15 Amazing Things That Happen When You Write a Diary
The benefits of journaling are good enough to consider adopting this practice. Find out what journaling can do for you.
We may associate the act of journaling with childhood episodes when we’d lie on our beds with notebooks and pen in hand to write down our feelings about that girl in the next room we’d never dare speak to. However, journals aren’t just kid stuff. Even in adulthood, journaling can have incredible benefits that make it worth picking up the habit.
Journaling makes you a happier, healthier, and more creative person.
Reduce your stress and anxiety.
Putting your feelings down on paper helps work through anxiety and obsessive worries before they become serious problems. It happens because putting your thoughts on paper helps identify stressful thoughts and beliefs that could be distorting your reality. It also enables you to find solutions to your problems.
You become your teacher.
Keeping a journal helps you examine your life and analyze and reflect on what happens to you. Thus, your experiential learning is much greater. According to a Harvard Business School study, reflecting on what you have learned helps make your experiences more productive.
Boost your creativity.
Writing is one of the effective instruments to develop your creativity – you can see that by talking to the people related to this: who works at an essay writing service or who is a book writer, etc. You’ll see how creative these people could be.
Keeping a journal helps you get thoughts out of your way and makes room for other ideas. It also enables you to record things that inspire you, quotes, sketches, and eventually become a starting point for a project.
Your communication skills increase.
When you write, you learn to express your ideas better. And even though you do it for yourself, the benefit is reflected in your relationship with others.
You sleep better.
When you write down your to-dos, your brain relaxes because, in a way, it is already taking care of them. Thus, you no longer have a thousand things going around in your head without letting you rest. When you write about the good things that happened during the day, your sleep quality also improves. It has been shown that people who write a to-do list or journal entry before bed fall asleep faster.
Your memory improves.
Writing in your journal is a great way to remember specific moments and stages of your life. In addition, writing by hand stimulates the reticular activating system, so your brain prioritizes whatever you are concentrating on at the time and processes it on a deeper level. Thus, you pay more attention.
It brings you closer to your goals.
Journaling forces you to write down your goals, and if you do, you’re more likely to achieve them. What if you don’t know what you want? You guessed it: writing helps you figure it out. You can also become aware of what’s blocking you and develop plans to get closer to them.
Reduce symptoms of depression.
Writing clears your mind and helps you become aware of the things that are bothering you. It also enables you to identify specific patterns and thoughts that make you fall into depressive behaviors.
It helps you overcome traumatic events.
One experiment observed that writing in a journal helped migrants and refugees who experienced traumatic war situations process their experiences and assimilated the trauma. Other studies have shown the same effect in more “everyday” traumas. Six weeks of journaling is enough to see a difference in anger and anxiety levels.
Your immune system is strengthened.
According to a University of Texas study, journaling brings physical benefits to people with illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, asthma, and arthritis. People wrote about what stresses them out for that study, which helped release stress and strengthened the immune system.
Helps heal injuries.
A study was done in New Zealand in which older patients were asked to write a journal after a medically necessary biopsy. Researchers noticed that people who wrote about their problems found more meaning in them, reducing their stress level. Long-term stress increases stress hormone levels, and that weakens the immune system. This study showed that writing in a diary helped biopsy patients recover from the biopsy 4.4 times faster than those who had not.
You leave a record for your future self.
Reading old journals is a unique way to relive the past and to notice how far you’ve come and how far you still have to go.
It helps you focus on the moment.
Writing about your surroundings and how you feel now teaches you to pay attention and appreciate life uniquely.
In a similar sense, the freedom that writing for yourself gives you helps you find your voice and express yourself more fully.
Improves your self-esteem
Writing about positive things, such as the high points of your day or your most significant accomplishments, gives you a better perspective on life and silences the critic in you. By focusing on these topics, you’ll see that you are so much more than you’ve made yourself out to be.