What's the deal with journaling?

I’ve been “journaling” since I was ten. Not consistently, but I remember getting my first diary from a garage sale that my dad had taken me to. It was pink and cream and had a little silver lock and clasp that made it feel special. Being 10, my life was quite uneventful. So instead of actually recording my day-to-day I made up friends and events as if I DID have cool things going on. Looking back, the imaginary friends and life were the perfect representation of my loneliness as a child.

Although I somewhat maintained a journaling habit ever since, it didn’t become a healthy habit until my early 20s. Up until then, I used my journal as a place to vent and pour in every emotion I felt (and there were a lot). It wasn’t a bad habit to have. Journaling is linked with emotional regulation and is proven to help break obsessive thoughts.

What I didn’t know at the time was that timing really mattered as well. Research shows that writing immediate after an event could actually deepen the emotions and thought patterns. Explains why I was so moody and anxious.

There was one year I finally had a break through. This was early in my self-help reading days but before I actually started therapy. I was sick and tired of loading all my depressive thoughts into my journal and decided that if I wanted to feel better I had to change how I journaled as well. If I was going to diligently record my life almost every day, I wanted to be able to look back 10 years later and read about my progress, wins, and personal growth rather than everything that was holding me back.

That was the moment I felt like journaling changed for me. It went from a safe space to unload to being a tool that I could use to shape how I saw myself, what I wanted to achieve, and what mattered to me in life.

Today, journaling is one of my most consistent habits and has been monumental in how I

• process information and emotions,
• break down and further my ideas,
• manifest the life I want to live,
• and create deeper self-awareness.

It still is a place I go to unload my brain (see morning pages method) but it’s no longer the capsule for everything negative in my life.

There’s been a ton of research done around journaling but the benefits that resonate with me the most are:

• Improved memory: journaling activates areas of our brain that makes it easier for us to process information and emotions faster, create deeper connections between different data points, which actually strengthens our memory.
• Increased attention span: by writing by hand, it slows down the speed of our thoughts and forces us to be present in the moment and stay with our thoughts. This not only creates more mindfulness but also teaches us to engage with our senses for a prolonged period of time.
• Better articulation of thoughts: by practicing putting our thoughts onto paper (or a digital doc), our ability to articulate ideas in both spoken and written form improves which can lead to better emotional processing, deeper connections with others, and even enhanced confidence and self-image.
• Decreased mental distress: a test group showed that just by writing for 15 minutes a day, 3 days a week, over a 12 week period, all participants had increased feelings of well-being and fewer depressive and anxious symptoms.
• Strengthened physical health: this one is crazy to me. Research done in New Zealand showed that journaling starts an intensive internal process that actually helps wounds heel faster. This process includes the practice of labeling emotions, acknowledging traumatic events, organizing events in our mind, improving sleep…which ultimately lead to better physical health and wounds healing faster.

If you’ve been considering adding journaling to your daily habits, I hope this helps your decision. In the next article, I’ll go over tips and strategies that I’ve found actually worked for me when it came to building a journaling habit. Stay tuned!