You may have kept a diary as a teenager tucked under your mattress. It was a haven where you could express your doubts and anxieties without fear of being judged or punished. It must have been nice to get all of those thoughts and feelings out of your head and on paper. The world appeared to be clearer.
When you entered maturity, you may have stopped keeping a diary. However, the notion and its benefits still hold. It’s now known as journaling. It’s simply writing down your ideas and feelings to comprehend them better. Keeping a journal might also be beneficial if you suffer from stress, despair, or anxiety. It can help you achieve emotional control and improve your mental health.
We journal for various reasons. We keep journals for multiple aspects of our lives, such as travel notebooks, dream journals, gratitude journals, and prayer journals. Many people used to save personal journals to record the activities of the day and their observations.
We wouldn’t know anything about our history’s personal aspect without diarists like Anne Frank and Samuel Pepys. Even though many individuals nowadays create blogs or vlogs and document their life on social media, relatively few of us keep a notebook and write down our experiences. Why not give it a shot?
How does Journaling help?
Finding a healthy approach to express yourself is one technique to deal with overwhelming feelings. As a result, writing in a journal can be an effective tool for maintaining your mental health. Journaling will assist you in the following ways:
- Control your anxiousness
- Reduce your tension.
- Healing from depression
Journaling will help you manage your symptoms and enhance your mood by doing the following:
- Supporting you in prioritizing difficulties, worries, and concerns.
- Keeping track of any symptoms on a day-to-day basis so that you can identify triggers and learn how to handle them better.
- Allowing for positive self-talk and detecting negative thoughts and behaviors.
How to start Journaling?
There are other approaches to developing a daily writing habit, but here’s what I’d recommend based on my own experience:
- Commit to writing every day. Many people make an effort to write a couple of times per week or once per week. That is just too irregular, and it will not become a habit in that manner. Instead, commit to yourself, “I’m going to write every day, no exceptions.” And then follow through on your promise.
- Make time for it. This is quite crucial. You must set aside a short amount of time for this, or it will not happen. I recommend putting out your thought in your journal first thing in the morning when you are fresh, as quickly as possible, so that you can carry out the rest of your day with a clear mind. On the other hand, late nights are great if you’re a night owl, as long as you’re not too exhausted.
- Take small baby steps. OK, you knew I would say it, but it’s the key. All you want to do is start writing every day – you don’t even have to write 1,000 words. It doesn’t matter how much you do; what matters is that you start. You can lengthen it once you’ve established the habit, but for now, just get started.
- Disconnect from all distractions. Distraction is the writer’s best friend. He is aware of its strong call and must resist the impulse to follow it. So close anything that isn’t your writing instrument, including all tabs, email applications, social media, and just writing.
When your life is whirling in turmoil, keeping a journal might help you create order. You learn about yourself by expressing your deepest fears, thoughts, and feelings. Consider your writing time to be a personal relaxing time. It’s an excellent time to unwind and de-stress. Write in a quiet and soothing environment, perhaps with a cup of tea nearby. You’re going to like your journaling time.