Journaling may seem like something we only do in our teen years, but continuing this habit is something that can benefit us greatly into adulthood and beyond. Why? Well, there are many benefits to doing so, as Prompts First knows.
When you journal, you are making a physical note of thoughts, feelings, goals, and any other thoughts that may freely pass through your mind.
You can journal with the classic old pen and paper, or you can do so electrically now as well. You could even create video journals or audio notes. Adding this into your routine can seem like a nonsense and tedious commitment to make, but it can be really simple.
What’s best is it can be massively helpful to maintaining mental health and helping you with expression. It can even dig into your subconscious and help you make realizations.
Transferring Thought To Paper Helps Us With Goals
Writing down your goals is a very powerful thing to do. In fact, those of us who write down our goals have a much higher chance of actually succeeding in accomplishing them.
However, you can go one step further still and do something known as free-writing. When you do this, you write out your thoughts without stopping to correct yourself in a subconscious way.
This brings forth our subconscious mind and outs those feelings. Allowing us to express what might be sneakily blocking us from getting where we want to be.
Increases Self Awareness
Writing down how we feel and going back and reading them over time increases our awareness of ourselves. Looking back on things we wrote before with a fresh mind and fresh eyes can illuminate parts of us we may otherwise ignore.
Keeping a journal and making entries on a regular basis helps us identify patterns in our lives and allows us to better learn what makes us feel happy, sad, angry, loved, insecure, and excited.
Writing expressively like such can be a very healing experience, and it can help you learn about yourself, face traumatic situations and move on from the things that are holding you back.
Aids In The Healthy Practice Of Clear Communication
Journaling can help us to create better habits and stay more organized in our lives. When we make the time to apply pen to paper it increases our productivity and helps us sort through our ideas and thoughts. It gives us a new mental clarity.
An effect of this is how it allows us to develop communication skills. As we become better at communicating with ourselves through this, we become all round better communicators.
Journaling Can Help Us To Regulate Our Emotions
Sometimes we keep thinking about things, even though we know it is not good for us to continue doing so. Stressful things and unresolved traumas and problems keep us going back to these unhealthy patterns.
Journaling allows us to step away from these obsessive thoughts and their negative influence on our mental health.
Those of us who take the time to write down how we feel in comparison to others, find they can actually have a better control over how they are feeling and how they communicate how they are feeling than those who do not.
When we write something down, we let this thing out into the world instead of keeping it cooped up inside of us and building up tensions and pains.
It can be a release we did not know we needed. For those who are going through therapy, and who deal with mental health problems, journaling is highly recommended as a way to help you understand your emotions better and regulate them.
It Can Help You To Practice Gratitude
Many of us struggle with gratitude these days, and journaling for gratitude is actually more popular now than you might think. Studies have shown that practicing gratitude helps in the reduction of stress and aids in the boosting of our immune system.
Let’s not forget how it enhances our health and overall relationships.
It can be worthwhile to keep a separate notebook just for this practice alone, in which you can write three things per day that you are grateful for.
Some people may practice gratitude in their standard journaling wherein they express positive emotions in a casual way.
However you choose in which way you do this, the addition of adding gratitude to your journaling can relieve a huge amount of stress and tension from you and help you feel better overall.
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