Journaling – How it’s Good and Healthy for You Mentally and Emotionally While Helping You Grow or Track Your Growth.

Keeping the mind disciplined and focused has always been challenging for many people. So, maybe you've tried numerous techniques without much success. But have you tried journaling? Many notable and successful individuals have kept journals – Benjamin Franklin had a journaling habit to track and record his scientific theories.

You don’t have to be a scientist. Writing a journal can help you to keep track of your thoughts. There might be some skepticism about this approach, mainly if you don't like writing; however, as you continuously practice journaling, you'd realize that it plays a crucial role in improving the mental and emotional wellbeing and helps you grow as a person.

Read on as we share the benefits of regular journaling. Hopefully, the outlined points will convince you to take a step towards improving your general wellbeing by starting a journal today.

Journaling Helps Clear You Mind and Organize You Thoughts

Maybe you've got a daunting routine – attending to the kids, dealing with a demanding boss, running errands for your elderly parents, helping out with daily chores, etc. These can all take a toll on your mental and emotional wellbeing. All the bottled up negativities and frustrations can make you feel jumbled up inside.

Putting this complex blend of emotions and feelings into words allows you to sort them into rational chunks of information. This will make processing those emotions and feelings easier, hence improving your focus and creativity.

Journaling Makes You More Mindful

Journaling can serve as an extension of a routine mindfulness exercise. While meditation is excellent for calming the mind, journaling allows you to vent out both positive and negative emotions, recording the best and worst moments of your life.

Journaling allows you to focus on various moments throughout your life, making you more mindful of any experience. It teaches you to control your mind, keeping it focused on the positive moments in your life.

Journaling Helps Improves Your Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to recognize and manage your emotions. Thus, individuals with greater emotional intelligence are less likely to have an emotional outburst. The more you put down your past thoughts, experiences, and emotions, the better you can understand how it influenced your emotional responses. As you become more aware of your thoughts and feelings, you learn to look at things objectively. The development of an objective point of view helps you understand how your feelings affect others and how they may feel emotionally. Understanding how others think or feel would increase your chances of making more informed and sensible decisions. You’d be able to balance the complex dynamics between personal and professional relationships readily.

Journaling Helps Reduce Stress and Anxiety

Negative emotions like sadness, frustration, and anger, bottled up inside you, can increase stress and anxiety levels. You continually mull over things, which undoubtedly brings back many bad memories, causing unnecessary suffering to you and your loved once. It could also affect your self-confidence, gradually slipping you into a full-blown depression.

Journaling serves as an emotional outlet and works like therapy. It gradually relieves your mind of any negative emotions. This helps you stop being an emotional burden to people around you. Putting down a negative experience enables you to feel light-headed, less stressed, and calm.

It Helps You Become More Confident

Journaling increases your mindfulness and self-awareness. This, in turn, helps you to grasp a deeper understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Looking back at your events daily, you could see how you dealt with different situations – where you acted confidently and where you panicked. Journaling offers you the opportunity to look back at your past achievements objectively. So, when you feel down or low, open your diary and go through those happy memories and achievements instead of mulling over your shortcomings. These seemingly small wins will help build your self-confidence over time.

Journaling Helps You Track Your Personal Growth

One of the best benefits of journaling is its ability to help enhance your personal growth. Putting down events, emotions, experiences, and memories ensure that you can look back to them and develop a better emotional response the next time you face a similar scenario. This means you grow as a person without expecting changes from others.

It also helps you set and achieve your personal goals. It allows you to start keeping track of your routines and devise ways to maximize output and consistency.

Conclusion

Journaling comes with an array of psychological and emotional benefits; however, keep them is a hugely personal thing. You can practice it whichever way you like and for whatever reason. It’ll provide you with the outlined benefits one way or another. Hopefully, this read will encourage you to start practicing it.

Be well!

Photo by Wendy Wei