The Incredible Benefits of Daily Journaling
There are some incredible benefits to chronicling your daily narrative, keeping track of your thoughts, and recording your dreams and aspirations. This wide range of advantages ranges from the mental and emotional to the professional and career driving.
Today journals are sometimes associated with teenagers, but hundreds of years ago everyone kept journals, from presidents and soldiers to farmers and merchants. Just what perks did this provide their daily lives and how can journaling assist you? Let’s take a deeper look at just a few of the myriad of benefits daily journaling can provide.
The Benefits of Journaling
The act of keeping a journal benefits us across the board and serves to greatly improve the way we think, live, and work. Of the incredible amount of information, events, and feelings we consume and interact with in a day how can we be expected to remember and learn from them without some form of journaling?
Though the short list of benefits below is separated into 'Personal' and 'Professional' oftentimes the advantages of journaling overlap and can assist in various facets of life. When you live a life in alignment, the personal and professional coexist in daily life.
Personal
Enhances Your Emotional Intelligence- Journaling allows for daily recognition and management of emotions. Through this process, we begin to better understand why we feel certain ways and why these feelings illicit certain actions from us. In understanding our own emotions we begin to better understand those of others which can lead to longer lasting and more fulfilling relationships.
Provides for Mindfulness- Mindfulness is simply the act of being present and mindful in each and every moment of life. Mindfulness allows us to enjoy and learn from each unique experience in our day and in our lives. While we journal we are actively engaging our thoughts and emotions, bringing them to the forefront of our minds. In this way, we are neither regretting past occurrences nor worrying about the future but analyzing and planning for a better way of thinking.
Boosts Self Discipline- Making time to chronicle events, thoughts, and ideas that happen throughout your day takes a measure of discipline. Being truthful with yourself and reporting events and feelings as they truly are is an imperative part of this learned discipline that allows you to see yourself and life's circumstances in a more analytical light. However, even taking the time to write in your journal is an act of discipline and this little time set aside daily can greatly assist you in attaining more self-control.
Professional
Assists in Obtaining Goals- Journaling on the topic of your goals and aspirations is a lot like designing blueprints for a house. How could you ever begin to build without the schematics? Not only do we provide ourselves with a clear-cut list of what we want to accomplish but the act of writing things down signals to the brain that this detail is important, making it much more likely to retain the information.
Cuts Clutter- As mentioned above, journaling provides us with the opportunity to more thoroughly examine our thoughts and feelings and record our goals and aspirations. During this study of ourselves, we begin to better formulate an idea of what is important to us in every compartment of life which can then allow us to cut down on insignificant tasks and emotions.
Helps Think Critically and Creatively- For many the struggle with thinking critically and creatively isn't that we can't but how we access and engage those thoughts. 'Stream of consciousness' journaling is an excellent way to allow this kind of thinking to flow and take root within us. This type of journaling can help us overcome writer's block, bring out ideas and thoughts, and strengthen the part of our brain that promotes creative and critical thinking.
Thoughts on Beginning Your Journal
Beginning and getting in the habit of keeping a daily journal can be a difficult one but it is important to remember that journaling is a personal process meant to allow for reflection and edification of our daily experiences. Using pen and paper seems to be the key to activating the benefits of keeping a journal within the brain.
Going slowly at first and writing as many pages as a day as you feel comfortable with will help to grow your journaling habit without burning you out. Remember, it doesn't have to sound good just so long as it is useful to you.