HOW JOURNALLING HELPS WTH MENTAL HEALTH ? EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT

Whether you're dealing with a difficult decision, organizing a complicated project or feeling confused, stressed or anxious about something — or about nothing — try keeping a journal. Not only does journaling offer a number of intellectual, organizational and psychological benefits, but some studies have shown that it can also improve your physical health. And none of these advantages require that you be a good writer.

Artists, writers, psychotherapists and even little girls who are gifted locked pink diaries have long been aware of the importance of journal-writing. But did you know that scientists like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein also kept journals? So did business magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, General George Patton and Winston Churchill.

Well, journaling is no longer old-fashioned, or just for folks of a certain older-and-wiser age. It’s something you need to do — now. Yep, it’s true. Journaling does more than just help you record your memories or find self-expression. It’s good for your health.

What are some of the short- and long-term health benefits of putting pen to paper?

Here are five good-for-you virtues of journaling:

• Reduces Stress. An overabundance of stress can be damaging to your physical, mental, and emotional health. It’s proven. Journaling is a incredible stress management tool, a good-for-you habit that lessens impact of physical stressors on your health. In fact, a study showed that expressive writing (like journaling) for only 15 to 20 minutes a day three to five times over the course of a four-month period was enough to lower blood pressure and improve liver functionality. Plus, writing about stressful experiences can help you manage them in a healthy way. Try establishing journaling as a pre-bedtime meditation habit to help you unwind and de-stress.

• Improves Immune Function. Believe it or not, expressive writing can strengthen your immunity and decrease your risk of illness. Those who journal boast improved immune system functioning (it strengthens immune cells!) as well as lessened symptoms of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. Expressive writing has been shown to improve liver and lung function and combat certain diseases; it has even been reported to help the wounded heal faster.

• Keeps Memory Sharp. Journaling helps keep your brain in tip-top shape. Not only does it boost memory and comprehension, it also increases working memory capacity, which may reflect improved cognitive processing.

• Boosts Mood. Want more sunshine in your life? Try journaling. A unique social and behavior outcome of journaling is this: it can improve your mood and give you a greater sense of overall emotional well-being and happiness.

• Strengthens Emotional Functions. Related to mood is how journaling benefits overall emotional health: As journaling habits are developed, benefits become long-term, meaning that diarists become more in tune with their health by connecting with inner needs and desires. Journaling evokes mindfulness and helps writers remain present while keeping perspective. It presents an opportunity for emotional catharsis and helps the brain regulate emotions. It provides a greater sense of confidence and self-identity. Journaling can help in the management of personal adversity and change, and emphasize important patterns and growth in life.  Research even shows that expressive writing can help individuals develop more structured, adaptive, and integrated schemes about themselves, others, and the world. What’s more, journaling unlocks and engages right-brained creativity, which gives you access to your full brainpower. Truly, journaling fosters growth.

How It Helps

Makes you more aware. Journaling helps you get to know yourself better.

Expressing yourself in a journal can bring your thoughts and feelings to the surface. Many people are surprised by what they write, says Denver psychotherapist Cynthia McKay. You may discover you're worried about something you didn't know was upsetting you until you wrote it down.

You can keep your journal private or share it with your therapist. They can help you see what's important and use it to help you move forward.

Lets you take control. When your thoughts and worries swirl around, putting pen to paper can cut down the chaos. "When we write things down, they feel more manageable," says clinical psychologist Perpetua Neo, PhD.

Suchon agrees. She says writing helps her get things into perspective and puts a damper on feelings of worthlessness. "It brings me back to reality."

Journaling helps you take an active role in your treatment. It empowers you to do something to help yourself feel better. It also helps you recognize when you feel worse and need extra help.

Shifts your viewpoint. Keeping a journal gives you a chance to use positive self-talk.

"I like to use gratitude journals and affirmation journals with my clients," says Charlynn Ruan, PhD, a licensed clinical therapist. Ruan says writing about happy memories is especially powerful because depression tends to bring up negative feelings. "It's like retraining your brain."

Why is it so beneficial for anxiety?

According to psychologist Barbara Markway,

There’s simply no better way to learn about your thought processes than to write them down.

Writing in a journal can positively impact your anxiety through:

• Calming and clearing your mind;
• Releasing pent-up feelings and everyday stress;
• Letting go of negative thoughts;
• Exploring your experiences with anxiety;
• Writing about your struggles and your successes;
• Enhancing your self-awareness and teaching you about your triggers;
• Tracking your progress as you undergo treatment.

Through mechanisms like those listed above, journaling has been shown to:

• Reduce anxiety in patients with multiple sclerosis .
• Reduce physical symptoms, health problems, and anxiety in women.
• Help students manage their stress and anxiety and improve their engagement and enhance meaning found in the classroom

Benefits of Journaling for Stress Management


Besides the outcomes listed above, journaling can also help you manage your stress by:

• Decreasing symptoms of various health conditions;
• Improving your cognitive functioning;
• Strengthening your immune system;
• Examining your thoughts and shifting your perspective;
• Reducing rumination and promoting action;
• and planning your options and considering multiple outcomes of a situation .


