Developing a discipline for recording your thoughts in a journal will provide a myriad of benefits, including helping you to navigate life’s many ups and downs.
One way that may surprise you is that journaling provides a window into your past. As time moves along, our mind changes our memories. Thus, becoming an unreliable source of information. So, if you have kept a journal over time, it will provide an opportunity to examine real ways in which you have overcome adversity or broken through limiting belief patterns.
What better reminder that you actually CAN succeed, you CAN overcome, and you CAN push forward toward success than a documented account of a moment when you did?
Journaling cultivates a deeper sense of self-awareness. Emotions are important indicators that something is wrong. But, they sometimes cloud our judgment. Writing emotionally charged thoughts down serves to dilute their effect. Thereby, allowing you to focus on the logic of a situation. This ultimately will make it easier for you to solve your problem or move past negative experiences.
The top 3 benefits of journaling are:
1. Process disappointment and alleviate stress
Writing in general is therapeutic. It can help slow down and regain control over a mind spinning with frustration or pain that is likely associated with something outside of our control.
Once the thoughts are on the paper, and out of our minds, we can take a deep breath and look at the situation with clearer vision.
Oftentimes, re-reading what you wrote will show you that the situation wasn’t as bad as you thought it was. One hour, one day, or even one year later you might look at it and think “I sure made a mountain out of a molehill!” And hopefully you’ll be able to laugh it off or think about that situation with a fresh perspective.
2. Generate new and different ideas
Good ideas are often more interesting the more time they are given to age in the barrel. Great ideas hold up well over time. However, like fine wine, some also need time to breathe.
A journal is an ideal place to let some ideas age in buried pages. And to let fresh ideas breathe.
Once it’s written, you can always revisit it weeks or months later. Maybe even years later you’ll see if an idea or way of thinking still captivates you.
3. Create personal inspiration
The rate of retention increases in our brains when we write things down by hand versus typing or just listening to audio.
The handwritten word has a better chance of latching on to your memory giving it more opportunity to evolve it, and potentially bring it to fruition.
For many, a journal carries the unspoken hope that it will help you to create and embrace the best possible version of yourself.
On every blank page you have unlimited potential to expand your world view, imagine the unimaginable, reframe your narrative, and create something new.
Final thoughts on the benefits of journaling
From organizing your thoughts, to improving your writing, and setting and achieving goals, journaling can help improve your life in many ways.
Whether you choose to write about the past, present, or hopes for the future, there are so many unknown benefits of journaling that you will discover once you get going.
We have been telling stories to each other for a very long time.
Researchers have claimed traditional folklore and stories passed down through generations by Australian Aborigines may be among the oldest accurate oral history in the world, passing through some 300 generations.
Who knows where your words, thoughts and stories could land someday? Perhaps they could be of value in ways you cannot possibly fathom.
Get a journal. Write it all down. There is no downside.
