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10 Healthy Advantages of Journaling

Updated on March 26, 2018
Dr Bill Tollefson profile image

My passion is to inspire and coach people to achieve what they want to get out of life.

Feed Your Soul, Don't Ignore It

Feed your Soul with endless energy through journaling
Feed your Soul with endless energy through journaling | Source

Journal or not to Journal, that is the question?

Do you journal? Are you recording your ideas, creations, thoughts, successes, and life experiences? Maybe you should.

Journaling can be a very beneficial and powerful tool. It can help you reduce the volume of content stored in your subconscious mind.Journaling is also useful for recording life situations as well as being a mindful and intuitive tool.

Record Your Own History

Journaling or physically recording events, thoughts, emotions, inventions, research, and ideas date back to the beginning of man.

Cavemen started journaling their history by storytelling through drawings on cave walls. Some of the greatest inventors, visionaries, world leaders and thinkers have kept a daily journal.

Mental record keeping or journaling advanced with the advent of handwriting, and even further with the invention of typewriters. But with technology, such as computers, tablets, and smartphones used to record one's history has gone to the next level. Not only journaling with words by also with images and sound combined.

Heal through Journaling

Enhance your healing journey through journaling
Enhance your healing journey through journaling | Source

Why use a journal, you might ask?

Let’s look at what a journal is. A journal is a daily profoundly personal record. Journaling is a private recording of creative thoughts, dreams, events, feelings, ideas, and your own experiences. The primary purpose of journaling is to help you gain new perspectives. Reviewing your daily posts later and recognizing the development of ideas, inventions and progress through many of your projects. Best of all journaling is a key to knowing yourself more intimately, and intuitively, as well as improving your relationship with yourself.

Journaling can also be a chronological record of your perceptions of yourself and your connections with other people. You can explore your feelings about specific situations, or cultural circumstances throughout your day and world events. You can also record personal lessons and experiences you have had in unusual locations with others, and finally, you can keep track of things or events that excited you.

Many Advantages of Journaling

10 Tips to improve your life through journaling
10 Tips to improve your life through journaling | Source

10 Health Advantages

The health advantages of journaling are substantial. There are as many advantages to journaling as there are people who journal. You won’t find out the full extent of these benefits until you make a commitment to explore the path of reflection and introspection. Some of the advantages reported by many die-hard people who journal are:

1. Free up Mental Space

One of the advantages of journaling is the opportunity to free up space in your mind. Your conscious mind has a limited amount of conscious space. Freeing space by journaling your thoughts will open your mind and allow you to have free space to create, think, and dream more.

So surrender your questions, dreams, gratitude, fears, goals, ideas and inventions every day to your journal and liberate your mind from holding them all.

2. Free up the clutter in your mind

When your mind is cluttered, it is so hard to concentrate, be creative, or focus on all the chatter going on in your head. You hear constant reminders like; “don’t forget this” or “you haven’t done that.” If you record through journaling, you will not have to keep a multitude of thoughts, ideas, schedules, appointments, tasks and so on in the conscious mind … you won’t need to constantly exert effort in order not to forget. Journaling daily allows your mind to free conscious space in your mind. So rather than filling up your mind and memory storage with your thoughts and feelings you put your thoughts manually in a notebook or computer. At that point, your mind will be free of clutter and chatter. Your journal becomes you living consciousness.

3. Be in the moment

When all you think about is “what I haven’t done” or “what is going to happen next,” it is really hard to focus on the here and now. If you concentrating on the past or projecting into the future, it is almost impossible to focus on current, moment to moment tasks or experiences. It is also difficult to keep a positive and active mindset if you are focused on past or future attitudes which may or may not come to a realization.

4. Improves clarity of thought

Journaling is a method for expressing feelings, ideas and your creativity. Pondering ideas and expressing your thoughts merit being recorded and remembered in a journal. Once that is done, you no longer have to hold those things in consciousness, and thus free space for more thoughts and ideas to flow freely. Journaling is a platform for releasing anxiety, tension and worry while allowing your creativity to be expressed again.