The Importance of Journaling in Recovery

Whatever event, habit, or disorder you are struggling to overcome, journaling can help you find healing.

If you are suffering in the aftermath of a traumatic event, journaling can help you find the good in life. It can even help you see the positive side of experiencing the trauma, which helps reduce the severe symptoms that can accompany trauma (Ullrich & Lutgendorf, 2002).

Writing our thoughts, feelings, and actions down in a journal allows us to craft and maintain our sense of self and solidifies our identity. It helps us reflect on our experiences and discover our authentic self.

Keeping a journal can give you a chance to create and consider the narrative of your life, with all of the choices you have made and the memories that make you who you are today. In a word, the benefits of journaling on recovery is “cathartic” (New Roads Treatment, 2017).

If you want to really up the impact of journaling on your recovery, consider writing with gratitude.

What Are the Benefits of Writing with Gratitude?

Cultivating gratitude has already been shown to be an extremely effective tool for reaching all kinds of goals and improving the quality of life. However, you don’t necessarily need to write to cultivate gratitude—there are lots of ways to be more grateful.

Luckily, applying gratitude specifically through writing can contribute to most of the general benefits of increasing gratitude, and the outcomes reported from gratitude journaling include:

• Boosting your long-term well-being, encouraging exercise, reducing physical pain and symptoms, and increasing both length and quality of sleep.
• Increasing your optimism and, indirectly, your happiness and health.
• Reducing your symptoms of depression, for as long as you continue gratitude journaling.
• Helping you make progress toward your goals.
• Making you friendlier, more open, and more likely to engage in prosocial behaviors, which can enhance and expand your social support network.


9 Psychological Benefits of Journaling Every Day

Journaling every day is a great habit to get into. Of course, any time you can carve out for effective journaling is time well spent, but the best practice is a regular, daily journaling session.

What is so great about journaling every day?

There are tons of benefits to keeping a regular journaling practice, including:

• It promotes and enhances your creativity in a way that once-in-a-while journaling simply can’t match;
• It propels you toward your goals, helping you bring your vision to life;
• It offers you a daily opportunity to recover from the daily stressors and leave the unimportant stuff behind;
• It can help you identify things that would otherwise go unnoticed, such as patterns in your thinking, the influences behind your feelings and behavior, and any incongruencies in your life.
• It gives you a chance to get all of your emotions out on paper, reducing your stress and releasing tension;
• It facilitates learning by creating a record of the lessons and key ideas you have discovered and helps you remember them more effectively;
• It boosts your overall sense of gratitude and your sensitivity to all that you have to be grateful for;
• It makes you a better writer and helps you discover your “voice;”
• It leaves a written record of your experiences, which can be helpful today and extremely precious years into the future 

In addition, children can gain some of the same benefits that adults get from journaling, like:

• Helping them deal with “big feelings” in a healthy and safe way;
• Improving their writing skills, including spelling, sentence structure, vocabulary, and grammar;
• Enhancing their reading skills;
• Enhancing their communication skills (both written and verbal);
• Taking advantage of an outlet for things that are difficult to express or uncomfortable to share;
• Exploring and identifying their emotions;
• Allowing themselves to feel “taboo” emotions like anger;
• Examining the pros and cons of something to help them make a decision;
• Reflecting on their thoughts about something after the fact;
• Gaining insight into their own motives and the motives of others;
• Seeing the positives as well as the negatives;
• Planning out tough conversations in advance


If you’ve decided to start (or re-start) keeping a journal but you’re not sure how to go about it, there are some excellent tips, suggestions, ideas, prompts, and advice in this section that you might find helpful.


• Start writing about where you are in your life at this moment;
• For five to ten minutes, just start writing in a “stream of consciousness;”
• Start a dialogue with your inner child by writing in your subdominant hand;
• Cultivate an attitude of gratitude by maintaining a daily list of things you appreciate, including uplifting quotes;
• Start a journal of self-portraits;
• Keep a nature diary to connect with the natural world;
• Maintain a log of successes;
• Keep a log or playlist of your favorite songs;
• If there’s something you are struggling with or an event that disturbing you, write about it in the third person.
• Develop your intuition


Privacy is, of course, an important part of journaling and, unfortunately, no matter what format you choose, there is always a possibility that someone else might see what you’ve written. If you’d really like to keep your private thoughts to yourself, be very sure that you find a way to keep your journal somewhere that no one else is going to find it. Otherwise, you’re liable to find that journaling increases your stress rather than reducing it.

And that is definitely not the point. If journaling stresses you out, for whatever reason, give yourself permission to take a break — and think about why. Maybe if you have trouble parsing the reasons you'll find yourself... wanting to write them down. Just for you.