Journaling Between Therapy Sessions: 5 Apps That Help

Which app is best for journaling between therapy sessions?

The right app depends on what your therapist asks for. Some approaches, like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), use structured thought records. Others simply benefit from you remembering what happened. The table sorts apps by that job.

Why journal between therapy sessions?

Therapy is usually an hour a week or every two weeks. Most of what matters happens in the other 167 hours and fades before the appointment. People often arrive and say the week was fine, a bit up and down, because that is genuinely all that survived.

A journal fixes that specific problem, not by being therapeutic in itself, but by being a record. Between-session work is also part of many therapy approaches. A 2010 meta-analysis by Nikolaos Kazantzis and colleagues found that CBT with homework produced better outcomes than CBT without it, and that doing the homework was linked to better results.

1. Reflectize

Reflectize is an AI journal that can surface what you wrote three weeks ago, which is the material a session often tries to reconstruct from memory. You can join the waitlist ahead of the iPhone and Android launch. For therapy, the useful part is continuity. Reflectize keeps track of the people and events you write about, so when you sit down before a session, the week is already connected: the argument on Tuesday, the thing your manager said, the night you could not sleep. Its day summaries help you see what happened without rereading everything.

Reflectize can also save something from a session as a note or a goal, such as the exercise your therapist suggested, and you confirm before it is saved. It is a reflection tool, not therapy, and it cannot assess risk.

2. Day One

Day One's templates make it easy to create a "before session" and "after session" format that you fill in each time. Entries are dated, searchable and can include audio, which helps when writing feels like too much.

Day One runs on iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and the web, with end-to-end encryption available for journals.

3. How We Feel

How We Feel is an app built with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. You choose a specific emotion, note the context, and see patterns. Precise emotion words give a therapist much more to work with than "stressed" or "bad".

4. Daylio

Daylio records mood and activities in seconds and produces charts. Showing a therapist a month of mood data can reveal patterns, such as low days after poor sleep or particular social situations, that neither of you would spot from memory.

5. MindShift CBT

MindShift CBT is an app from Anxiety Canada with thought journals, belief experiments, coping cards and guided relaxation. It focuses on anxiety and follows CBT principles closely.

What should you write down between therapy sessions?

Write specifics, dated, close to when they happened. Leave interpretation for the session. A therapist can work with an accurate account of a Tuesday, but not much with a summary of a summary.

• What actually happened, in order, without the verdict.
• What you felt at the time, not the tidier version you reached afterwards.
• Something you noticed about yourself and immediately explained away.
• What you avoided doing or saying, and what you told yourself about why.
• Anything you wanted to say in the last session and did not.
• Dates: when something started, when it changed.

What should you write before and after a session?

Two short entries per session do more than daily journaling with no link to the appointment.

Before: five minutes listing what happened since last time, so the hour is not spent reconstructing it. This is the single most valuable use of a journal in therapy, and few people do it.

After: what landed, what you resisted, and what you want to return to. Sessions fade quickly, and within a week most people keep only a general impression. The resistance note matters most. What you found yourself arguing with is often where the work is, and it is the part you will otherwise not mention next time.

How do you use a journal for CBT homework?

Many CBT therapists ask clients to keep a thought record. It is a short, structured entry written soon after a moment of strong emotion, and it works well in any journaling app with a template.

Ask your therapist which version they prefer, since formats vary. Do not force yourself to find a balanced thought if you cannot. An honest partial record is more useful to bring to a session than a neat one.

• Situation: where you were, what happened, when.
• Emotion: name it and rate its intensity from 0 to 100.
• Automatic thought: the thought that went through your mind, word for word.
• Evidence for and against the thought.
• A more balanced thought, if one comes.
• Re-rate the emotion.

What if you never know what to talk about in therapy?

Not knowing what to bring is very common, especially after the first few months when the original problem has eased. A journal helps because it collects material without you needing to judge whether it is important.

Before the session, read the week's entries and mark anything that made you feel strongly, surprised you, or that you would rather not mention. Bring the one you most want to skip. If nothing stands out, bringing that observation is also useful: a flat stretch can be a sign of progress, or of avoiding something, and a therapist can help tell which.

Should you tell your therapist you use an AI journal?

Yes. Your therapist may want to shape what you record, suggest a format, or ask you to stop tracking something that is feeding a compulsion or anxiety. Homework is a normal part of several therapy approaches, and yours may have a view.

There is also a useful clinical question: what you find easy to tell software and hard to tell a person is itself worth discussing. Some people notice they disclose more to an app. That difference is worth exploring rather than hiding.

What can a journaling app not do that a therapist can?

An app will not reliably push back. Much of the work in therapy happens when someone declines your account of events and asks about the part you left out. Software designed to be helpful tends to help you phrase your version better instead.

An app also cannot assess risk, take responsibility for your safety, or notice that this bad fortnight is different from your usual ones in the way a person who knows you can. If you are in crisis, contact your therapist, emergency services, or a crisis line listed at findahelpline.com.

Are therapy journal entries in an app confidential?

Not in the same way as therapy. What you tell a licensed therapist is covered by professional confidentiality rules, and in the US by HIPAA. Consumer journaling apps are usually not covered by HIPAA, although privacy laws such as GDPR in the UK, Iceland and the Nordic countries give you rights over your data.

Before writing sensitive material, check whether the app encrypts entries, whether entries are used to train AI models, and whether you can delete your data yourself.