Have you ever felt overwhelmed with thoughts and emotions you cannot understand or explain? Have you ever felt so tired of feeling the way you feel without knowing what you can do about it? It is hard to carry on normally with relentless emotions that are not understood. This is why it is essential to learn how to understand yourself and why you are feeling this way through journaling.
Journaling is, more or less, like writing in a diary. It is when you write about your everyday experiences, intense emotions, thoughts, successes, failures, and the like. Splaying your thoughts and feelings out on paper can be beneficial for you to see what it is you are feeling and try to understand where this feeling is coming from. It is your chance to deal with and control your emotions. Rather than keeping your raging emotions pent up and hidden, you can release them all to your journal and relieve yourself from the stress-inducing situation.
Journaling as a Self-Care Tool
Studies have shown that journaling can benefit your mental health and be used as a self-care tool. In fact, writing about anxiety-inducing issues or trauma has been associated with lower grief and depression, a decreased number of visits to the doctor, and improvement in immunity. Furthermore, a statistical analysis on the effects of journaling found that writing about certain issues enhances your psychological, physiological, and general functionality.
Relieving yourself of the stress-inducing situation is an added benefit to writing down how you feel, in addition to analyzing your feelings and figuring out where they stemmed from. This can help you think rationally and take steps to decrease the stress that comes with your emotions. Pent up feelings are extremely harmful to your well-being. According to certain theories that explain and analyze the importance and effects of journaling, these pent up feelings are known to be chronic stressors that negatively affect mental and physical health. Accordingly, it is essential to your well-being to alleviate the tension that comes from within.
When your feelings and emotions are written on paper, you can separate yourself from these emotions in order to think clearly about them and undergo a desensitization process. This is a process where negative or positive responses to certain stimuli are decreased. For example, let us say that a person has extreme negative feelings towards something that triggers their stress, anxiety, or even trauma. When they express this feeling, write it down, and address it, the extreme reaction will decrease.
Journaling can take place every day at home, work, school, or anywhere else – depending on your preference. Interestingly enough, it is also a method used in counseling settings as a creative way to involve people in remedial activities that heighten growth, self-reflection, and understanding.
Difficulty in Journaling
Sometimes, it may be hard to write down your feelings and thoughts because writing them down means admitting them and admitting them is not a simple walk in the park. It takes effort and courage to address your emotions and analyze them, especially if you have been denying and avoiding them. That being said, it may take some time to get used to the possibility of admitting your problems, so it is important to take that time and be patient with yourself.
You may also face difficulty in knowing how or from where to start writing. Another inhibiting factor could also be the fear of people possibly seeing your deepest thoughts.
Tips for Journaling
A number of steps will be outlined to assist you in learning how to journal, or from where to start:
- Write what is bothering you, or what you are thinking about.
- Be as detailed as possible when describing issues that are worrying you.
- Write down your fears/stressors (what anxiety-inducing issue you are worried will happen).
- Re-read what you wrote and think about it again.
- Challenge your fears and worries.
- Think about your fears in an alternative way.
- Think about your triumphs and ask yourself if you can use the same strength you used then to overcome your current issue.
- Prepare yourself for a worst-case scenario situation – this can help alleviate your fear of not knowing what to do.
- Come up with some sort of action plan (be it a plan to reduce your stress or a plan to empower yourself).
Journaling is a great tool you can use to self-reflect and look into yourself. It is also convenient because you can write down whatever you are feeling whenever you want to. It is a creative and effective way of coping with your anxiety, albeit with certain difficulties that come in the way. Nevertheless, finding the strength to jot down your emotions and analyze them is a great step forward to find your inner peace and come to terms with your feelings.