Contents
Contents
- Introduction
- Journalling takes the weight off your shoulders
- Journalling keeps you accountable for your actions
- Journalling is a gateway to your inner mind
- Journalling improves your ability to handle difficult situations
- Journalling gets you writing
- Conclusion
Introduction
Journalling has been around since ancient Roman times, and several Stoic heavyweights were known to advocate the very art of journalling. One of such examples is Marcus Aurelius (also known as the last good Roman Emperor) whose personal writings were kept in a journal entitled ‘to himself’. Today, many of us have followed in Marcus Aurelius’ footsteps by pursuing our own journalling journey.
Journalling involves keeping a log of your actions, thoughts, and feelings. But, different people journal differently. For example, the Stoic method of journalling places an emphasis on reflection, which allows you to understand how you react to different experiences and emotions, and invites the opportunity for change.
Keeping track of your daily thoughts and actions is a great exercise, for it can shed some light onto thought processes that may otherwise go unnoticed. Perhaps you’re more stressed than usual, and as a result act more reactive in certain situations. Though you might not readily notice it in your day-to-day life, you’d be able to pick this up through journalling.
So without further ado, let’s dive right into the five reasons as to why you don’t want to miss a day journalling.
1. Journalling takes the weight off your shoulders
One of the main reasons that journalling is popular nowadays is because journalling is a great mindfulness tool. Unlike other popular mindfulness techniques, journalling is an ‘active’ form of mindfulness that does well to release any anxiety or nervous energy without straying away from, or dismissing such feelings.
Not only does the act of writing down your thoughts and feelings onto a sheet of paper serve as an excellent method to release any pent up emotions, it also serves as a great way for the mind to relieve the tension from a difficult experience that you may have experienced that day.
The act of writing itself has a therapeutic quality to it and is engaging enough to achieve a state of mindful ‘mindlessness’ – a state of flow.
By capturing your emotions on paper as they occur, you’re able to acknowledge them and at the same time release them onto the page, where they remain until you decide to go back to them.
By journalling daily, you’re able to capture and release your emotions as they come and go. Over the longer term, this will teach you to recognise triggers for particular emotions, and will also enable you to exercise a greater degree of control over your emotions. This is alongside the benefit of having an emotional safety net to fall into should you need it.
2. Journalling keeps you accountable for your actions
Since journalling is about recording your daily doings, it’s also a great tool to develop your sense of personal accountability.
I’d recommend a cause-and-effect approach to journalling (I will write an in-depth guide to journalling at some point). This means: capturing the actions that lead to specific emotions. I believe this is important, as emotions are natural reactions to particular situations. This way you can assess your emotions in their full context.
Capturing your daily actions on a regular basis gives you great insight into who you are as a person (versus who you think you are). This is useful as it is common for people’s actions to not match up with their thoughts and intentions. Fortunately, I’ve previously written about this discrepancy and highlighted the importance of our sense of judgment and why it matters (see here).
It’s often easy to forget about our intentions and actions as we go about our day. Journalling about your actions allows you to evaluate them against your intentions. Sooner or later, you’ll notice the discrepancy between the way you imagined you would act, and the way you actually acted in the moment.
Noticing this discrepancy between intention and reality is the crucial first step to transforming your sense of judgment. It’s in this way that journalling will serve as a catalyst to improve your sense of judgment and accountability.
3. Journalling is a gateway to your inner mind
Since we are both the observer and the observed, it’s be difficult to understand our state of mind on a day-to-day basis. This is quite natural, as we’re often too busy and distracted by the happenings of the world around us to pay much attention to what’s going on in our heads.
Though daily journalling itself presents a great opportunity to sit down and capture your thoughts, it is the analysis of longer-term patterns that gives a true insight into your mind-state.
Let’s return to the example posed earlier – life’s many stressors have gradually creeped up on you and have skewed the nature of your every-day thoughts toward the negative. You might not realise this living your day-to-day life. But, by journalling daily for perhaps several weeks, you will start to notice specific cues rearing their head in a pattern-like fashion, making you aware of your stressed-out mind-state.
These types of insights are extremely helpful in understanding important aspects of your unconscious thinking patterns. By recognising these types of patterns, you’re able to take a stand and deal with them.
4. Journalling improves your ability to handle difficult situations
One of the key aspects of writing your thoughts down is that you’re given the opportunity to process them at your own leisure. The ability to sort through and process your thoughts at your own pace is conducive to reflect upon them as it’s natural to let the mind wander when we are relaxed.
Through reflection are we able to assess how we handled the situation: do we deem our actions satisfactory, or not? If not, the moment of reflection likewise presents an opportunity to change our future approach in case the situation occurs again.
By considering our approach to future situations, experiencing them, and again adjusting our behaviour based on the experience, we’re able to gradually develop and hone our stance towards future events and be better prepared to take on life.
Unsurprisingly, this process serves a key role in the quest for self-mastery and is greatly endorsed by the Stoics. Indeed, journalling and the reflection upon our daily actions, thoughts, and emotions is an crucial exercise towards achieving self-mastery.
5. Journalling gets you writing
Perhaps one of the most obvious benefits is that journalling gets you writing. Writing about your day-to-day life and other familiar topics is a great and easy way to start practising the art of writing.
Unlike prompted writing exercises, journalling gives you free reign. You can choose to write in whatever style you should choose to, with no limitations as to structure, word limit, or formatting.
In many ways, journalling is an excellent way to exercise your creative spirit.
As such, you can approach your journalling routine in whichever way you want. Perhaps you like adding dramatic flourishes to your speech, or perhaps you like to keep it simple – the choice is yours entirely.
As an added benefit, the act of writing itself is a great tool in developing and maturing your trains of thought. With time, you’ll find that your ability to follow your trains of thoughts to their conclusions becomes a lot easier.
With this many benefits, is there really a reason why you shouldn’t start journalling?
Conclusion
In this post, I’ve highlighted five advantages of journalling daily; though this list is only the tip of the iceberg.
Since journalling is accessible to all and boasts numerous benefits, I would highly recommend everyone to do it. Not only has writing by hand shown to improve cognitive function and foster creativity (Vinci-Booher & James, 2016). Nevertheless, the emotional and psychic benefits themselves are astounding.
I’ve decided to challenge myself to journal for 30 days in a row to how an entire month of journalling will impact my life. Why not subscribe to my blog (see below) so you don’t miss the post that is to follow?
Sources:
Vinci-Booher, S.A. and James, K.H. (2016) “Neural substrates of sensorimotor processes: Letter writing and letter perception,” Journal of Neurophysiology, 115(1), pp. 1–4. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.01042.2014.
