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There are many ways to keep a journal – if you’re looking for five ideas you could start using right away, please keep reading.

You can record the events of your everyday life, plan a vacation, analyzethree assorted-color books your dreams or use a bullet journal to organize your life’s tasks and activities.

Journals can help you capture your thoughts or plot out your career – or a change in career!

Another benefit of journaling is the ability to help you declutter your mind, and there’s still more – keeping a journal can have some surprising benefits…

A Journaling habit will help you reduce stress

The act of putting your feelings down on paper helps you to manage your and breathe neon sign on trestress levels better. All those anxieties and worries stop going in circles inside your head, allowing you to step back and get a deeper perspective on the things that are troubling you. It can even help with problem-solving, giving you space and sometimes inspiration to help you find answers to challenges!

Consistent Journaling can improve your mental health

Journaling is often recommended by psychologists and therapists, and with brown braingood reason – it can help you to work through the issues that concern you. Whether they come up in a therapy session, or just in conversation with a friend, writing down your thoughts and emotions will complement and support the process of healing.

Journaling can be a powerful tool in removing psychological blockages, and in helping your plan out your next move. You can even diagram out a conversation you need to have with someone important in your life in your journal or frame a response to someone that’s causing you distress.

Use Journaling to improve your cognitive skillswoman wearing denim jacket reading book

Developing a journaling habit helps your brain to function more efficiently. Studies have shown that the act of writing strengthens the learning process and helps you to store facts and concepts more firmly in your memory. Writing helps to develop new neural pathways in your brain, connecting added information with data already stored in your memory.

Journaling will help you plan for and meet your goals

Studies have found that you are 42% more likely to achieve your goals if black and white typewriter on green textileyou write them down! Journaling gives you the space to work through ideas, setting out the details, the possibilities, and even drawing pictures of your preferred outcome, or including photographs that represent your goals.

Writing about the process helps you to track your progress so that you can see how close you’re getting to achieving your goal or where you may have gone off track. Including details about your goals helps you to visualize them in your mind’s eye, strengthening your resolve and motivation to accomplish them.

Journaling will help boost your creativity to a new level

assorted-color paintbrushesKeeping a journal allows you to write down whatever ideas come into your head. The brilliant thoughts that you have in the shower can be lost forever – or kept safe if you write them down.

Journaling is a private, safe space for you to explore ideas that might not have a home in your professional or everyday life. And once let off the leash, there’s no telling what sort of magic your creative mind will produce!

Choose one or more of these ideas to help you realize additional benefits of journaling – if your motivation has taken a dip lately, pick an idea that fires you up, and get started writing again.!

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About the Author Dianne Daniels

Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and currently residing in Norwich, Connecticut, Dianne M. Daniels' mission is to empower women 50+ to Amplify their Self-Confidence, Deepen their Self-Knowledge, Inspire Creativity, and Glide into the next phase of their lives with the Power of Journaling, Affirmations, and Assessments.

You can learn how to use these time-tested, proven practices to create and manifest the life you want (and deserve) to live.

Dianne is an ordained Unitarian Universalist Minister with a Master of Divinity degree from Starr King School for the Ministry. She's an avid reader, a lover of old houses (she renovated an 1850s vintage Greek Revival home with her family) and has been journaling since the age of 9.

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