5 Ways Journaling Changed Me and Why You Should Start Today
Journaling helped me prosper in ways I never imagined.
Maybe your life is what you have always wanted, but you want to document it and see your personal and professional progress over time. Each day passes and you have nothing to prove that it even happened. Did you achieve something? Go on a date? Have an emotional breakthrough? Who knows?
These days during a more restricted life during the COVID pandemic, it is important to take note of these things. Maybe even make a bigger deal of them than you normally would!
Our lives are full of hidden gems of passion and insight, and the most recent events in our lives contain the most useful gems of all. Why? Those hidden lessons are the most up-to-date, meaning they have the largest impact on what we’re doing right now.
But the question is, how do you get those lessons? There’s a simple way to do it, and it doesn’t involve time machines to different lifetimes:
Journaling.
This simple practice improves mental clarity, offers the ability to see the big picture of our lives, and serves as a catalog of every success we’ve ever had, and maybe also how to learn from the possible “failures” we have experienced.
Journal writing is a useful and flexible tool to help shed light on achieving your goals and also see trends in your life and personality that you may not have seen before, in addition to its many other health benefits!
Here are 5 reasons I have found in my life for why you should start a journal today.
1. Journals Help You Connect to Your Emotions and Goals
By journaling about what you believe in, why you believe it, how you feel, and what your goals are, you can understand your relationships with these things better. This is because you must sort through the mental clutter and provide details on why you do what you do and feel what you feel.
Journaling may allow you to discover a theme of why you may be unhappy or settling, that you were not able to identify before. Journaling can show you you’re capable of fixing this problem because it allows you to finally be honest with yourself and get to the root of the problem. It provides the useful insight that you may not have had before into the honest reality behind your experiences.
2. Journals Improve Mental Clarity and Focus
If there’s one thing journal writing is good for, it’s clearing the mental clutter.
How does it work? Whenever you have a problem and write about it in a journal, you transfer the problem from your head to the piece of paper. Now, this may seem too simple, but this empties the mind, allowing allocation of precious resources to problem-solving rather than problem-storing.
Let’s say you’ve been juggling several tasks at work. You’ve got data entry, testing, e-mails, problems with the boss, among others— enough to overwhelm you — but as you start journal writing, things become clearer and easier to understand: You can prioritize your tasks better.
Journaling helps you prioritize your problems, fears, and concerns. Additionally, you can track your mental health triggers day-to-day and learn how to control them or not put yourself in those same situations in the future.
You become better able to focus and reason your tasks out, and this is an indispensable and useful skill to have. it not only can be helpful in the work setting, but also your free time, household tasks, and goals.
3. Journals Improve Insight and Understanding
As a positive consequence of improving your mental clarity, you become more open to insights you may have missed before. As you write your notes out, you’re essentially having a dialogue with yourself and are able to see trends or themes.
This draws out insights that you would have missed otherwise; it’s almost as if two people are working together to better understand each other. This kind of insight is only available to the person who has taken the time to connect with and understand themselves in the form of writing.
Once you’ve gotten a few entries written down, new insights can be gleaned from reading over them. What themes do you see in your life? Do you keep switching goals halfway through? Are you constantly dating the same type of people who aren’t good for you? Have you slowly but surely pushed people out of your life for fear of being hurt? As you write more and more, these insights are able to be seen more distinctly and/or frequently.
All of these questions can be answered through self-reflection, but you can only discover the answers if you’ve captured them in writing. These questions are going to be tough to answer without a journal of your actions and experiences. The journal can act as a spotlight on ideas you may not have seen important previously.
4. Journals Track Your Overall Development
Life happens, and it can happen right before your eyes, literally. Sometimes we don’t take the time to stop, look around, and comprehend what’s happening to us at each moment. We don’t get to see the step-by-step progress that we’re making in our own lives. So what happens? One day it’s the future, and you have no idea how you got there. That’s where journaling comes in!
Without documentation, it can be very difficult to see the small changes Journal writing allows you to see how you’ve changed over time, so you can see where you did things right, and where you took a misstep and fell.
The great thing about journals is that you’ll know what that misstep was, and you can make sure it doesn’t happen again — all because you made sure to log it, allowing yourself to learn from your mistakes.
5. Journals Facilitate Personal Growth
The best thing about journal writing is that no matter what you end up writing about, it’s hard to not grow from it. You can’t just look at a past entry in which you acted shamefully and say “That was dumb, anyway!” No, we say “I will never make a dumb choice like that again!”
It’s impossible not to grow when it comes to journal writing. That’s what makes journal writing such a powerful tool! If it’s about achieving goals, becoming a better person, or just general personal-development — No matter what you use it for, you’ll eventually see yourself growing as a person. In the short-term, it may be difficult to see glaring changes in yourself, but over time looking back, you can see the growth and potential you have experienced.
Journals provide an avenue for positive self-talk. It is very difficult to physically write something personally harmful or negative in a journal to yourself, much more difficult than saying it in your head. Journaling helps you not get into this habit- if you can have positive self-talk in your journal entries, it makes it easier to incorporate it into your everyday life, as well.
The Take-Away
How can journaling best be of use to you? To vent your emotions? To help achieve your goals? To help clear your mind? What do you think makes journaling such a useful life skill?
Think you know the answer? Then it’s about time you reap the benefits of journal writing and start putting pen to paper. So many people are doing this and finding benefits to it, time to find out just how powerful it can be for you!
