Most self-help websites and Youtube channels are full of tips and tricks which are superficial and ineffective for most people. However, there is one habit or activity which keeps popping up everywhere: journaling. Journaling has been shown both scientifically and anecdotally to improve many aspects of an individual's life and is among the most recommended habits out of all. In this article, I will discuss the benefits of journaling on
my life, whether physical, mental, or concerning my habits. If you are interested in learning more about one of the most useful habits you can build, this article is meant for you, and I suggest you read on!
Why Is Journaling Beneficial?
Okay, so journaling is good. It has many benefits (that I will talk about later on in the article) and can improve multiple aspects of life. But how does it work? Why is it beneficial? What are the mechanisms at play? This is what I will break down in this part of the article.
First of all, journaling is beneficial because it is a form of organized reflection on oneself. Basically, you could sit down and think about your day or your feelings. Still, thoughts are very fast and chaotic, and you would probably forget much of what you were thinking about, let alone the conclusions or criticisms you noted for yourself.
When you write, apart from scratching a piece of pulverized wood with a pen, you organize your thoughts into cohesive structures (sentences, paragraphs, etc.). This slows down thinking and makes you reflect a lot better on all the thoughts you have about your day, emotions, relationships, goals, experiences, and more. This helps with acknowledging bad behaviors, taking note of positive ones, and digesting emotions better.
Aside from the amazing reflection, it also has a practical aspect: it is a habit and a pretty easy one to start. Buying a pen and a notebook is not a big deal. Most people have these items at home already, and all that needs to be done is to write. Since writing about oneself is enjoyable, people can easily pick up on the habit of journaling, and in turn, this can help them develop better habits, but more on that later.
Generally speaking, journaling is what Tim Ferris calls a "meta-skill" (he calls meditation this), which is a skill that improves other skills. With journaling, you can notice significant improvements in your everyday life in relatively short periods of time. Due to its physical, mental, and habit-forming benefits, it is a true Joker card.
Physical Fitness and Journaling
First, let's talk about the benefit of journaling, which is the most easily palpable, and that is, physical fitness. One might ask: how does writing about your emotions help with increasing fitness? Well, it may not seem obvious, but it can really deeply affect one's physical health, and I will discuss my own experience to show you how.
One of the most noticeable benefits of journaling on physical fitness is keeping track of progress and goals. When journaling, you can spend 5-10 minutes a day only writing about your physical fitness. You can jot down the rep counts and sets you have done, the maximum weights you could lift, or the distance you ran. Over time, this won't only help you be more conscious of your daily activities but also help you keep track of your progress, fueling a sense of pride and success that can propel you forward.
Writing down goals is also a great way to keep you motivated. This way, you won't only be able to look backward and see how far you have come but also look forward and develop a solid and well-formed plan on where you want to go.
Being mindful of progress, activities, and goals can help you develop a proper workout routine that you can stick to and be proud of. Something I did aside from all I have mentioned so far is that I didn't only write down my longer-term goals but also my immediate ones. I journaled every night, writing down all the progress I have made so far and also my workout plan for the next day. Also, I wrote down a general structure of how I wanted my day to look, just so I don't get carried away doing something I shouldn't have, and this way, I could train much more consistently than I had before.
How I Dealt With My Anxiety with Journaling
All of us have our problems. This can be stressful, bad relationships with loved ones, lack of social life, low self-esteem, etc. The list goes on. There is no single person who has everything figured out, but there are people who have more things figured out than others, and they are happier. In this section of today's article, I will break down all the amazing ways how journaling can help with mental health and how it helped with my anxiety issues.
Journaling, as I have mentioned already, is a form of reflection on oneself. Still, above that, it is a sort of meditation (the difference is not much between the two anyway). What meditation does is not what the common misconception poses, which is a scammy system of zen-humming. It is an action in which one realizes that they are not the same as their thoughts and emotions, and also not the same as their immediate experience since that is also only a flow of thoughts and feeling. This requires one to "look" at these functions objectively.
Journaling is the same thing in many ways. What happens is when you are journaling, you are paying extra attention to the arising and passing away of every thought you have. You record them externally, placing them outside of yourself, on paper. This way, you can be more in touch with your emotions and thoughts and learn to handle immediate reality interpretations.
What this added to my life is significant progress in battling my own anxiety. Ever since I was in my late teens, I was an anxious person. This creates a brain-circuitry which will negatively interpret much more of the world around you than a "normal" person's brain would, resulting in all the problem anxiety comes with.
With journaling, one can break through these stubborn thought patterns and be more mindful of these unnecessarily negative interpretations of the world. Journaling can also help with depression, or just overall emotional, built-up residue. It is a calming activity that can reduce stress levels and benefit both the mind and the body.
Journaling and Building Habits
Journaling is a habit on its own. However, as mentioned earlier, it is one of the easiest to build. It can stick easily since it has most of the elements that form a quickly sticking habit. It doesn't take much time out of the day, doesn't require much effort, isn't tiring, has noticeably positive effects in relatively short periods of time, and a lot more.
Nevertheless, it is one of the best "entry-level" habits, which can improve your ability to pick up new habits in general. This is why I like to label it as a "meta-skill." You can use journaling to improve physical and psychological well-being and set and better form goals. Habits take time and effort to build, so planning them out and outlining them more clearly makes them somewhat easier to implement.
Journaling will also make you feel more of an urge to finally stick to some habit since you will write about the nudging feeling and acknowledge it a lot more than you would if you just thought about it a couple of times.
I personally developed several habits by journaling. For example, I never managed to lose weight, not to the extent that I wanted to. However, when I started journaling, I managed to develop a habit of working out and prepping my meals the second time I tried, and now I am a lot happier and healthier than I have ever been.
Reading an hour a day was another of the habits that I developed due to journaling, since it was on my mind for quite a while now that I haven't read a book for years, but journaling and writing these thoughts down clearly made the urge ever stronger. Thus, I was able to start reading daily, which, since then, has evolved into reading up to 2-3 hours every day.
Journaling is one of the best habits you can get into, and I can confirm from personal experience that it will, in fact, improve your life. It is one of the only habits that helped me develop other habits, so aside from it improving my mental health and helping me hit my fitness goals, it also evolved into the CEO of all other habits I have—a successful one at that.
Author bio: Robert
I spent the last years of my life learning martial arts and getting better at SEO and building websites. Still getting amazed each day at how journaling helped me with the two. More precisely, I managed to build two sites: Way of Martial Arts (all about martial arts) and Text Paradise (all about SEO and Content Writing). Currently looking to improve each day, develop new habits and grow in life. Looking forward to seeing how journaling will help me once again to fulfill my goals.
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