In a chronically online world, people are finding respite in ‘junk journaling’

Danielle Catton is the kind of person who hangs onto old birthday cards, boarding passes and business cards — ephemera that feels wrong to toss but doesn’t have a particular use.

These pieces of her everyday life sat accumulating in a large plastic bin until recently, when she came across a YouTuber who introduced her to the practice of junk journaling.

Junk journaling calls for taking those bits and bobs and sticking them onto a notebook page. A freeform hybrid of collage, scrapbooking and traditional journaling, the creative hobby is having a moment right now. Google searches for “junk journaling” spiked in late December and early January, and countless creators across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube have been documenting their junk journal processes and sharing tips with followers.

While scrapbooking might involve purchasing sticker kits and ornately decorated paper to document a specific occasion, junk journaling emphasizes the use of found and recycled materials: a sticker from a piece of fruit, a pamphlet picked up at a museum, a piece of product packaging that’s too pretty to discard.

Purists might adhere to the ethos of only using “junk,” while others supplement recycled scraps with printed photos and other decorative flourishes. For some people, a junk journal is a visual diary of sorts, with notes and thoughts jotted in the margins. But it could just as well be a completely random assortment of materials arranged on paper.

Part of the fun is that there are no rules.

Catton, 37, just started junk journaling a few weeks ago but she says she’s already finding it addicting. Plus it gives her an excuse to repurpose stuff lying around her house.

“Things that maybe would traditionally find their way into the trash are now finding a new life within a journal — something that I can look at in years to come,” she says.

Junk journaling helps people decompress

Despite the recent surge in interest, variations of junk journaling have been around for a while.

Crafting blogger Jennifer Perkins says she’s been junk journaling for more than a decade, before she realized there was a term for what she was doing. She considers the hobby an iteration of zinemaking, the self-published DIY medium that she engaged in as a teenager in the ‘90s (and that is seeing its own resurgence).

Perkins, 50, also traces the form to mixed-media journals such as Keri Smith’s 2007 hit project “Wreck This Journal,” which encouraged users to unleash their creativity by filling and defacing its pages, and K&Company’s Smash Books, which prompted users to glue or tape in items from their day-to-day lives.

Junk journaling is a creative outlet for Perkins — a way to decompress and channel her energy into making something pleasing.

She tends to be unstructured in her approach, letting herself be guided by feeling. In one spread, she pasted in a piece of math homework from 1982, juxtaposed with an image of a woman with two black braids. In another, she scattered cutouts from vintage yearbooks throughout. Yet another is made up entirely of scraps that are orange.

“Glue sticks are my Xanax,” she says. “If I just need a minute to calm down and chill, I’ll grab one of my books and a stack of random stuff … and I tear it up and just glue it in.”

The science appears to back her up. One study last year suggested that creating arts and crafts could significantly boost public well-being, while prior research has found it can help people who suffer from mental health conditions. Junk journaling videos, featuring the dulcet tones of crinkling paper, are even a form of ASMR content.

Catton, who says she struggles with a number of mental illnesses, says the practice is so far helping her process her emotions better than merely writing about them does. She also appreciates that it forces her to step away from her phone and computer screens.

“It’s calming and it’s therapeutic, and it allows me to kind of shut my brain off a bit,” she adds.

It forces you to appreciate the little things

The junk journaling trend also nods to another recent phenomenon: A return to analog.

Faced with a deluge of digital content, younger generations are expressing an appetite for physical media — print books, magazines and CDs are all making a comeback, and more broadly, people seem to be yearning for objects they can touch.

At a time when photos, movie tickets and messages all live in the cloud, junk journaling creates a tactile record of one’s experiences.

Tatyiana Gordon, 26, gravitated toward junk journaling largely for that reason. She picked up the hobby last June and is now in the habit of collecting physical mementos throughout the day to put in her journal. With the uncertainty around TikTok’s future, she’s reminded that digital media can be impermanent: The memories she’s posted on the platform might one day be inaccessible, but putting them in her junk journal means she can always look back.

Her new pastime has also inspired her to find joy and beauty in the mundane, a practice often referred to on social media as “romanticizing your life.” Since getting into junk journaling, she’s learned to appreciate items that others might disregard: Wrapping paper from a Christmas gift, a city map collected at a rest stop, even the red-and-white checkered paper lining a basket of takeout fries.

“A lot of the times I end up junk journaling about very small and specific memories that, without having the space that I’ve created for myself, I probably would have forgotten about,” she says.

Recently, Gordon documented a Saturday morning visit with her partner to a coffee shop in town. She took home a business card, a piece of her coffee cup and the receipt from her order, later arranging them onto a page in her notebook.

“It’s a small blip of a moment in terms of a week, but it was so special trying something new and doing that with my partner,” Gordon says. “I’ve made it a little bit bigger now that it is a permanent spread in my journal.”

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and depleted from the constant stream of negative news on our phones. At least for now, Gordon says junk journaling is providing her some respite — and an easy, inexpensive source of fun.

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