Journaling for Health and Wellness

As we go through a tumultuous time in history, physical and mental health, along with general well-being, are slowly deteriorating for most. Having to suffer yet another day cooped up in a home with the kids and frustrating Zoom calls all day and night have most yanking their hair out in frustration. Does this sound something like you?

In order to promote emotional and physical well-being, one of the greatest, and tried, techniques is to express the thoughts of our inner lives externally. Such expression helps us make sense of the inner workings of our emotions and handle the emotionally intense periods in our lives. There is a therapeutic value in self-expression - think about how much better you felt after a long, frustrating period when you finally got to socialize with friends, talk to a therapist, or spend time with your family. While these activities are somewhat limited now given the circumstances, there is yet another avenue for self-expression: journaling.

Journaling can help us all manage our anxiety and stress and make sense of the emotional rollercoaster ride we so often experience but cannot make sense of. By putting words down on paper, we allow ourselves to cognitively process our thoughts around our health and emotional well-being, pinpointing on our personal concerns, fears, and/or self-limiting beliefs.

How to Start Journaling

As is with everything, setting out with an intention to better understand and develop yourself will go a long way in starting your journaling experience. There’s a common misconception that you have to journal every single day either as soon as you wake up or late into the evening hours. This couldn’t be further from the truth; journaling is meant to be a personal, reflective process through which fits best with your schedule and personal well-being.

When you’re first starting out, set out with the intention to regularly journal about three times a week at times when you look forward to it. Fill your journaling time with a particular rhythm and beat that speaks to you so that you create a healthy, enjoyable environment, both physically and mentally. Let your thoughts run out freely in that environment and don’t get bogged down by whether or not if your thoughts need to be structured out in a particular way. As we’ll see a bit later, it’s a result of the free-flowing thoughts where we truly reap the benefits of journaling.

Making Sense of Our Journals

As you progress in your journaling journey, you’ll stumble upon a block where you look at all your journals and think to yourself what all your journal entries even mean. Fear not, as journaling takes time to get into the groove of and even longer to make sense of the actual process. In the beginning, focus on the habit of journaling as regularly as you can and develop a respectful, appreciative mindset to the practice and your concerns.

Once you develop a healthy habit for journaling, you’ll come to find that it reinforces other healthy habits, such as eating nutritiously, exercising, socializing, and getting adequate sleep. All of these healthy habits build on one another, so the benefits will continue to compound on one another all as a simple result of you taking the first step to start journaling.

Getting into the actual written thoughts, your journal will serve as a source for the externalization of all your thoughts, feelings, and emotions from one point to the next. By physically giving weight to our thoughts, feelings, and emotions, we are able to uncover some of our most deeply rooted private fears and stressors that would have otherwise been difficult to untangle. The act of writing this all down in a journal allows us to detach ourselves from the writing itself and let the journal reveal all of these self-discovery moments.

As you review your journal from time to time, you’ll start to pick up on patterns of your own emotional state based upon your social and physical environment from period to period. It’s no secret that we often can see the significance in singular events, but we often overlook the overall pattern seen through a sequence of multiple events. This allows us to see the near invisible in plain sight since our minds are always rushing from one moment to the next instantaneously.

Envision Health and Wellness

Now that we’ve been able to capture your physical, emotional, and psychological states down into a journal, we can utilize the patterns we find in this journal to develop healthier habits and create a life centered around wellness. Specifically, you will have noticed key indicators and environmental factors that will cause your mind, body, and spirit to degrade. Knowing this, you can plan more accordingly to either distance yourself from such instigating factors or to develop an aptitude to respond more aptly to those circumstances in order to keep your health and general well-being in shape.

All of these results aren’t going to magically come into place in just a week or couple of months. It will take time to develop the practice of journaling and to enter into the mindset of expressing yourself more freely in pursuit for greater self-development and specifically towards your health and wellness. Take the time. In a world that expects you to move as fast as ever, journaling, along with meditation, self care, and digital detoxes, is a slow practice to develop that eventually allows you to grow exponentially from within.

Now you’re ready for the journey to start journaling for your health and wellness. But what if you’re like many of us who start out and stare fruitlessly at a blank page and don’t know what to even write? Free yourself from the idea that you need to know what to write and simply start with where you are. As a friend of mine would say, you have your starting point right now and a point you envision yourself being at in the future - that means there is a path, though not linear as life will show you like the events of 2020 would demonstrate, to get from point A to point B. That path to point B for greater health and wellness is the path that includes journaling. Happy journaling everyone and here’s to greater health and wellness for everyone this year!

“Journaling is like whispering to one’s self and listening at the same time.” - Mina Murray