The Benefit of Journaling
Journaling can be a healthy way to express ourselves when we are overwhelmed with emotions or stress. I can speak from experience. Regardless of how silly journaling feels at first it is a powerful took that helped me during a difficult time in my life. Here are 4 benefits of journaling.
Healthy Outlet to Express Emotions
While there are various methods to express emotions, journaling is definitely one of the healthier outlets. Journaling is a great way to pour out our feelings or emotions without judgement. A journal is a private and secure place to express our emotions. For results, it’s important to relinquish judgment of ourselves when journaling.
One benefit of journaling is that it’s an unstructured approach to let our mind and emotions flow freely. Many of us avoid expressing our feelings and instead bottle them up. Just like a pressure system, we can only take so much before the feelings released themselves, usually in the form of a toxic behavior. Journaling gives us a place to safely vocalize our feelings and can help prevent us from bottling up our emotions.
It took a while to get into a routine with journaling, but once I did, I noticed my behavior improved significantly since I had a healthy outlet to express my emotions.
Manage Stress and Anxiety
By writing down our feelings in a journal, we are also vocalizing our problems, fears or concerns. This is the first step to managing stress and anxiety. It’s important to recognize where our stress and anxiety are coming from. Once the issue is acknowledged, we can begin to tackle the problem by creating boundaries, seeking clarification or other methods. This in turn reduces stress and anxiety.
Track Symptoms or Mood
Journaling is a great way to track your progress or events. It’s great to reflect on and learn from our own personal journey. One of the benefits of journaling is how it allows us to track symptoms day-to-day so that we can recognize triggers and learn better ways to control them. As mentioned in a previous post, sometimes recognizing triggers in itself can be a difficult thing to do, but utilizing a journal is a great way to acknowledge triggers.
When I started journaling, I began to recognize a patterns, behaviors and events that would trigger my trauma. This was huge for me, since at the time I didn’t have control over my behavior when I was triggered. Being able to recognize the things that were triggering for me was extremely helpful in learning to control how I reacted to my triggers. This was a groundbreaking tool for me. I finally felt in control of my PTSD and my life changed for the better.
Identify Negative Thoughts
Negative thoughts are detrimental to our mental health and performance. Another great benefit of journaling is it provides an opportunity to detect negative thoughts. Reflecting on our journal entries can give us great insight into our negative inner dialogue. Once negative thoughts have been identified, implementing positive affirmations and inner dialogue is critical. Recognize, correct, repeat. This is how we can take control and reduce our negative thought patterns.
There are many benefits of journaling. It is a healthy way to reduce stress, express feelings, track our symptoms and to practice reducing negative thoughts.
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