Finding a safe place to vent any overwhelming emotion has become more necessary in recent times. Stress has become our daily guide, and anxiety has now plagued most of our senses with the overwhelming demands inflicted on our lives. Which is why, to regain and keep a good feeling of wellbeing and mental stability, keeping a journal is one effective, and creative way of pouring out all those pent-up emotions. And a personal chalkboard for solving your problems in safety and in peace.
There is a certain level of dedication to keeping a journal, and that is to write in it every single day. Yes, it does seem like a lot of work and responsibility, but that’s the thing: don’t see journal keeping as another responsibility, but as a way to let go and express anything you wish to say, or yell out, or curse at in the security that your journal provides, all within a productive form that does not include hours burning through your Facebook feed simply to distract yourself.
Your journal motivates you to be creative because you have absolute freedom to write, draw, glue anything on its pages, and slowly, whatever goals you might have in mind are being written down, with ideas as to how to reach them until they become real. It refocuses what you actually want in your daily work, clearing paths between your responsibilities and your ambitions in a way that is healthy for your mind to work on without feeling overwhelmed. And if you want to glue a ticket stump or place a photograph, your journal keeps it for the future you want it to transform into.
Which is why keeping a journal benefits your wellbeing and mental health. And if all the above is not enough, here are some more reasons as to why you should start keeping your own fun journal:
- Keeping a journal helps reduce stress in your daily life. It points out those situations that have your sense of calm flying away by writing down what caused them and looking for solutions to certain problems that take away our focus from our responsibilities. By maintaining a practice with journaling in the morning or evening, you’ll be able to see incongruences in your life and have a clearer understanding of what is going on till you find a solution.
- Journaling helps us create self-awareness and mindfulness over our surroundings and the people that we know. You become more aware of your capabilities as you write down your train of thought and the memories of that day. You realize your errors as well as your good habits, and you become aware of what has gone wrong and what can go right with your next big decisions.
- Being aware of your faults and merits will make you more grateful for what you have and what you can do. Having a sense of gratitude helps you feel happier, makes you have stronger and better emotions, increases your optimism, can develop your personality, and improve your self-esteem, among other things. Keeping a journal makes you self-aware of what you should be grateful for and why you should improve that thankfulness.
- When you have an entirely free creative space within a blank page, your creativity is enhanced. There really is no right way to keep a journal, it is only a space to express yourself, your emotions and your problems in the best way you deem possible, whether it be only writing down a particular event to drawing with a whole rainbow of colors. It is a precious and very personal space in which you can collect memories, interesting things, emotional marks, anything that will fill the page with what you want to the best of your ability. Whatever mess you make on the page only needs to make sense to you.
- Regular journaling improves your self-discipline and willpower by maintaining a constant, daily practice. If you tend to have problems with keeping a habit that you need, journaling helps you develop that practice in a creative and fun way that eventually becomes a healthy need for your personal and emotional understanding.
Keeping a journal becomes like a therapeutic practice. The difference is that you do it by yourself as a self-help to not only be organized with your responsibilities, but also strengthen your emotions and deal with any stress in a way that is liberating to your creativity. Don’t be afraid to start your journal, simply buy a good and eye-catching notebook and write down whatever you did that day, every day till you develop a sense of trust in it that will help you focus on what you can get out of life and its daily events.