Unlocking the power of your pen: The psychological benefits of journaling
(maind Monday 2/5)
Penning your way to better health
Most of us have started journaling during childhood or during our teenage years. This was probably a period when we wanted to express our thoughts and our feelings in a safe way, meaning that our diary was only for ourselves, and we could express anything we felt without getting judged or criticised by anyone else!
For most of us the diary was left in our younger years, yet according to research, journaling can help improve physical health (lower heart rate, less physician visits), reduce mental distress and improve mental health (less symptoms of anxiety and depression) [1,2,4,5,6]. But what really is journaling?
Journaling can take various forms from a bullet point list, a sketch, or a diagram, to a written text — digital or on paper. The idea is that you can choose whatever works best for you! You can write about your day, your feelings, or your struggles. You can also do it in a more structural way to keep track of your emotions and your triggers, so it can help you increase your awareness and be more conscious of what is happening in your life, and on how you tend to cope with your daily challenges. In any of these forms journaling can help you become more aware of yourself, express difficult emotions without experiencing any judgement and in this way reduce your stress and anxiety levels [2,4,5,6].
Journaling: The science behind boosting your well-being!
Research has shown that journaling can be very effective regarding emotional expression and cognitive restructuring. Journaling about the connections between emotions and thoughts helps in the acknowledgement of their relationship and how it influences the writer. According to research, guided journaling that includes emotional expression, cognition experimentation, and awareness of stressors, can facilitate physical health [1,3,7,5].
Furthermore, it has been proven that when you put your feelings and thoughts into words, especially if you have a hard time with challenges, stresses or traumatic events, journaling can help you to have a more concise idea of what is happening in your mind. That way you can view your thoughts in a more constructed way, which helps you to gain perspective, to distance yourself from your thoughts, and to engage with them in a more constructive way.
How can journaling help you?
In our daily lives we come across many challenging situations. Sometimes we feel so stressed and overwhelmed that it is difficult to silence our mind, to calm down and have a moment to rest. Thoughts like “I did something wrong that I could have avoided”, “I am not good enough”, “I cannot handle this situation”, or “I wish I had more courage” make us feel down, less confident, and so the downward spiral continues.
Journaling can be incredibly beneficial in these situations. First of all, whenever we put something “on paper”, it stops preoccupying our mind. Thus, if we devote time to writing something down, we will feel a relief as we don’t need to keep the thought in our mind anymore. This will help clear the mind and will make us feel lighter.
Emotional freedom through journaling
Talking about our feelings is always helpful. Our feelings are valuable! They exist to tell us something, to protect us, or even to warn us. What we call the “difficult emotions” like anger, sadness, or fear, pop up in order to make us feel alert of a challenging situation that requires our attention or action. It is very important to allow space for our feelings to exist.
Journaling helps us to be more aware of our feelings and our thoughts by taking the time to really think and reflect on them through writing. This further allows us to take some distance from the events that happened, of the thoughts that we have created about these events, and of the feelings that have emerged. That way we have already created the space to let our feelings be, which has the power to make us feel lighter and relieved.
When we allow our feelings to simply be without controlling them, judging them, or trying to make them go away, we send a signal to ourselves that we care about ourselves and we accept what is happening. Acceptance is a state of mind that can be hard to achieve, but once entered can greatly help us practise self-love and self-compassion, as well as feel calmer and more relaxed. Journaling is a great tool to use on the journey to acceptance: It helps us come into contact with ourselves, to be more aware of why we feel the way we feel, and to give us the time and the space to be more compassionate with ourselves. Once we have confronted our feelings and their causes, shown ourselves that we have listened, the negative emotions will often fade away.
Gratitude journaling
Journaling is likewise beneficial for processing our positive emotions, this is considered a part of “gratitude journaling” [5]. Even though most of the time we (understandably) don’t feel the urge to write when we have fun and are enjoying life, journaling about the good things that happen and our “good emotions” is as beneficial as writing and keeping track of our challenges.
Journaling about what makes us feel good today and what we are grateful for helps us to experience these feelings to a broader extent. How does it work? Gratitude journaling helps us shift our focus on the positive things that happen in our lives and has been found to increase happiness and life satisfaction. Practising gratitude helps us to find more things in our daily life to be grateful for and this increases our positive feelings and makes us feel more optimistic and happy.
Another benefit of keeping track of our positive emotions and events is that when we experience difficulties — and we always will — we can look back on the good things that happened and feel more confident that these good things will happen again. Additionally, we can feel reassured that the challenges are just a part of our life and not our whole reality.
Still, trying to be in contact with our joyful moments helps us feel better and process the difficulties in a more comfortable way!
Unleashing your inner writer: Tips and techniques for effective journaling
Sometimes you may feel you have many things in your mind and you don’t know where to start. This is very common, but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t give it a go!
The easiest way to start is to sit down with some pen and paper and write the first thing that pops into your head. Trust the process! You don’t need to know in advance what you want to write about. Just write down whatever comes to mind, whatever you want to express, or makes you feel angry or afraid, happy, excited, sad etc. Expressive writing has proven to be very beneficial [2]! Expressive writing is when you start writing about your thoughts and your emotions regarding a stressful or traumatic event without needing to further think about it. For 5–10 minutes, write whatever crosses your mind without judging it, or without checking for any spelling or syntax errors. This helps you to express the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that you have, and then if you want you can read them and reflect on them. Or you can just leave them, destroy them, or save them without ever dealing with your text again. The goal of expressing yourself has already been achieved!
