Why you want to journal if you’re on the fence.
For today’s busy professionals juggling a million and one activities, each day, adding a new thing to your already full list may seem daunting. It may be counterintuitive but hear me out. Maybe you have heard about the many benefits of journaling and think it’s not for you. You may want to revisit your assessment and reconsider since the benefits gained will definitely outweigh the few minutes a day investment.
Journaling helps to slow you down enough to consider, to think, to reframe, to respond instead of reacting, to process, and to rewrite your narrative. Think of it as a type of life preparation and practice skill for personal growth. When we have tools to help us manage stressful stuff we feel less uncertainty and less stress. While journaling may be an acquired taste, it can be appreciated and learned for its enormous stress relief benefits.
In this article, you will learn the physical and mental benefits of journaling, expressive journaling, brain dump bullet journaling, and gratitude journaling, the best way to get started, and tips for the closet perfectionist when starting a journaling practice. After reading this article you will know how to journal for stress relief.
Physical and Mental Benefits of Journaling
Clearly, in today’s fast-paced climate of exchange, your inner negative chatter, your relationships, and external events can be stress-provoking. What happens when these stressful events are not adequately expressed? Studies indicate those who use expressive writing particularly about stressful situations, have increasingly better health outcomes. Often, we choose to suppress because it is too uncomfortable to confront head-on. What if more of the population decided to shift into the brave dimension of journaling for personal growth? What if we met our discomfort head-on and jumped into a personal commitment to self-care? Expressive journaling has the potential to change the landscape of your perceptions, thoughts, moods, and therefore improve your relationship with yourself, your friends, and your family.
Journaling Relieves Stress
The intensity of our present-day technological advances comes with the price of being on this fast timeline of immediate actions and responses. What if you are experiencing a need to pull back from the demands both externally and internally imposed? Giving yourself permission to take a break and write, letting out feelings, sensations, thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors can create a sense of purging. For the most effective journaling outcome, remember to do some reflection of what is beneath the stress. For example, maybe your first assessment is being stressed over someone else’s behaviors, which you cannot control. Naturally, identifying the sense of discomfort and yielding to look at what you can change is helpful.
Physical benefits
Numerous studies suggest that putting pen to paper literally, using expressive wiring, where feelings and thoughts are developed and reflected upon, have positive health benefits. Some interesting findings suggest that those that use expressive writing consistently, receive significant immune system benefits. The study explains that consistent writing, for at least 5 days a week, improves immune function and decreases the risk of illness as well as improves subjective overall well-being.
Journaling improves your mood
Write your narrative, by reflecting on obstacles and solutions, offering adjusted perceptions of yourself, and create a positive narrative. For example, let’s look at consider that Jane is having difficulty dealing with a coworker, Sue. A reflection exercise might uncover Jane dislikes this individual but also identifies feeling less than adequate at her job as well as overall lacking confidence in her abilities.
Less Negative Thoughts Equals Happier Feelings and Better Mood
During the writing process, when troublesome events, future concerns, or just mental chatter are weighing you down, journaling can lift the heaviness. Specifically, taking the time to allow for brain dumping, is both cathartic and combined with reflection and kind assessment can relieve anxiety.
Journaling improves Working Memory AKA Short term memory
Since you think a lot faster than you can write, when you journal, you slow down the process of recalling and then remembering. Certainly, improvements in recalling are helpful for stress relief in that we feel better when our brains operate optimally.
Journaling Improves Working Memory
Journaling increases your working memory, a fundamental function for the cognitive processes of holding and using information. Think of it as a temporary holding station that serves to support the temporary with other mental processes. Working memory helps to transfer short term information into long term memory and is part of the cognitive process that allows for reasoning and decision making
How to Start a Journaling Practice
- Decide which style you prefer or decide to try all three and let yourself choose daily what you would like to explore. Bulleted journals are lighter in intensity but extremely satisfying. Bulleted journals help us feel some certainty because you will sort your things to do into priorities.
- Buy a simple or special journal, decide to be flexible, and permit yourself to go off your standard. Praise yourself when you write and remind yourself how good it is for you.
- Keep your journal in sight and readily available. You never know when the mood will hit you.
- Decide to fall in love with this new practice because it will bring you the benefit of getting to know yourself while relieving stress.
Journaling Styles
Each of the following styles: Expressive writing, gratitude journaling, brain dumb, and bullet journaling have its benefits. To improve mood and lessen stress we explore expressive writing to form a new narrative and gratitude writing that reflects the greatest stress relief benefits. Brain dumping and bullet journaling offer relief as well but a not as cathartic as the others.
Expressive Journal Writing
When needing to make sense of events in the past, this form of writing allows for creating order and insight. Likewise, writing expressively to deal with present upheavals, such as your teens giving you a run for your money or an annoying coworker is helpful to unravel thoughts and concerns. Also, when we need to step out and reevaluate whether our life plans and goals are working, expressive journaling can help bring clarity and solutions. An enormously wonderful benefit of this type of writing is how the mind can be stilled and quieted to contemplate and be in the moment.
Approaches to Expressive Writing
Writing more days is optimal but some are better than none. Flexibility is better than berating yourself if you have trouble keeping an unreasonable self-imposed standard of perfection
Here is the best advice about journaling, don’t stress about how often or for how long, trust your gut, and let your inner wisdom guide your writing sessions. Think of this as an opportunity to get to know yourself and enjoy the journey.
