Journaling offers benefits galore for mental, emotional, and even physical health. In fact, research shows that keeping a journal can lower stress, alleviate anxiety and depression, and help boost immunity. As a key component of mindfulness, journaling can help you stay present and inspired in your daily life. According to mental health professionals, it is one of the most recommended tools for creating a clearer mind and a happier life.
Simply put: the benefits of journaling can be life-changing. Here are fifteen benefits of journaling that you can start experiencing today.
1. Improved Stress Management
Stress is inevitable in life. We all face stress about work, school, money, and relationships. Journaling offers many benefits that can make your day-to-day life more manageable.
When you are stressed out, journaling is one of the best things you can do. Writing about a stressful situation can release some of the pent-up emotion that contributes to stress. Putting your worries on paper lets you address them in a meaningful way, helping you focus on specific solutions instead of dwelling on negative feelings. Writing about stressful experiences helps you process emotions and realize that difficult situations are often not as bad as they seem at first glance.
In a 2018 study on Positive Affect Journaling in JMIR Ment Health, researchers confirmed that expressive writing such as journaling can aid in mitigating mental distress, increasing well-being, and enhancing physical functioning.
2. Reduce Anxiety
Journaling is one of the most efficient ways of processing stressful events or difficult emotions that produce anxiety. Keeping a journal helps you work through worries by writing them down, which may reduce their intensity.
Journaling helps reduce anxiety by helping you work through anxious feelings. By journaling, you can examine and shift anxiety-producing thoughts to empowered and action-oriented ones.
By its nature, journaling requires you to focus your attention on the present moment. When you are anxious, your mind is filled with racing thoughts and negative self-talk that can be difficult to shift. Journaling can push you out of your head, into the here and now, as you record how you feel and how those feelings change over time. This interruption in anxious thoughts may also help you work through anxious feelings instead of letting them linger or escalate.
In the first scientific study on expressive writing in 1986, researchers concluded that expressive writing, such as keeping a journal, was associated with both short-term increases in physiological arousal and long-term decreases in health problems. Studies consistently show that people who keep regular journals have lower stress levels and feel less anxiety than those who don’t.
3. Regulate Emotions
Over the past 25 years, a growing body of research has demonstrated the beneficial effects that writing about traumatic or stressful events has on physical and emotional health. A 1999 study published by the Oxford University Press studied how translating emotional experiences into words could be used as an effective coping tool.
Psychotherapist and licensed mental health counselor Haley Neidich explains that journaling is an effective tool for emotional management:
“Having a private space to let out and explore your inner world can help you to create perspective in your life and clarity around your needs. When you’re experiencing heightened emotions, it is very challenging to know where the entry point is for processing these feelings.”
Neidich recommends journaling prompts as a way of working through your emotions and feelings. She recommends answering specific questions to help guide the journaling process, such as:
- Which emotion(s) am I trying to avoid right now?
- Why am I trying to hide from this emotion?
- What does this emotion need from me?
- What is preventing me from addressing this feeling?
Keep in mind that journaling may stir up strong emotions and bring to the surface issues that may have been buried or overlooked. You may want to seek the support of a mental health professional, who can help you cultivate coping skills.
4. Improve Memory
Have you ever been in the middle of a conversation with a friend, and you can’t remember that great joke they told last week? How about when you’re writing your memoirs and you can’t remember if that specific event happened in New York City or London?
Journaling is an easy way to improve your memory. When you write things down, it helps commit those memories to your brain. This may seem obvious—but what is less obvious, is how much more detailed your memories will be the more often you write them down.
Scientists say journaling may actually change how your brain works, including the way we organize our memories. Journaling can aid in a type of cognitive processing which develops a coherent personal narrative, or how we explain things to ourselves. This results in more adaptive internal schemas, or how we organize our memories, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs.
In a study by Klein & Boals in 2001, expressive writing was shown to increase working memory capacity, which may reflect improved cognitive processing.
5. Solve Problems More Efficiently
Writing about a problem gives perspective on it which often leads to a solution. Writing down what is upsetting you can also help you work through those problems.
Researchers have found that expressive writing, including journaling, helps people “resolve their negative emotions and gain psychological benefits from the experience.” This type of writing allows you to both identify the problem and then try to solve it, no matter how big or small the issue may be for you.
6. Increase Self-awareness
If you want to get to know and understand yourself better, journaling can help. By writing regularly, you can gain clarity about your past, present, and future, your goals and dreams, your values and beliefs, your relationships, your health and well-being, what makes you happy, and more.
In a 2011 study, The Therapeutic Use of Journaling With Adolescents, journaling was found to help people express, in a tangible way, what they think and feel, which ultimately helped them fill the gaps in self-understanding.
7. Improved Physical Health
Journaling can improve your health in a variety of surprising ways. The simple act of writing itself helps to calm the sympathetic nervous system, which controls your fight-or-flight response.
