The Surprising Effects Of Journaling

Journaling daily is the most influential and powerful keystone habit one can get hold of. Journaling is a wonderful way to know more about you and to discover exciting ideas inside you. Scientific studies have shown it to be a universal cure for modern life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a personal journal or using a journal for writing career because what you’ll discover is that you’re benefiting from it both personally and professionally.

Your journal is a written record of your thoughts, experiences, and observations. Your journal is a space where you’re free to express yourself.

WHY KEEP A JOURNAL?

• Preserve memories, it’s amazing as of how quickly we forget. We’re losing pieces of our lives and pieces of ourselves. Thus, a journal is a way of keeping them.

• Improve your writing, the more you write the better a writer you become.

• Sharpen your senses, writing about your own experiences can make you a better observer.

There is a ton of evidence out there on the outcomes of journal writing, and this evidence points to its effects in helping people identify and overcome their emotions, manage their stress and reduce mental illness.

1. Journaling helps manage depression:
The journaling and expressive writing for those suffering from depression; gives them the opportunity to release our negative emotions and keeps them in a more positive frame of mind.

2. Journaling for anxiety:
There’s no better way to learn about your thought processes rather than to write them down. Journaling is instrumental in helping us identify our negativity and get to the root of anxiety. Writing a journal can impact your anxiety through:

• calm and clear your mind

• release feelings and everyday stress

• let go of negative thoughts

• writing about your struggles and successes

• enhance your self-awareness

3. Journaling for Stress Management:
Journaling is an excellent method for anyone who wants to manage their stress. Keeping a journal can help you explore your emotions and release tension. Besides the outcome, journaling can help you manage your stress through:

• decreasing symptoms of health conditions

• strengthens your immune system

• examining thoughts and shifting your viewpoints

4. Journaling evokes mindfulness:
The buzzword for a good reason, which leads us to sit still, take the past and put it aside along with future anxiety and focus on what you’re feeling now. It’s important that we evoke mindfulness, and journaling makes that happen as there is a connection between happiness and mindfulness. And we all want to be happy.

5. Journaling develops Self-Discipline:
The act of deciding to journal and doing it consistently and purposefully will help grow your self-discipline. Putting time aside to write, and committing to journal every morning or evening or once a week will strengthen your discipline.

6. Journaling grows Self-Confidence:
Journaling about positive experience allows your brain to recall it. It is arguably the best tool for self-growth known to humankind. It’ll help you give a boost of self-confidence when self-doubt appears.

7. Journaling generates clarity and consistency:
This habit has much power, by journaling morning and evening you’ll see what needs to be removed and what should be focused in your life. Not only clarity with your path in life, but journaling also improves your ability to make small and large decisions.

8. Journaling ingrains your learning:
As we humans have always been bad at learning, however when you write down the things you’ve learned, you retain them for a long way. Thus, a simple act of writing down increases brain development and learning.

9. Journaling increases your gratitude:
Even if you start your journal session in a bad mood, the insight writing shifts your mind towards gratitude. When you start writing what you are grateful for, a new chamber of thoughts opens up in your mind. It is scientifically proven, gratitude journaling has a way to overcome several psychological challenges, here are few:

• makes you happier

• strengthens your emotions

• makes you more optimistic

• makes you less self-centred

• helps you network

For those sitting at the fence, these surprising effects of journaling will convince you to start writing. I would greatly recommend journaling to others, and now, myself will try to journal on a more regular schedule to see if the benefits that occurred to the individuals in the studies I found could happen to me as well.