Hey guys! Penny here. Today I decided to make a post about journaling, its benefits, and how to make the most of it.
I hope you'll find this post useful! Let's get started!
1) Journaling has a very profound effect on not just mental health but on your overall health too. In psychology, especially humanistic psychotherapy, many beneficial effects of journaling—writing down your thoughts on someone's immune system—have been reported since writing about stressful experiences, thoughts, and emotions can help reduce the intensity of stress by providing a healthy outlet for expressing and processing feelings. This can lead to lower levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, and promote relaxation.
2) It helps you become more creative. Yes! Even writing down your current feelings can help you boost your creativity. Journaling allows you to explore your thoughts, emotions, and experiences in depth. This self-reflection can lead to insights and connections that spark creative ideas.
Exercise tip:You can use your journal for brainstorming sessions or freewriting exercises that can help unlock creativity. Set a timer and write continuously without worrying about grammar or coherence. This can help you bypass your inner critic and access deeper, more innovative ideas.
3) It allows for self-reflection. If you are journaling as a habit, you have probably noticed this. When you read what you write, you become aware of your thought and feeling patterns. You can clearly see if talking to a certain friend makes you unhappy or if taking a walk in the park makes you feel relieved. Writing down your thoughts before an important exam or deadline actually helps you to relax so that you can focus more on your project or exam. In summary, reviewing past journal entries can help you identify patterns and themes in your thinking and creative process. This awareness can lead to new insights and directions for your creative work.
4) It enhances your memory! Writing down things might seem easy, yes, but while you do that, you are also improving your memory. For instance, when you journal about your experiences, thoughts, and feelings, you engage in a process of reflection that helps solidify memories. Recalling events and writing them down reinforces neural pathways associated with those memories, making them easier to retrieve in the future. Furthermore, regularly journaling about your experiences, goals, and achievements allows you to track your growth and progress over time. Reviewing past entries can help reinforce memories of your accomplishments and the steps you've taken to reach them.
5) It makes you shift your focus from the past and future to the present moment. While you are writing your feelings, you become aware of the moment you are writing them in. How you feel after experiencing something bad in the day changes once an amount of time passes. That's why it's important to journal and have a shift in the area you focus on.
P.S. If you want to make journaling a habit, buy a nice notebook that you really love! When you do this, you'll feel more inclined to write in it!
That's all for this post, everyone! Let me know in the comments below whether you liked this little post and if you are looking forward to journaling. Do you think journaling has many benefits for our mental health, too? What were your experiences?
Until the next post!
x Penny