How do you feel right now? Are you bored? Happy? Sad? Excited? Angry? Frustrated?
You can improve and change your mood when you take time out to write down what is happening in your life in your personal journal.
Did you write in a diary when you were younger? Or, did you have a pen pal who would share your innermost thoughts with and exchange chatty letters regularly?
You probably remember feeling better after doing it. So, why not bring back the benefits you recognized then and realize how journaling can benefit your emotional health right now, right where you are?
Enhance Your Deep Connection to Yourself and your Grounding
Journaling can help you to feel more grounded, deeply connected to yourself and others, and even help boost your memory. As journaling helps relieve stress, it will also support your immune system, thus improving your overall physical health, too!
Writing about your ideas and feelings will help you clarify what is on your mind. It will help you process the experiences that you have gone through.
Recognize and Deal with Your Feelings
Journaling helps you recognize your feelings and deal with them. It will help you develop clarity about who you are as a person and what you want from life.
You might not feel comfortable sharing your story with others, you might not want to talk about it. Writing about it is a powerful tool to both express your feelings and maintain your desire for privacy.
You can think of it as writing your memoirs if that makes it any easier for you to adopt it as a beneficial self-development activity. The point is that you can process experiences, deal with past traumas, and outline what you want to achieve for your future without having to bare your soul in public or to anyone else.
Discover and Accept how Interesting You and Your Life Are
Initially it might seem boring, to write about the things that happened to you today, but Harvard University researchers conducted a study that suggests that we are more interesting than we realize.
The subjects in their study were asked to write about current experiences, whether it was a social media update or an activity. They were also asked to rate how interested they were in what they were given to write about. When asked to rate this using a scale of one to seven, three was the average response.
Yet, when the subjects were given their journal entries three months later and asked for a new rating the average was 4.34 (https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Rediscovery_91a38887-12e7-4c5c-a60d-866c0e4a95c4.pdf).
Time helps Manifest the Importance of Self-Reflection
If in the moment you are rolling your eyes thinking your journal entry is pointless – know that it isn’t. You’ll benefit from the time and energy you give to your journaling practice when it comes time to reflect.
Even moments that seem insignificant can take on deeper meaning after some time has passed. We often don’t realize just how important these little moments are. We don’t always recognize how they are influencing our emotional health.
Take the time to complete a detailed inquiry into the smaller moments of your life, look at an insignificant moment, and tease out more information that may show you just how much it impacted your emotions.
The memories that you record form part of your identity. We perfectly imperfect human beings are guilty of misremembering the past. As we share a story and embellish it for an audience, that enhanced story becomes part of our internal record.
Use past Journal entries to Benefit Your Emotional Health
We start to believe that it happened just as we described. Your memory can also be swayed by input from others and future events. So recording them in a journal can be beneficial to your emotional health. When you run into difficult times, you can go back to a similar time to see how you coped and what you did to overcome the challenges.
Writing might not be easy for everyone, but a journal isn’t for the eyes of others. This is your own personal path and you don’t need to share it with anyone. So, don’t worry about writing something amazing.
Don’t think about how others would perceive your thoughts. Just let it out. As you do, you will see an improvement in your emotional health.
