10 Life-Changing Benefits You Can Enjoy By Keeping a Journal
The chances are that you write every single day without even thinking about it. Whether you’re chatting with your friends and family through your smartphone, crafting emails to colleagues at work, or writing up some sort of letter to customers, writing is a huge part of our lives.
However, have you ever considered how writing can benefit your mental and physical wellbeing? By keeping a journal, an increasingly popular form of jotting down your thoughts, feelings and emotions, it’s renowned that you can change your life. Here are some other benefits that keeping a journal can provide.
Get in Touch with Thoughts and Feelings
One of the biggest benefits that keeping a journal provides is allowing you the time and space to get in touch with how your mind and body is feeling. After all, how often is it that you sit back and take a minute to acknowledge how you really feel?
Improve Your Problem-Solving Abilities
Scientifically, we use the left side of our brain for problem-solving. However, some problems, whether logical or social, need a touch of creativity to help you move forward. Writing down these problems can help you think about them in a new light and even gain a new perspective.
Learn About Your Mind
By building up a habit of writing on a regular basis, you’ll quickly learn what makes your mind tick. This includes what makes you happy, what makes you sad, and what happens in your everyday life to make you feel confident or stressed. This is a great way to get in touch with yourself, so you can actively improve your wellbeing.
Reducing Stress Levels
Perhaps one of the most beneficial elements of keeping a journal is the fact that it can help to reduce stress. If you’re writing about your bad day or things that stress you out or make you angry or sad, instead of letting them build up and overwhelm you, you can write them down, vent, and understand them better.
Enhance Your Intelligence
Writing has long been connected with the ability to increase your own intelligence and even to improve your IQ. By writing through a journal, you’re actively stimulating your brain, putting thoughts into written form and expanding your vocabulary.
Set & Achieve Goals
One of the best ways to approach journaling is to use it to set goals. This means you write down what you want to achieve now, today, tomorrow, next week and even go so far as to say where you want to be in five years or more. By writing down your goals and aspirations, you’re making them real, making it far more likely that you’ll be able to achieve them.
Improve Willpower
Writing in a journal every day is a great way to boost your levels of discipline and improve your willpower. By writing every day, you’re proactively forming a habit which can be applied to the rest of your life, whether you want to exercise more, eat better, or quit smoking/drinking.
Enhance Your Communication Skills
Since you’re writing every day, and you want to be able to understand what you’re saying, over time and with practice, your methods of communicating will improve as well. This will be reflected in your everyday life, from talking to family and friends to interacting at work. It can even improve the vocabulary you use.
Evoke Creativity
How often would you say that you let your mind get creative? Through writing, you can get those creative juices flowing. You might even feel like writing something like a poem or a short story.
Build Up Your Self-Confidence
Since you’re writing down your thoughts and feelings, both positive and negative, you’ll be so much more mindful of how you react and deal with certain situations. Not only can this help you to become the person you want to be, but it can also improve your self-confidence and your self-esteem, which can lead to more happiness.
How to Begin
First, you’re going to want to get yourself a dedicated journaling book or you can use a word processor on your laptop, just as long as you feel comfortable. You’ll also want to set up a routine where you write at the same time every day, so it becomes a habit, perhaps just before bed.
Conclusion
Even with all the many benefits of keeping a journal, it can be hard to know where to begin. If you’re still in doubt, start by doing it solidly for a week and seeing how you feel. I strongly believe that you’ll notice a difference in your wellbeing.
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