Does Journaling Help With Mental Health? My Experience
I believe journaling to be a great tool for improving your thought processes over time. Writing your thoughts down every morning can be an extremely cathartic experience. This blog is going to answer the question “does journaling help with mental health?” and cover my experience.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH JOURNALING
I’ve been using journals as a means to improve my cognition for the past few weeks and have definitely noticed a big difference in that time.
Below, I have listed a few benefits you can expect from journaling and given some evidence for you to have a look at if you’re still not convinced.
Does Journaling Help With Mental Health?
Keeping a diary as a teenager is really common and relieves the pressure that comes with coping with difficult thoughts and feelings. It can be a good thing to plough through some of the uncertainty and confusion you’re going through.
You may have stopped writing in a diary once you became an adult, but journaling is a great way to recollect your thoughts and understand them better. Staying connected with your thoughts through a journal can be a great thing. It can offer you an outlet for your emotions and help improve your mental health.
One way to feel better in any emotional situation is by finding an outlet where you can express yourself. A journal is a great way to manage your mental health by helping you with these things:
Deal with and overcome anxiety
Descrease stress
Overcome depression
Journaling helps control symptoms and improve mood by:
Helping you put concerns and worries into context to the bigger picture
Tracking symptoms and habits over weeks, allowing you to identify patterns
Providing opportunities to review your progress and self-monitor.
does journaling help with mental health? From my experience, journalling is a fantastic way to deal with mental health (as identified in this study), it can provide a way to express your emotions, track your progress and communicate to yourself, and others about how you're feeling.
IMPROVES IQ
The constant writing and use of your brain associated with journaling every day can improve your IQ according to some sources. This is great news if you’re looking to keep your brain on its toes and improve your vocabulary whilst improving other areas of your mental state.
Journaling benefits for mental health: EXPANDS YOUR MEMORY
According to some research, there is a relationship between the hand and the brain. As words are technically physical representations of ideas, getting these down on paper on a regular basis allows you to boost your ability to re-compose ideas whilst writing and improve cognitive recall over time.
Benefits of journaling: ALLOWS YOU TO EMPTY YOUR MIND
This is a subjective benefit that I have noticed since taking up journaling. It allows me to empty my thoughts onto the page every morning and start the day off with a clear mind, meaning I can concentrate on what is important to me on that particular day. This has been proven in research which has shown those who write journals regularly suffer far less stress than those who don’t.
So these are some of the amazing benefits on offer if you start journaling, how exactly can you get started?
I recommend buying a cheap notebook and writing for 5 minutes every morning, aiming to fill at least half a page each time. Write anything that comes into your mind, aiming to empty all of your thoughts and cognitions onto the page and let them out of your mind.
Try to keep it to a certain structure – things that are stressing you out, things you are thankful for, things you are looking forward to and goals you are working towards. This way you will always have a structure to prompt you when you get stuck and this will also organises your entries conveniently.
Emptying your mind is also really useful if you want to get rid of negative thoughts or negative emotions, forget a traumatic event or traumatic experience and even realist physical health benefits.
Improves Progress In Your Business
If you're a business owner, you may often find that you do your best work when you have a clear, direct mindset. Journaling can be a great way to empty your mind (as covered above) and better align your day-to-day activities towards your long-term goals.
In my routine, I journal every day and make sure that I write down three things I'm grateful for (some people may call this a gratitude journal), three things I want to achieve that day and something I could have improved on the day before, all using pen and paper - this keeps me present and helps my business, as it keeps me focussed on what matters!
Journaling can take much less that 20 minutes - journaling prompts benefits that are 100% work journaling practice on a daily basis.
Once you’ve started you’ll be able to check back in a month or so’s time and check whether things that were stressing you have been resolved or something you’d been looking forward to had gone to plan. I find this is a great way of tracking progress and making sure that stressors don’t hang around for longer than they have to, making you a much happier person in the long run.
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