“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” – Anne Frank
Journaling can help you meet the mental and emotional challenges of each day. This powerful mindfulness practice deserves a spot in your daily health routine just as much as exercise, reading, prayer, or meditation. Doing this mental maintenance can help you to give emotions their proper place without letting it get out of control.
Below are some powerful ways that journaling can help you have a healthy mind and healthy emotions.
Journaling before bed can help you sleep better. Having a lot on your mind at bedtime can prevent you from falling asleep. Journaling helps to unload the chaos from your brain, making it easier to transition to sleep.
Quality sleep has an incredible impact on the rest of your life. “Helping people get better sleep could be an important first step in tackling many psychological and emotional problems,” says Oxford Clinical Psychology Professor Danial Freeman. In addition, poor sleep can affect your immune system, ability to focus, weight gain, work performance, and a host of other cascading effects.
Researchers have found that it is particularly useful to spend at least 5 minutes journaling about what you need to accomplish the next day. The results of the study were comparable to the benefits of taking a sleeping aid.
Journaling about anxieties and other worries have also been shown to be a helpful practice for getting a good night’s rest. If your mind is spinning and you can’t sleep, try pulling out your journal. It’s cheaper than sleeping pills.
Journaling can help you manage and reduce stress. Many studies have shown that writing about your stress can reduce its effects and bring clarity to your thinking.
Stress can be overwhelming. Writing can help you organize and prioritize the mess in your mind, bringing perspective, clarity, and focus.
Stress can make you less aware of contextual information needed for good decision making. Journaling provides a focus that allows you to pierce through the mental fog that stress creates, helping you take control of your thoughts so you can get unstuck.
Journaling can help you when you’re angry. There’s no better example for needing a safe place to let your feelings out than when you’re angry. Anger is almost always destructive, leaving a trail of new problems to solve in its wake.
A historical example of how journaling can help with anger comes from Abraham Lincoln. With his reputation of calm, kindly leadership, President Lincoln doesn’t seem like someone who needed help with anger management. Surprisingly, historians write that he made a habit of writing explosive, angry letters to those he got frustrated with during his presidency. However, he kept these letters in a drawer rather than sending them.
This practice allowed him to vent his frustrations while maintaining productive dignity with those he had to work with. Because he had this release valve for his emotions, he was able to treat enemies with a kindness that often won them over and became a hallmark of his presidency.
Journaling can help you with both anxiety and depression. Studies have shown that with both conditions, writing aided individuals in detaching from their emotions. Journaling helped them build curiosity about what they were going through rather than helplessness.
Mental illness is often hard to understand for the person living with it. Writing can be particularly helpful due to the heightened self-awareness and self-discovery that it promotes. Journaling regularly can help you discover triggers you were unaware of, as well as identify factors that contribute to a good day.
One of the most gutting effects of anxiety and depression is how they cripple the mind’s ability to see the messages these illnesses peddle for the lies they are. Most who have not been diagnosed with a mental illness will still find these messages to be familiar:
- You’re not good enough
- You’re going to fail
- Things will never get better
- The worst possible will happen
- You’re not worthy of love
Mental illness can cause you to ruminate on these messages until you are wired to think them automatically. When they roam free in your mind, these lies are harder to confront.
Getting these false stories out in front of you gives you a clear opportunity to expose them, break that cycle of rumination, and replace them with a new narrative. Journaling also provides a way to practice positive self-talk and create uplifting stories that are at least, if not more likely to be valid than the negative ones.
Journaling can help you heal and move past trauma. Studies show that journaling with a focus on the thoughts and emotions surrounding traumatic events, as well as searching for meaning and growth in the trauma can lead to feeling better not only emotionally, but physically as well.
Healing from trauma seems to follow the pattern of needing to get worse before it gets better. Study participants who wrote regularly about a traumatic experience from their past generally felt worse immediately after writing. However, as time went on, participants experienced fewer depressive episodes, better moods, fewer doctor visits, and other positive results.
Journaling is ideal for working through trauma for a variety of reasons:
- It provides an emotional release for feelings, thoughts, and experiences that you may never have been able to express before.
- Seeing your story in front of you rather than in your mind helps you expose lies and partial truths that grew in power because they were left ambiguous.
- Journaling about trauma can help you gain perspective on what you’ve been through, helping you to identify what can learn from it and how you have grown.
- It’s an opportunity for you to delve deeply into compassion for an area of your life that may not have received any.
GoldMind Will Help You Unlock the Power of Journaling
GoldMind was designed to help you use journaling to improve your mental health. By starting with powerful questions rather than just a blank page, you can explore ideas that help you grow. You can shrug off beliefs that are holding you back. Scheduling to write about different areas of your life throughout your week will ensure that you shift your focus to the various areas where you need more clarity.
You can unlock the power of journaling for your mind at https://www.goldmind.app.
