How Journaling Impacts Mental Well-being

Somewhere in You is a Dream

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Did you just shrug and say to yourself, doesn’t everybody have a dream? Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course I’ve got dreams.

But, do you stockpile your dreams behind the shades of your mind and take them out once in a while as mementos of your visions?

Can’t say that sounds like a good way to stimulate your mind or spark your mental well-being.

Why not unlock your Journal app and transcribe those dreams into words that cannot be lost or deteriorate or fade away and — as a bonus — change your life and attain mental, physiological and emotional benefits?

If you are skeptical that pen and paper can have such profound effects on you, read on.

Changing Your Life

Journaling can change your life in the following ways:

• Discover your true feelings
  Journaling about something that is on your mind leads to a more realistic view of your true feelings
• Restores balance
  Committing negative feelings like anger, jealousy, resentment to paper releases them and restores balance.
• Puts your life in perspective
  Writing daily tells your story over time and helps you realize that you are an interesting person whose life is honestly worth living.
• Brings forth the real you
  Journaling unsheathes your dreams and guides you to set boundaries that free you to be your authentic self.
• Sharpens your point of view
  Committing negative feelings like anger, jealousy, resentment to paper releases them and restores balance
• Builds your legend
  Your journal captures the triumph, defeats and ordinary moments of your life building a legacy yo pass on to your loved ones.

Therapeutic Benefits

Scientists attest to the therapeutic, stress-coping mechanism of writing about personal experiences, dreams and feelings. In addition, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits such as improved memory, better sleep and enhanced immune cell activity.

It is established that journaling clarifies your thinking and helps to organize your ideas and opinions, allowing you to gather insights from the most significant data. This, in turn, offers the opportunity to reflect, edit and clarify your ideas, highlighting patterns and discovering new pathways to consider. Psychologists call this reframing your personal narrative.

A study in the February issue of The Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

That alone says volumes about the life changing benefits of journaling.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 57.7 million people suffer some form of diagnosable mental disorder every year. However, recent heartening and perhaps surprising data proves that writing therapy, or journaling, is a beneficial therapy for those suffering from depression, anxiety, panic attacks and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Journaling is also exceedingly useful in learning to manage and modify negative patterns of thought — those nagging insecurities and unfounded fears often symptomatic of poor mental health.

Take a look at some examples of negative thinking

• Perfectionism — this is a pattern of thought where someone feels that anything less than perfect in any situation, social, professional or personal is a complete failure.
• A Sense of Doom — this pattern of negative thinking revolves around thoughts that something bad is just around the corner, making it nearly impossible not to be in a constant state of worry and fear.
• Ignoring the Positives — in this category, the pattern of negative thoughts focuses on the disappointments rather than the simple joys in everyday life.
• Self-Labeling — these are patterns of negative thought in which a person falsely assumes they’re not as good everyone else and they wouldn’t be loved if people knew the “real” them.

Journaling is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and over time, can help correct negative thought patterns. The premise of CBT is simply that if you change the way you think, you will change the way you feel and change the way you act.

As you write in your Journal about negative situations, thoughts and feelings, you create a thought record. Examining the content of this record helps identify the reasons behind your feelings and establishes the point when you might have first felt that way. In this way patterns of thought and behavior are identified. It is then possible to create an alternate thought record using positive and self- responses to stressful situations.

The Brain’s Role

There are a few things at work when we journal about our thoughts, ideas and plans. The action of writing focuses the brain’s attention and enhances the ability to retain the information captured and thus retrieve it when necessary. This process also stimulates intellect and perception and boosts long-term memory, thus improving your understanding of complex material, unfamiliar concepts and subject-specific vocabulary.

However, our short-term memory storage is limited. Most of us can only hold five or six, possibly seven items in our head at a time (can you remember your buddy’s phone number). Beyond that, we start to forget things. Recording your feelings and ideas in a Journal, cleans out the storage bank so your mind can bypass the old, redundant, mental loops. You gain clarity and begin to think more clearly. Even if you never re-read what you’ve written, the simple act of writing something down increases brain development and memory.

Here are five short- and long-term health benefits of journaling:

1. Reduces Stress.
2. Improves Immune Function.
3. Keeps Memory Sharp.
4. Boosts Mood.
5. Strengthens Emotional Functions.

Self-reflection

One effective way researchers have found to reinforce learning is through reflective writing. In reflective writing, the writer describes and analyzes a real or imaginary instance, event, memory or observation (good or bad), articulating feelings and opinions about the subject matter and its impact on the writer’s life.

Take advantage of diary software available in Journal apps to write down your entry as soon as possible after the event. This way, the details will still be fresh in your mind, which will help later in your analysis.

A reflective journal can be used to determine key points, detailed descriptions, feelings or to form new ideas about a subject. Thoughts develop and become more precise as critical thinking expands. This type of journaling helps you to learn from past experiences.

Journals using reflective writing are invaluable to many medical professions including physical therapy and nursing. The ability of journaling to improve critical thinking and decision making helps practitioners to reexamine past experiences, evaluate their individual actions and develop insights for encountering future challenges.

Below are some of the most common reasons why people find reflective journals so useful:

1. To make sense of things that happened. What you write should sound as if you are describing the details to someone who wasn’t there. Just the act of writing down the details may give you a new, innovative perspective.
2. To speculate why something is the way it is. Your views can come from your own common sense, from something you have heard at a lecture or read in a book or by exercising your reasoning ability.
3. To align future actions with your reflected values and experiences. After positing your interpretation, continue to speculate to decide whether you want to make changes. This can be done at any time.
4. To get thoughts and ideas out of your head. Writing down your thoughts helps relieve pressure or resolve problems while keeping you fixated on the task.
5. To share your thoughts and ideas with others. Getting opinions from others about what you wrote can help you clarify your feelings for a deeper understanding of yourself.

