT Austin, suggests starting with 5 to 10 minutes.

Does a short entry still count?

It seems to. In a small study, people who wrote for 2 minutes a day on 2 days reported fewer health complaints weeks later than people who wrote about something neutral.

One honest caveat. When the goal is working through something painful, longer sessions did better: a review of 146 studies found sessions of at least 15 minutes had clearly larger effects. So keep the long sessions for the hard days. For everyday notes, short is fine.

How often should you write?

Less often than you'd guess can work. In a well-known gratitude study, students filled in one form a week for ten weeks, listing up to five things they were grateful for. Compared with the other groups, they felt more optimistic about the week ahead, reported fewer physical symptoms and exercised about an hour and a half more each week.

A later study went further: counting blessings once a week raised well-being, while doing it three times a week didn't. The authors guessed people got bored. It was a small study, and the gratitude study above found daily lists shifted gratitude more. So the honest answer is: daily is fine, weekly is fine, and stopping is the only thing that doesn't work.

When in the day should you write?

At the same moment every day, tied to something you already do. Habit research recommends repeating an action in the same context, and says a cue inside an existing routine is the easiest place to start.

Good cues are boring ones:

• after you brush your teeth at night
• when you sit down on the train home
• right after you put your phone on the charger

On average, a new habit took about 66 days to feel automatic in that research, with big differences between people. Expect two months, not two weeks.

What should you write about?

Whatever is easiest tonight. The University of Rochester Medical Center's advice is to make it easy and forget about structure or spelling.

If a blank page stops you, use three prompts and rotate them:

1. What happened today?
2. How did it feel?
3. What's one thing worth remembering?

Three lines, one answer each. That's an entry.

What if you miss a day?

Skip it and carry on. In the habit research above, missing the occasional day didn't seriously slow the habit down. Making up missed entries turns a two-minute habit into a 20-minute chore, which is how most journals end.

Can journaling make you feel worse?

Sometimes, briefly. Writing about something painful usually brings a short-term rise in distress right afterwards, which the research doesn't consider harmful.

Pennebaker's site is clear about the limits: if writing upsets you, stop. If you're highly distressed or depressed right now, expressive writing isn't recommended, and it's not a substitute for therapy.

Paper or an app?

Whichever you'll open. Paper is lovely if it lives where your cue happens. An app wins if your phone is already in your hand at that moment, which for most of us it is.

Look for three things in an app: it opens straight to today's entry, it doesn't punish you for a missed day, and you can get your writing out if you ever leave.