You may hear the word journal and immediately associate it with being a teenager scribbling out your thoughts, but journaling can actually have many benefits when incorporated into your life as an adult. From helping you process emotions to capture memories, you should consider keeping a daily journal.
It’s Free Therapy!
Writing down your thoughts and feelings can be hugely therapeutic. This is especially helpful when you don’t feel like sharing them with anyone else but feel the need to process and address them. Journaling is an accessible, inexpensive, and self-managed form of therapy. It can be done anywhere, and can also be a great form of escapism when you’re feeling overwhelmed.
It Enhances Creativity
When you write in your journal, you’re not only expressing emotions, but you may be writing down thoughts, ideas, and plans. Being in a dialogue with your inner life allows you to problem solve and get creative. There’s nothing quite like a pen and paper when it comes to jotting down your creative ideas and unleashing your imagination.
It Can Help You Grow
Writing in your journal and reading back through allows you to reflect on particular periods in your life, and also will enable you to recognize specific patterns of behavior. You will be able to look back to times of struggle, times of happiness and everything in between to see how you dealt with that particular time in your life, and think about how you might deal with something similar difference in the future.
It’s a Healthy Way to Manage Difficult Emotions
Sometimes when we’re faced with intense situations or emotions, we feel the need to respond with anger or frustration. This can cause problems in the heat of the moment and cause us to say things we might not really mean. Instead of saying what you’re thinking to a person, write it down. Let it all out no matter how toxic your thoughts may be, then revisit it when you’ve calmed down. You will be glad you wrote your thoughts down rather than said them aloud and potentially caused conflict.
