Journaling is a great way to practice mindfulness and reflection of your day to day life. It can improve your self-awareness, help you solve problems in your life, boost your memory and creativity, reduce stress and anxiety, and increase your overall happiness.
When we journal, we create a safe space to express ourselves without any censorship. This benefits our mental health and helps us develop as individuals as we work through challenging emotions, set goals for our future, and reflect on the past with a new perspective.
You can write about anything you want. If you like to collect your thoughts, write down what happened that day or the week before. If you like to doodle, draw pictures of anything and everything. Write down notes from meetings or lectures. Use your journal as a planner — keep track of your homework assignments and upcoming events. Keep track of your habits and goals by writing them down in your journal every day.
Here are some of the benefits:
- Reduces stress. When you write about stressful events, it helps you process feelings associated with them so they don’t keep haunting you later. The simple act of putting pen to paper can also distract you from stressful thoughts for a short time.
- Recall. If you write daily, after a while you will have a detailed account of how things were going in your life at different times. The more often you write, the more you will remember, so the more often is better!
- Helps process traumatic events. Post-traumatic growth can help people who experience trauma or other difficult life events to see their lives as more meaningful than before their experience happened.
- Organization: Journaling is like taking notes, only you don’t really have to follow any rules or guidelines. This means that it becomes easier for you to organize the information in whatever way makes sense for you. This can make it easier for you later when trying to recall something specific.
