Journaling is something many people believe is a figment of the past. However, in a world of social media and constant daily updates, journaling still holds a special place in many people’s hearts. By journaling every day, you not only keep track of the events that happened, but you also reap a lot of benefits from it. Here’s why journaling is a fun hobby and how it actually helps you.
It Helps You Deal with Your Feelings
Writing in an expressive manner helps you lay down your thoughts in a cohesive way. When you put them down on paper, it’s like you’re discussing something with yourself. You’re better able to fully understand your situation, reflect on what has happened, and comprehend your emotion and why you felt them. This helps you to have a better grasp of what you are feeling, which in turn helps you regulate your emotions. Self-reflection, or introspection, helps you deal with your struggle. The more often you practice journaling, the better you will be at facing your inner negativities.
Immortalize Your Precious Memories
Technology affords us to immortalize memories through pictures and videos. However, nothing can quite make you remember a good memory more than putting it in a journal. When we take pictures and videos, they inevitably get stored in a hard drive or cloud folder, never to be seen again unless you accidentally find them. By creating an entry in your journal commemorating an event, it’s as if it happens twice in your mind: first for the actual event and again when you’re putting it in your journal. You can even put in memorabilia and trinkets that can help you remember that moment. A printed picture (which is rare nowadays!) or a trinket connected to that event are things that help you etch a better memory in your mind.
Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness can be simply defined as the practice of being in the here and now – zoning in on yourself and zoning out everything else. One way people practice mindfulness is through meditation, where an individual closes their eyes and focuses on their breathing. When you do this, you become mindful of where you are and what you are doing. You become aware of your surroundings, too. This is especially useful for people who are easily overwhelmed by external factors. For people who experience anxiety, mindfulness can also be called “grounding,” where you focus on your five senses: focus on one thing you can see, touch something near you, etc.
In journaling, when you write down your thoughts and emotions, you become aware of them and start to zone in. It’s a pretty personal and quite vulnerable state, but it helps you become stronger because you learn how to unravel your knots and creases, and you learn to be a better person through the process.
Learn to Organize Better
When laying down your thoughts, you need to be able to do it in a way that makes sense to you, and it should be able to help you understand yourself in the end. But apart from your thoughts and feelings, journaling also helps you organize other aspects of your life. Particularly, it can help you with your schedule and lists. Whether you choose to journal the traditional way with a pen and notebook or digitally on your phone or tablet, a common integration in journaling is scheduling. List down your meetings, commitments, and to-do lists in your journal and regularly check on them to have a bird’s eye view of your progress and endeavors.
You Can Express Yourself Freely
What’s great about journaling is the freedom to put whatever you want in it. You can put pictures of your travels and favorite stuff. You can draw, decorate, put washi tapes. Overall, it gives you the chance to be creative. If you’re up for it, you can even subscribe to scrapbooking kits that you can receive regularly, so you’ll never run out of crafts and materials. Even if you feel like you don’t have any creativity in your bones, you can still find ways to make your journal uniquely yours. The way you use your journal, what type of pens and notebooks you use, and even your choice of traditional or digital journaling can say a lot about yourself. Your journal is an extension of yourself, so you can do essentially whatever you want with it with no judgment.
There Are Different Types of Journals, So Don’t Box Yourself In
There are a myriad of journaling types to try out. You can go all out with the expressiveness and design and even go the scrapbooking route. If you’re more for organization and simplicity, there are minimalist bullet journals to help you out. You will benefit a lot from simply logging your thoughts and emotions to understand yourself better.
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