5. Relieve stress

Journaling can be a vehicle for relieving stress. Write down all your negative thoughts, worries, anxieties and fearful predictions. Once in your journal, you can stop holding onto them. You can also go back weeks later and see if they ever come true. You’ll see that 99% of the time worries, anxieties, and fearful predictions never become reality. Your journal acts like a trusted friend or confidant who helps to relieve your burdens in life.

6. Improve decision making

Use your journal to help process decisions you need to make. You can enhance the ability to make good decisions by having a conversation about these issues in your writing each day. Don’t procrastinate and wait until the last minute deadline for having to have a decision on something. Explore your options and consider all sides in your writing, and you’ll feel confident that you’ve reached the best decision possible.

7. Enhanced self-care

Journaling is a wonderful way to focus on what you need to do to take care of yourself. Many times, your needs and wants get buried under the activities of day-to-day life. By taking time to reflect and explore what’s really important, you can find better means of taking care of yourself through journaling.

Free your Mind through the Act of Journaling

Allow your Mind to Fly
Allow your Mind to Fly | Source

8. Reboot your mood

Journaling can be a great vehicle which you can utilize to set a mood or eliminate a mood. Focusing on noting in your journal and expressing what you need to can pull your mind off of a troubling mood and before you know it your mind is in a different mood. Journaling is a very effective way to shift your mindset.

9. Documenting your passions

Journaling is also a way of keeping up with your passions. You will be able to go back and review your progress toward your goals. After a time, you may begin to see a history of your growth and development. It is important that you journal daily so that you maintain this perspective over time.

10. Enhance creativity

Journaling is the art of creating a mental picture with words. A written picture emotional words that will help you remember, return to the thought and connect immediately with the feeling you had that moment you wrote the note. Not everyone has a good memory. Different people remember in different ways. Some people connect with an emotion through words to remember. Some connect visually through reading words. Some through physical connections with a description of an event you experienced.

Another important point is that journaling is a creative process and allows you to express in degrees and creativity. Even though creativity is not natural to everyone, creativity can be enhanced with consistent daily practice and dedication.

Getting Started

In order to get your journal started, you first have to decide what type of vehicle you are going to use to record your beliefs, dreams, events, ideas, passions, perceptions, thoughts, and visions.

Think about it.

Do you prefer the feeling of writing the traditional way, by hand on paper?

Does having a special notebook inspire you to journal regularly?

Perhaps, your personality is more suited to record your feelings, life, and thoughts on a computer.

Try different options and see which suits you best.

Once you have decided on your method of recording then make a commitment to dedicate at least a minimum 10 minutes or even more of your time writing in your journal every day.

Writing is a Powerful Method of Expression

Source

Another Advantage of Journaling - Meditation

Another positive aspect of journaling is that you can do meditation through your journaling. Many overlook the value of journaling as a meditative vehicle as a way to an expression of intuitiveness and mindfulness to connect to the moment. Writing is a very powerful way to express.

Journaling can help you to emote your authentic and honest emotions in a safe, productive protected and personal manner. It also allows you to express your vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

When using journaling as a meditation method do the following:

1. Set an intention for what you want to accomplish when focused on your journaling so you can keep yourself in the present.

2. Allow to write down all your emotions. Like your disappointments, frustrations, dissatisfaction and other negative feelings as well as your healthy expressions, positiveness, acceptances, fulfillment, happiness, and expectations to increase your gratitude for how your life is changing.

3. Use your writing to express your personal power. Writing is powerful way emote your feelings.

4. Set up a schedule and write in your journal often.

Take away

Be good to your brain by starting an active and living journal. Don’t wait.

Start today recording your life, beliefs, dreams, ideas, passions, thoughts, and visions. For you never know when someday your journaling will be important to you or even to the world.

Have compassion for yourself and remember, "any life worth living is worth recording."

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