Three Ways Journaling Positively Impacts Your Life
Journaling is a habit I couldn’t live without.
It has helped me to slow down and create space to put down on paper my thoughts, feelings, wonderings, questions, and heart felt longings.
When grieving, more than ever, we need space to reflect and get out what’s bouncing around in our head and heart. If you are someone who journals, I want to cheer you on and remind you of the impact it can have on your life.
If you aren’t someone who journals, I want to make a case for the impact it can have on your life — if you will but try it. I so resonate with the words of Julia Cameron.
Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury. It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change. — Julia Cameron
Three Ways Journaling Positively Impacts Your Life
1. It creates space to be still in the midst of a storm
Stillness is essential for creating an environment for processing your life. Journaling helps create the space where stillness can be captured even when the world is swirling around you.
At 13 years old, Anne Frank was given an autograph book that morphed into a journal that she used to confide in. 24 days after her first entry, her family lost their freedom and were forced into hiding in a cramped attic above her father’s warehouse in Amsterdam. In that attic, they spent two years hiding from the Nazis.
Her circumstances were overwhelming and unfair. In the midst of the storm, Anne needed a place to record her feelings — which ended up being her journal. There in her writing, she found stillness and solace to process what she was experiencing.
We too need a place to record our thoughts and feelings when overwhelmed and met by unfair circumstances.
2. Journaling becomes a form of self-therapy
My journal is a place where I unload all I am thinking about and feeling. I have people to talk but I always have my journal. It can handle anything I throw at it without judgment or without changing the subject. My journal never turns away because it is uncomfortable with my story told yet again.
Paper has a way of being unbiased and allows you to be unfiltered in your words, thoughts and feelings. It was Anne Frank who said, “paper has more patience than people.”
Journaling doesn’t replace therapy — there is a time and a place for it. But journaling has therapeutic value. In your journal, you can bring out into the light what’s going on in the darkness of your mind and heart.
When going through my darkest valleys of grief and suffering, I found comfort in journaling and did a lot of deep work.
I gained clarity about what was going on inside me, gained new insights, offered prayers, recorded quotes, gave thanks, vented anger, and raised unanswered questions.
3. Journaling helps improve your health and well-being
Studies validate the health benefits journaling. The research states that journaling improves well-being after traumatic and stressful events.
Another study found that divorcees who journaled their experience were able to recover better than if they didn’t. Divorce is the death of a relationship that comes with all kinds of challenging ongoing stress and hurt.
Psychologists recommend journaling because it helps clients stop obsessing and allows them to make sense of the many inputs — emotional, external, psychological — that might otherwise overwhelm them.
It’s a break from the world. Provides needed structure to your grieving. Helps you cope with the trouble and confusion you’re feeling. It also creates much needed ah-ha moments of insight and clarity.
One Place to Start: Journal Prompts
If you don’t have the habit of journaling but would like to start or relaunch the practice, use questions and journal your thoughts over the next few days.
What am I thankful for?
What am I learning, reading, or thinking about?
What am I experiencing emotionally?
What questions am I asking about my situation or my life?
What do I need to work on or change in my life?
