One of the best habits for your mental health. Take away from your mind the responsibility of carrying all your thoughts and worries...
Journaling changed my life, and it will change yours if you decide to make it part of your life, I promise.
You don't have to do it daily, once a week it's enough to experience some of its main benefits:
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Stress reduction: Writing down your thoughts and feelings can help reduce stress and anxiety by allowing you to process and work through difficult emotions.
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Improved mental clarity: Journaling can help you clarify your thoughts and gain perspective on your problems and challenges.
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Increased self-awareness: Writing down your thoughts and feelings can help you become more aware of your own patterns of behavior and thought, allowing you to identify areas for personal growth and improvement.
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Enhanced creativity: Journaling can help unlock your creativity and allow you to explore new ideas and perspectives.
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Improved memory: Writing things down can help you remember important events, ideas, and information more effectively.
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Increased mindfulness: Journaling can help you cultivate mindfulness by encouraging you to be more present in the moment and fully engage with your thoughts and feelings.
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Better problem-solving skills: By writing about your problems and challenges, you can gain new insights and develop more effective strategies for solving them.
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Improved communication skills: Journaling can help you develop your writing skills and become a more effective communicator overall.
What I journal about
One time, 6 o 7 years ago, I was experiencing a tremendous amount of anxiety and even some panic attacks. I had so many emotions, feelings and thoughts stuck in my head I couldn't think or speak clearly. I woke up one day and I felt the urge to write down everything that was disturbing my mind somehow. That day changed my life. I realized I was so calm after writing all that down that I began to do it more often.
For me, journaling has become a very powerful tool to improve my emotional and rational intelligence. I write mostly about my feelings and emotions. It has helped me detect and improve emotional patterns that used to affect me deeply.
These are some of my latest journaling topics:
- The happiness of my loved ones is not my responsibility: I'm always trying to help everyone around me because their suffering makes me suffer. Empathy is ok but when you have an excess of it it's not healthy at all.
- Flor is leaving: Florencia is my youngest sister and my business partner. She's moving to Spain (we live in Argentina). I felt very sad and responsible about it because I thought it was my fault that our business was not good enough to make her stay.
- Lack of Balance: I wrote about it because this last month I was feeling very tired and unhappy. The economic crisis in my country made it very hard to keep our business afloat and without noticing it I progressively started to work almost twice than what I used to and I stopped doing the things that make me happy.
If you don't know how or where to start it's ok, don't worry. Just write down anything that comes to your mind and you'll see you will gain mental clarity as days pass by, and with time, you will become better and better at it.
Conclusion
Journaling has great benefits such as: stress reduction, improved mental clarity, increased self-awareness, enhanced creativity, improved memory, increased mindfulness and better problem-solving skills.
To start journaling just write down anything that comes to your mind and with time you will get better at it.