Journaling is meta af

boo · Post by **boo** » Mon Oct 23, 2023 9:02 pm

Out of all the single things that you could incorporate into your daily routine, journaling has to be one of the single most valuable.

We have such little time left in our day-to-day to actually reflect on our lives. Journaling allows us to reflect, not just on the events of the day, but the feelings associated with it. It allows us to check how our over-arching goals are going. So many times, because I journal regularly, I've been able to catch myself entering slumps and correct myself.

Just the act of putting down my feelings into words, my scattered thoughts into written paragraphs, is so therapeutic. I've tried therapy before, but I don't think anyone knows my situation better than myself. Writing down a problem or concern I have and just looking at it, considering it, having a dialogue with myself is so beneficial. I am basically just talking to myself, but writing down first and then considering whats there kind of seperates the problem or idea from myself. It detaches me a bit and allows me to see my situation from an outside perspective, a more holistic perspective. The journal is my therapist. (But this is just my experience with journaling!)

One thing thats really cool about journaling is being able to time-travel. To go back and look at your own thoughts on crushes, crisises, and victories. Reading entries of mine that are just a year old show me just how much I've grown since then. Day-to-day I kind of feel like I'm the same person I was when I was 18, but actually going back to entries from when I was 18 show just how untrue that is. I may have the same spirit but I've grown sooo much more since then. It reinforces my confidence in my self.

And outside of my own personal experience, many studies have shown that Journaling really is good for you!

It can reduce symptoms of depression before important events (Flinchbaugh, Moore, Chang & May, 2011).
It improves your working memory (First researched by Richards & Gross in 2000, reproduced by Klein in 2002 and Baikie & Wilhelm in 2005).
It reduces intrusive thoughts & increase emotional regulation (Davidson et al., 2002).
It decreases depressive symptoms (Stice, Burton, Bearman & Rohde, 2007).
And it even results in more health-promoting immune responses (Booth & Perie, 2002).

Have you taken the journaling pill? If you have how do you find you benefit from it? How long have you been journaling? What made you start? Do you employ any 'non-standard' techniques or processes when you journal? What kind of Journal do you have? What do you like to write with? Pen? Pencil? Do you write in cursive or print?

If you haven't journaled, or used to but stopped, I encourage you to try it for two weeks! An entry a day. You don't need to recollect all your thoughts and feelings for the day, even just "today was boring" is fine. But I bet once you do it for a few days you'll have more to say and more to think about than you first thought.