To create a reflective journal that really provides detail on your overall perspective under a variety of different circumstances, consider using one of the prompts below to help with your thought process.

• Write about which relationships have the most meaning to you and why. Include ways you can grow to help maintain these close relationships and get rid of the toxic relationships currently in your life.
• Write about what you are learning at school or in college.
• Write about someone in your life who has experienced a positive change and how you can learn from their situation.
• Write about what you want out of the next five years of your life and what you can do to achieve these goals.

Emotional Benefits

Filling a journal with prized values makes people feel in control, proud and powerful. At the same time, it merges feelings of love, connection and empathy for others.

When you are in an intensely emotional mood, journaling can help you more fully experience and understand those emotions. After you’ve vented on the pages of your journal, you’ll quickly find a release. Objectivity will return and you’ll be able to move forward.

The sensation of composure and relaxation inherent in journaling increases pain tolerance, boosts self-control, and reduces useless focus on stressful experiences. An honest and inspired journal session can be the best form of therapy — quickly restoring your shrewder self.

Consider the following ways that writing in your journal reduces stress:

• Reducing scatter in your life
• Increased focus
• Greater stability
• A deeper level of learning, order, action, and release
• Holding thoughts still so they can be changed and integrated
• Releasing pent-up thoughts and emotions
• Empowerment
• Bridging inner thinking with outer events
• Detaching and letting go of the past
• Allowing you to re-experience the past with today’s adult mind

Neurological Benefits

It turns out that regular journaling can be used to focus our attention and strengthen neural pathways. Neuroscience and cognitive science research have provided evidence that correlates creative writing with academic, social, and emotional intelligence. If you are math-challenged it may be comforting to know that writing can help the brain to develop the logical functions required for successful math and science learning.

Neurologically, when you listen to something, a different part of your brain is engaged than when you write it down. Memory recorded by listening does not discriminate important from non-important information. However, writing creates spatial regions between important and non-important pieces of information, allowing your memory to identify and retain the important stuff you want to remember.

Furthermore, the act of writing allows your subconscious mind to work out problems in unique ways, intensifying the learning process. You’ll be able to work out problems and get insights while you ponder and write about the things you’re learning.

Timothy D. Wilson, a University of Virginia psychology professor states that “Writing forces people to reconstrue whatever is troubling them and find new meaning in it.”

This tells us that journaling can prod people into a more optimistic state that continually reinforces itself, rescuing them from a self-defeating way of thinking.

What wonderful benefits!

Summary

The simple act of writing a few words, sentences or paragraphs every day can profoundly change your life as it helps you discover your true feelings and to realize that your life is worth living. Writing daily tells your story over a span of time and puts your life in perspective. When you make journaling a daily part of your life, you create a legacy to share with your loved ones.

Writing in a journal allows you to unleash your dreams and establish the boundaries necessary to become your authentic self. Committing to paper negative feelings like anger, jealousy and resentment that threaten your mental health releases them and restores balance. As you journal you begin to understand who you are and are able to clarify your own point of view while opening your mind and spirit to what others think.

Recent data from the National Institute of Mental Health proves that journaling is a beneficial therapy for those suffering from depression, anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD and other diagnosable mental disorders and is highly effective in managing and modifying negative patterns of thought.

The action of writing focuses the brain’s attention and enhances the ability to retain the information captured, thus enhancing retrieval. This process also stimulates intellect and perception and boosts long-term memory, all of which improve your understanding of complex material, unfamiliar concepts and subject-specific vocabulary.

Creating a thought record is a way to write about any negative situations for later study of motivating reasons and when they might have first felt that way. This helps identify patterns of thought and behavior and used to create alternate responses that are more positive and self-affirming.

A reflective journal can be used to determine key points, detailed descriptions, feelings or to form new ideas about a subject. Thoughts develop and become more precise as critical thinking expands, enabling you to learn from past experiences.

Additionally, journaling provides emotional benefits. Journal writing can prod people into a more optimistic state that continually reinforces itself, rescuing them from a self-defeating way of thinking.

Journal writing reduces stress by reducing scatter in your life, improving your focus and stability and releasing unexpressed emotions and ideas. Your journal helps store your thoughts for analysis and review giving you a deeper level of understanding and empowering you to make changes. You benefit because you are able to correlate internal thoughts with external events. Importantly you are able to let go of negative past events and re-experience it with today’s adult mind.

Neuroscience and cognitive science research have provided evidence that correlates journaling with academic, social, and emotional intelligence and has provided insights about the brain’s role in journaling.

Conclusion

It is impossible to go through life and not deal with relationships, responsibilities and stress.

It is not surprising that people need some way to release the accompanying anxieties and negative feelings. Unfortunately, social expectations increase the emotional pressure we feel, sacrificing mental well-being. An unhappy outcome is that it becomes harder for individuals to verbally communicate these feelings and worries and get the help they need from others.

The search for an alternative solution is answered by a common object that allows them to have a conversation with themselves — the journal.

Journaling gives the writer something tangible to show, share and keep for him or herself that can be examined, analyzed, revised or reintegrated to boost the mental, physiological and emotional state of mind. At the same time, the writer can step back and view, even analyze, the situation without becoming absorbed in the personal nature of it.

Because the writer entrusts his words to a book, a notebook or an app, he gains control that he was unable to articulate in verbal communication.

It appears that journaling relinks the daily anxieties, agitations and stresses to personal values, essentially allowing individuals to rewrite their stories to find meaning and purpose.

It is an amazing gift!

Your Journal is a personal space to express your feelings and emotions so just pick up a pen and start writing.

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. ~Anne Frank

Journal X — Diary with Lock