3 Benefits of Journaling
There is no overstating the many benefits to keeping a record of your thoughts and feelings in a journal. If you can develop a discipline for it, you will reap countless benefits for many years to come.
It can help you navigate the present by allowing you a space for cataloging your emotions during life’s many ups and downs.
Down the road, journals can become a window into your past, reminding you of ways you overcame adversity or false, self-limiting belief patterns that might have hampered you at times.
It’s a great way to chart your path, embracing intentional, deep and nuanced self-awareness and reflection.
Through eyes now older and hopefully wiser you’ll recognize that all the worries, missteps and courageous notes struck along the way were important way markers.
There are also the people you meet and the lessons they share that are worth jotting down and remembering. They are like shamans or spirit animals, directing you in subtle but invaluable ways on the journey forward.
In time, these learning moments and life lessons can be forged into a useful long-range strategy, based on observation, experience and critical thinking.
Below are 3 benefits of journaling.
1. Soothe a sense of failure or rejection
Writing in general is therapeutic. Writing in a journal is especially so because of the way it engages your mind to fire on multiple cylinders including intention, self-awareness and self-introspection.
It can help you process disappointment or rejection by identifying and accepting that failure is temporary and often entirely out of your control.
You can try harder, hold on more tightly to the tiller but, ultimately, your endeavors and relationships are complex, multi-layered and impossible to steer with certainty.
The dynamics and conflicts you are faced with often defy reason and leave you feeling confused and helpless, but they do not ever have to define you.
Writing it all in a journal can help you to accept and embrace what cannot be changed and map out a better plan for changing the things you can.
2. Generate new and different ideas
Good ideas are often more interesting the more time they are given to age in the barrel. Great ideas hold up well over time. However, like fine wine, some also need time to breathe.
A journal is an ideal place to let some ideas age in buried pages AND to let fresh ideas breathe.
Once it’s written, you can always revisit it weeks, months, or even years later to see if an idea or way of thinking still captivate you.
3. Personal inspiration
The most important thing to remember is that words and writing can, and do, inspire. If you’re thoughts and ideas resonate with others you may someday also inspire them.
Moreover, it’s common knowledge that the unspoken hope of every journal that you write words in them that will inspire YOU to embrace the best possible version of yourself.
On every blank page you have unlimited potential to expand your world view, imagine the unimaginable, reframe your narrative, and tell your distinctly individual story through a very singular point-of-view and ever evolving lens.
Final thoughts for 3 benefits for journaling
We have been telling stories to each other for a very long time.
Researchers have claimed traditional folklore and stories passed down through generations by Australian Aborigines may be among the oldest accurate oral history in the world, passing through some 300 generations.
Stories of ancient sea level rise have survived for 10,000 years.
They say at this time sea levels rose as a result of the melting of the huge ice caps that covered much of the northern hemisphere around 10,500 years ago.
The findings have allowed them to map how the continent may have looked around 10,000 years ago.
Who knows where your words, thoughts and stories could land someday? Perhaps they could be of value in ways you cannot possibly fathom. Although the benefits are many these 3 benefits of journaling should convince you to start if you don’t already.
Get a journal. Write it all down. There is no downside.
Lisa Ryan LPC
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