The Power of Journaling: How Writing Your Thoughts Can Promote Wellness
Most of us have experienced the positive feeling that can come from unburdening ourselves to another person. Sometimes, it’s enough just to be able to vent, expressing rage, frustration or other strong emotions. But what happens when another person isn’t available or when you fear dumping too much on any one individual? Or maybe you’ve got some feelings you need to express but that you aren’t comfortable sharing with another person. This is one of many ways that journaling can come in handy. You can use journaling to express gratitude, to reflect on experiences you’ve had and to explore your emotions, among other things.
Gratitude
It can be easy to lose track of the things in your life that you’re truly grateful for and only notice what’s difficult, infuriating or sad. Writing down the things that make you happy can turn that around. There’s the twist in that you don’t have to do this every single day. Practices that emphasize cultivating gratitude for everyday things can turn into rote chores if you actually have to do them every single day. Try a few times a week or even once a week. Write as well about how your mood shifts based on how often you do this.
Put Self-Care Plans in Motion
The tools available to boost wellness are many and varied, and you can use journaling to enhance the use of many of those tools. Perhaps you’ve decided that for you, an important element of the self-care part of wellness is visiting a med spa. This can be a relaxing experience that also leaves you looking your best, with procedures that may include body sculpting, wrinkle reduction and more. If this is important to you, don’t discount it on the grounds that you can’t afford it. Many retail and service businesses increasingly recognize the importance of offering customer financing to increase revenue and customer satisfaction. You may be able to obtain financing and avoid paying the full amount up front for your procedure as part of an installment plan.
Reflect on the Experience
Your journaling can reflect on several elements. What are your goals for the procedure you’ve chosen? How did you feel before and after? Consider the money as well. Many people find it tough to spend money on themselves. How can you view this as an investment in yourself? What can you learn from this that will permit you to continue these small indulgences without guilt? Of course, what you choose doesn’t have to be a visit to a med spa. It can be a regular spa, some kind of retreat, a yoga class or just a night at a fancy hotel. What’s important is that you use your journal to explore, expand and reflect on the experience and how it fits into the rest of your life.
Understanding Your Emotions
People have different degrees of relationships with emotions. Some can barely name or describe what they’re feeling. Others seem entirely at the mercy of those feelings. Journaling can help you be more precise about how you’re feeling and why. It can also help you diffuse the power of the strongest feelings, which can be overwhelming and lead to poor judgment and decisions that you regret. For students, that overwhelm is often tied to academic pressure, and recognizing when to seek support, whether through reflection or resources like do my stats homework, can be an important step toward protecting mental well-being. As you write, you may uncover some surprises as well. Sometimes, anger, envy, sorrow and many other emotions are a stand-in for other things you’re really feeling that seem too painful to confront, even as you don’t realize that this is happening. Journaling can help you dig down into what’s really going on.
Now is the Time
If you’ve never written in a diary before or haven’t done so since you were a kid, the process may feel awkward at first, almost like stage fright. If this is the case, there are a few tricks that you can use to get started. It may be great sometimes to look back on what you’ve written and reflect on how far you’ve come, but freezing a moment in time isn’t really the primary purpose of journaling for wellness. It’s more about right now than writing for posterity. Therefore, give yourself permission to throw away, burn or destroy in whatever way that suits you everything that you’re writing. This can free you up, often to write things you haven’t dared yourself to think until now.
It may be uncomfortable to realize how much you hate your job or want to end a relationship, but it’s the first step toward resolving things. Another handy trick is freewriting, which is basically writing for a set amount of time without stopping. You can start with just five or ten minutes. Like destroying your work, this can free you up in ways that carefully considered writing can’t. The main thing is to keep your hand moving. If you’re writing “I can’t think of anything to write” repeatedly, stick with it as something will eventually come. Finally, experiment with the medium. If handwriting doesn’t work for you, try typing on a computer or on your phone, or using structured writing support tools available at PaperWriter.
Amélie is a health and wellness junky. Certified yoga instructor with Yoga Alliance in the Vinyasa and Ashtanga styles, she has a Yoga Instructor Certification – Level I (300 hours) and Yoga Instructor Certification – Level II (200 hours) under her belt. She also has a certified Open Water Diver certification with PADI and SSI Scuba Schools International Freediving Level I certification with SSI Scuba Schools International. She’s been vegan for over 15 years and is obsessed with anything wellness-related.