Hey there! I hope you have been having a fantastic week and this past weekend was even better!
I wanted to switched gears a little this week and move from talking about the physical into the mental aspect of wellness. As you know wellness is so much more than what you are able to accomplish and display physically. True wellness is the result of what you are able to do for yourself on the inside that manifests on the outside.
Afterall, what really counts are the things you are doing for yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually that others may not always be able to see. When you take the time to work on healing yourself on the inside everything on the outside appears that much healthier. That’s because you are doing the necessary things needed in order to properly detox your system of everything that energetically bad and negative for you.
But I digress!
Today I want to share with you a mental wellness activity that I absolutely love to do. This activity is something that I believe everyone would and could heavily benefit from. But a lot of people stray from doing it because it is a habit that you have to slowly build before you can receive all the benefits of it.
However, once you have this tool as a part of your wellness toolbelt, fully investing in the practice can be extremely life changing for you. So, let’s get into to.
Want to change your life for the better? Try journaling!
Look, I get it. Journaling can be a tedious task! To have to “force” yourself to sit down for an allotted amount of time writing down your feelings…no one really wants to spend any of their free time doing that. I understand because I used to be this way a long time ago.
Journaling was not something that came easy for me overnight. It took many years of engaging in the practice before I was able to discover how it could best serve me. And the reality is that this may be the same for you, if you do not currently journal.
Despite that I know that there are tons of benefits to journaling. This is a practice that requires consistency in order to really reap all the benefits. Therefore, it will take time before you may begin to see the value in it. However, if you allow yourself to explore this art to its fullest, you most certainly will not regret it.
With that being said let’s dig into the main benefits of journaling and how this tool can be used to help you organize your thoughts!
Organizing your thoughts with journaling
These are the top 5 reasons why I love journaling and am ALWAYS encouraging people to get into it. We will explore each of these reasons a little deeper to help you see the bigger picture.
Journaling can…
- Help you better manage stress and anxiety
- Be a safe space for negative emotions
- Help you discover your most authentic self
- Be healthy for your brain
- Provide you with free therapy 24/7
Stress and Anxiety
Journaling is a great way to better manage your stress and anxiety. The thing about stress and anxiety is that when left to its devices it will make you extremely sick (yes, I do mean physically), and will eventually take over your life. When this happens it’s a clear indicator that you have not been doing a good job with managing these parts of your emotions before they spiraled out of control.
Think back to moments when you may have found it to be a struggle to get out of bed in the mornings, or when you are more easily agitated. Maybe there have been moments when you intentionally avoid social situations, or you may even find yourself worrying endless about something.
When these moments happen, they are usually the moments when your stress and anxiety is starting to take surface. This is the stage where it is slowly ramping up and when you need to take immediate action to keep them from spiraling.
Journaling everything that is causing you to experience stress and anxiety is a great way to manage it. This is an opportunity for you to be able to slow down, take a breather, and really process what has been happening in your life as of recently. Most of us live very busy day to day lives which can leave very little room to be able to process it all.
Journaling can help with releasing a lot of pent-up stress to keep your emotions from spiraling out of control. In doing you get ahead of the stress and anxiety takeover so that it has no opportunity to impair your daily functioning in any way.
Space for Negative Emotions
Have you ever had a moment where you really wanted to express how you truly felt but knew that it may come at the expense of hurting others? So instead, you decide to bite your tongue, leaving you feeling like a sitting duck with all your emotions. Not fun, right? Giving yourself and your emotions a safe space to be able to release any pent-up negativity is a healthy way regulate your emotions.
This is perhaps where journaling can be the most useful with regulating your emotions. When we become upset and give into our negative emotions, we are allowing ourselves to act out in ways that may not feel authentic to us. And that’s ok! Sometimes we really do need to just set those emotions free.
But understand that there are always two options for how you choose to express your negative emotions. You can either hurt people’s feelings directly and abruptly, or you can release them in private so that you can function from a more rational (and less emotional) point of view.
At the end of the day, we are all humans who experience emotions and sometimes those emotions aren’t always positive. When those moments surface for us, the best way to manage them is in a journal where we can get it off our chest and out of our heads knowing that no one gets hurt in the process.
Discover Your Most Authentic Self
Another hidden gem that comes with journaling is the beauty of discovering who you really are. We all go through the phase of experimenting with our looks and social groups until we find what feels right for us. However, through journaling you are able to really dig deep and dissect all your likes and dislikes, wants and needs, and even your deepest desires.
All of this helps to uncover who you are at your core. And you guys, that is such a freeing experience because that’s when you truly start to live your life free of emotional chains. You stop trying to people please, you stop trying to look like everyone else, and you learn to stop comparing yourself to others.
Instead, you just fully embrace the beauty and uniqueness that is you! And journaling serves as a reinforcer of all those positive things.
Journaling and the Brain
One thing about journaling that you will come to discover is that it’s a great way to collect memories. Journaling allows you to be able to record important events and meaningful moments in your life while every detail is as vivid as they can possibly be. As we age and experience more life, our memories slowly start to fade away. We may not necessarily forget those stand out memories, but we will never really remember them as they actually were.
Having a journal to help you relive those memories over and over again is a beautiful way to persevere every little detail from those memories. As a bonus, it’s always a beautiful way to share those memories with others many years and generations down the road. Plus, as a bonus, bonus research has shown that writing with pen and paper can help with improving your memory overall. This includes short-term and long-term memory.
Free Therapy
Finally, we’ve arrived at the #1 reason I believe everyone needs to journal. It is literally free therapy right at your fingertips, available to you 24/7. That’s right. You read that sentence exactly as it has been written (or in this case typed).
The reality is that therapy is not easily accessible for everyone, especially those who may be able to truly benefit from it. This is because there are many different obstacles that stand in the way. From financial situations to geographic locations, a helpful service like therapy is just not something everyone can access. So, the next best thing is to reach for a journal.
A journal can serve as your personal therapist in knowing that your journal is not there to judge you, criticize you, or betray your trust and confidentiality. It is simply there to be a safe space for you to pour your thoughts and emotions into (good and bad) so that you are able to operate from a place of authenticity.
And at the end of the day, I think it’s safe to say that’s what we all really want in life. To be seen and accepted for who we are at our core. And we are all more than deserving of that!