There’s more to journaling than just writing whatever comes to mind on paper, even though it’s perhaps the best way for you to keep your ideas in one place.
Here’s how jotting down on your journal will change your life:
1. It gives you topics for conversations.
Journaling lets you collect the thoughts that come to you in a way that you can remember them better, so when you’re not sure on how to strike up a conversation, you already have a few topics at the tip of your tongue that will let you get the ball rolling.
2. It lets you look for the silver lining.
Whenever you feel that you’re having a tough time, there’s a trick in journaling that will get you through it and even find a solution for any problem you might be facing.
It’s as simple as this: alongside every negative thing that’s currently happening, write down a positive thing in your life that you’re thankful for. Compare and contrast the positives with the negatives.
Once you do this, you’ll find that there are more things to be thankful and are worth striving for, and that things are not as bad as they seem.
It’s also because of this that you get the next benefit of journaling:
3. Journaling helps you handle depression better.
When you’re overwhelmed with what’s on your mind, you need to be able to write everything down as a way to manage it better. You’ll find that when you’re feeling depressed, journaling might just help you get by.
While it won’t solve depression overnight, it will help to give you some perspective on your life – that not everything is as bad as it seems, and that there’s always a way.
4. It improves your writing.
Your writing style will improve the more you write, even if it’s just for a journal entry. By collecting your thoughts, you also get to process and organize them, and this already counts as a writing process in and of itself.
After doing this for a while, you can look back and notice the difference in writing style when you just started out. Your thoughts will be more refined when you put them to paper, and you’ll also catch errors in your earlier entries that you didn’t notice before.
So the next time that you feel overwhelmed by everything that’s happened to you recently, or that there are a lot of things on your mind, it’s important to have a perspective from which to view everything. Writing things down gives you that perspective.
So what are you waiting for? Give it a try today!
(Disclaimer: this list is compiled in no particular order.)