Try writing in sprints when possible, studies suggest that giving space between writing brings along new perspectives.
As a general guide, begin by writing for 10 minutes, then break, and return to see if anything new comes up.
The idea is to write your feelings and thoughts while paying attention to finding the specific feeling. For example, if your teenage daughter is fighting you about a clear boundary, you might identify first anger and then fear. Write about these differing and similar concepts, do some reflecting, resist the temptation to use this as an opportunity to be judgmental towards yourself.
Kindness goes a long way in building stress resilience. Once you identify your feeling and thoughts, read them over and take time to reflect on what you are thinking. You might also just write to find the benefit of the event you are writing about and how it has already helped you or will help you cope in the future. Another option is to consider expressive writing is to write about yourself in the future, how you have succeeded in your goals and accomplishments.
Step by Step Expressive Writing
- Take four consecutive days to write your deepest emotions and thoughts about an event or topic
- Do not hold back, if something comes up about your childhood, keep writing
- Explore in your writing what is coming up for you. What are your thoughts and emotions?
- You may contemplate how the event is related to the person you like to become, who you have been or who you are now.
- If this exercise creates any sadness, acknowledge it, it should subside in a few hours. If it does not, you may want to talk to a mental health professional to help you process what you are finding.
Expressive Writing for A New Self Narrative
Write Your New Story and Improve Your Mood
If Jane stopped to journal using the simple brain dumb, where a host of feelings and emotions are trashed out, she can expect some cathartic release. However, if Jane, drilled down into the feelings beneath what’s happening with her coworker she may find a few key connected dots. She may discover her dislike is really about her inner feelings due to comparison making. This discovery is likely to bring awareness of this common mindset trap.
If Jane gets stuck in comparing herself to others her negative self-talk will likely confirm Sue is irritating because Jane views herself as not as skilled or qualified. Jane can then decide to dispute the negative thinking, reframe and rewrite the story to reflect a more accurate perception.
Journaling to Rewrite Your Narrative
Jane’s revised story: When I am around Sue, I feel irritated by her confidence and positive demeanor. I realize my reactions are triggered by my inaccurate negative feelings about myself. I choose to see myself as competent and successful because (this is where she lists her accurate assessments of her strengths.)
I am an excellent employee, I am conscientious, reliable, trustworthy, etc. In fact, from this moment forward, my challenges with Sue or others at work are an opportunity to celebrate my strengths. Studies reveal there is a correlation between expressive writing and improvement of feelings of wellbeing because it lowers depressive symptoms.
Brain Dump Bullet Journal
Journal writing in this style is more about purging than reflecting. There are benefits to getting all the chatter out of your head and onto paper. Following a brain dump, journal-style can be as easy as just writing whatever about anything. Your journal may be an opportunity to take notes on events, relationship glitches, your goals, and your list of things to do. You may want to get some fine point pens to draw feeling, ideas, and lists of whatever suits you.
Brain dump bulleted journals offer you an opportunity to get the things in your head that is bogging you down and then spend time organizing, prioritizing, and deciding. For example, if you need to prioritize upcoming deadlines and tasks and if you need a realistic list of things to do, this is your journal solution.
How to Get Started With A Brain Dump Bulleted Journal
- Get out everything on your mind and don’t hold back
- Organize it all into categories, you can color code if it’s your preference
- Prioritize your lists in order of importance and urgency
- Put this together and create a day, week, and month schedule
- Schedule with time blocking when you plan to accomplish each item/
Tips for the Perfectionist
Perfectionists beware of holding a standard you cannot keep. Be reasonable with your expectations and then give yourself some slack. If you think it will take you a week, give yourself two. You want to build in the opportunity to find yourself successful and pleased with your efforts.
When we make reasonable plans for all the scheduled to-do’s and then prove we can do it, it is amazingly stress relieving. On the other hand, if you create an unreasonable standard and then cannot keep it because you shot for the moon, you will create more stress. Remember, be kind and keep your expectations reasonable. A very wise woman once told me, it is a marathon, not a race. We need to keep a steady pace and remember it is about enjoying the journey not crossing stuff off of our to-do lists.
Gratitude Journaling
Gratitude journaling is about taking time to recognize and appreciate in writing people and events you are grateful for. This method can be done by keeping a list or by writing in-depth on the gratitude you have and why. You will want to include how the event or person has changed your life. The idea here is to take time to consider.
How to Get Started
A format for this method can begin:
I am grateful for _____________, because of ____________. My life has improved as a result of _____________in the following ways_________________.
This guide can get you started and keep you on track with this powerful stress-relieving method of journaling. For more information on Gratitude and gratitude journaling see my blog
Practice Gratitude and Change Your Life.
Journaling for Life
In today’s hectic pace, we all need a moment to stop and think. Writing is beneficial and stress relieving. It does not need to be formal, just take the leap and go for it. You may find you are thrilled with this new intimacy you have formed with the written page. In this article, we reviewed the emotional and physical benefits of journaling, how to get started, how to expressively write, how to do a brain dump bulleted journal, and how to do a gratitude journal.
Hopefully, you have decided to crossover and join those who have dedicated themselves to this enormous stress-relieving practice. At the very least, you have learned how to journal to relieve stress.