Journaling helps us be more aware and more conscious of who we are and what is happening to us. Thus, when journaling, we can go a step ahead and try to understand where a thought comes from, and how it’s related to our past experience and past self. Also, it helps us to realise if and how it can be beneficial for our future steps and how it is related with the patterns we use to deal with in our life in the present moment. This reflection can have a great benefit for us, as we are more aware of the way we are thinking and the thinking patterns that we tend to use. As a further step we can become more capable in choosing patterns that serve us best and replace maladaptive ones with more valuable and effective thoughts and strategies.
My journaling journey
Journaling has been a favourite activity for me since my childhood: Mostly because I had the urge to write when I was not feeling good, and I had nobody to talk to about what I was feeling or nobody to trust to share my feelings.
As I grew up I realised how much journaling had helped me! I love journaling! The more I journal the more I realise how helpful it is for me. Personally, I prefer to use pen and paper. I don’t journal every day, but when I feel that I cannot get rid of some thoughts or feelings, I dig up my journal because I know how much it will help me — it will bring me relief and will allow me to continue with my life in a more comfortable and more conscious way. And yes, it really works! Most of the time I don’t know how I am going to manage to write about what I have in my mind: So many thoughts, so many emotions, I feel overwhelmed, I feel I don’t know where and how to start and I don’t know if I will manage to find the right words to express what I have in my mind. But all these thoughts subside when I get the pen and paper — after that always find a way to do it! It is magical! And I feel so fantastic when I am done.
After many years of journaling and reflecting, I can see my process more clearly. When I start writing what I have in my mind it is totally different from what I thought I had in my mind. What did not make sense when it was in my mind now comes into words in a new way. I can see why I am feeling or thinking the way I do, I can perceive causes and effects, I can go back and make the necessary connections which help me make sense of what is happening in my mind. And then I can take the distance I need from the thoughts, see them from another perspective and try to make them more constructive to my situation.
Lastly I would like to mention how much gratitude journaling has helped me to change my perspective of the world. When I started paying attention to the good things in my life, I also started feeling better, happier, luckier. The moment I started being grateful for the air that I breathe, the water I drink, the roof that I have upon my head changed the way that I see and experience every moment in my life!
What is truly magical in journalling is the more you write down the difficult, challenging, and frustrating things you experience, the lighter you will feel. There is no need to carry everything on your shoulders — you have already set them somewhere else: on paper! And yet, the more you share the good, positive, and favourable things in your journal the more they become amplified!
I am grateful that I had this opportunity to share with you my experience with journaling. I hope that everyone who reads this will write something down today.
We all want to live a healthier, happier life that consists of learning to navigate our emotions and manage our thoughts — but it is often difficult to get started, to make a habit out of journaling or know what to write about, and to really gain that outside perspective when we’re navigating through that jungle of emotions. Therefore, we have created maind, a place to write your journal, prompting and guiding you to write on the regular, and even getting you that much needed advice from our licensed psychologists: It is a journal that writes you back.
You can already give it a go and see how it works for yourself. maind is available for download on Android and iPhone!
Meanwhile, we also take this opportunity to introduce our team: the great “mainds” behind the app! You’ve all already met Ines, our expert generalist behind maind through her maind Mondays kickoff ““Dear diary…” and the journal that writes you back (maind Monday 1/5)”. This week‘s author is our Senior In-House Psychologists Giouli Chrysikou:
Meet the great m[ai]nds!
Giouli is a Child and Adolescent Psychologist MSc, a Family Therapist, and a Group Therapist. She has been trained in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Solution Focused Therapy (SFT), Systemic Dialectic Approach, and Counselling.
It is her passion to help people live a better life and she does this by supporting individuals who have experienced difficult life situations and by working in a preventive way by supporting parents, children, and families.
She is currently also working as the Senior In-House Psychologist for the maind app, where she supports maind users, oversees the app’s content, and consults the team in the development of new features.
References
1. Donnelly, D. A., & Murray, E. J. (1991). Cognitive and emotional changes in written essays and therapy interviews. Journal of Social and Clinical psychology, 10(3), 334–350.
2. Lepore, S. J. (1997). Expressive writing moderates the relation between intrusive thoughts and depressive symptoms. Journal of personality and social psychology, 73(5), 1030.
3. Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological science, 8(3), 162–166.
4. Purcell, M. (2006). The health benefits of journaling. Psych Central.
5. Smyth, J. M., Johnson, J. A., Auer, B. J., Lehman, E., Talamo, G., & Sciamanna, C. N. (2018). Online positive affect journaling in the improvement of mental distress and well-being in general medical patients with elevated anxiety symptoms: A preliminary randomized controlled trial. JMIR mental health, 5(4), e11290
6. Sohal, M., Singh, P., Dhillon, B. S., & Gill, H. S. (2022). Efficacy of journaling in the management of mental illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Family medicine and community health, 10(1).
7. Ullrich, P. M., & Lutgendorf, S. K. (2002). Journaling about stressful events: Effects of cognitive processing and emotional expression. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 24(3), 244–250.
https://positivepsychology.com/benefits-of-journaling/
https://psychcentral.com/lib/the-health-benefits-of-journaling
https://www.today.com/shop/how-journal-mental-health-benefits-t255576
https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=journaling-for-mental-health-1-4552