Studies show that expressive writing can speed up physical healing by allowing us to process our thoughts and feelings surrounding traumatic events (like an illness). Writing about these experiences forces us to acknowledge them, which means we are less likely to ignore them or feel like they are hopeless situations we cannot overcome.
In addition, journaling can help lower your blood pressure and improve your immune system. Journaling has even been shown to help with chronic pain, as it can reduce some of the stress associated with living with chronic pain. In a 2005 study Advances in Psychiatric Treatment published by the Cambridge University Press, numerous physical benefits of expressive writing have been documented. Specifically, expressive writing has been shown to lead to significant improvement in lung function in asthma sufferers, improved immune response in HIV patients, decreased admission rates in cystic fibrosis, and improvements in joint stiffness in rheumatoid arthritis.
8. Boost Happiness and Positivity
Journaling can be an excellent way to boost happiness, clear your mind, and reflect on the positive things in your life. Journaling your thoughts and feelings is a great way of processing them and leads to a better understanding of yourself. Not only can you get things off your chest by writing them down, but you’re also allowing yourself to reflect on these negative emotions, helping you deal with them in a healthier manner.
Journaling also gives you time to clarify your thoughts and process any negative emotions. With all of this negativity cleared from your mind, it makes room for positivity. This means that when something good does happen in your life, you won’t overlook it as easily or forget about it weeks later because the bad was never processed properly. Journaling allows you to make sense of what happens each day and see the moments that added value or joy to it rather than just focusing on the negatives.
Keeping a daily list of what you’re thankful for, called gratitude journaling, is one of the most effective forms of writing that boosts happiness and positivity. A growing body of research on the benefits of gratitude includes better sleep, lowered stress, and improved interpersonal relationships.
9. Find Inspiration and Creativity
A journal is a safe, personal space to unleash your creativity and express yourself. You can write about whatever you want, however you want to write it. You are not restricted by rules or guidelines.
That’s why journaling is a habit that many creative people enjoy because it stimulates creativity and encourages clear thinking. Famous authors, artists, and visionaries who kept journals include inventor/artist Leonardo da Vinci, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, Benjamin Franklin, and writer Virginia Woolf. In a collection assembled by Flavourwire, you can see the notebooks and journals of some famous artists, writers, and entertainers.
Why? Theories propose that journaling helps you find inspiration and be more creative by giving you a space to organize and explore your thoughts without feeling self-conscious or judged.
Through expressive writing, it’s easier to look for patterns and focus on new possibilities or potential outcomes. You can also use journaling to help yourself find the right words to express your ideas.
Journaling also encourages self-reflection, which can help you discover new talents and strengths. It also allows you to capture your ideas as they occur, so you don’t lose track of them. Writing things down to remember them, and looking for connections between events or ideas—these connections may help you be more creative.
10. Practice Mindfulness
You may not have considered it before, but journaling is a great way to extend your mindfulness practice. Journaling allows you to be in the moment, slow down and live in the present, and be grateful for the present.
When we are overworked or overwhelmed by our schedule (or simply distracted by mindless busywork), we forget to stop and appreciate the small things we have done well or the beautiful moments that took place during our day.
When you journal, you take a moment to check in with yourself and reflect on the present moment. You slow down and allow yourself to be occupied by only one thing at a time, rather than multi-tasking between scrolling through social media or checking your emails. Journaling can allow that same sense of presence to carry into the rest of your day, even when it’s packed full of activities or responsibilities.
Journaling requires regular reflection which can make us more mindful individuals over time. This enhances overall well-being as well as other positive outcomes such as improved memory. If you practice journaling regularly before bed or in the morning, it’s likely that you will be more mindful throughout your day, too.
A 2010 study on the outcomes of integrated journaling and mindfulness techniques showed increased psychological well-being and reduced levels of stress.
11. Set and Achieve goals
On a recent episode of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, Tim Ferriss talked about the importance of journaling. He called journaling the “most underused tool in high performance.” Ferris also called journaling “the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found.”
Why? Journaling can be one of the best ways to gain clarity about what you really want. With the clarity you can gain by journaling, it’s easier to set clear, obtainable goals and track your progress over time. Journaling can also help you identify why you want something, which is a key factor in staying focused, committed, and ultimately achieving a goal.
12. Sleep Better
Journaling can help you process your thoughts and emotions in an effective way. As a healthy way to reflect on your day and express yourself, journaling can help you sleep better, especially if you are anxious or stressed out,
Many of the mental and physical benefits of journaling are related to helping you sleep better. By reducing anxiety and helping the body to relax, restful sleep may be easier to obtain after a journal-writing session that clears the mind.
In a 2012 study on the benefits of expressive writing on sleep difficulty, researchers found less sleep difficulty in participants in just three 15-minute writing sessions a week.
13. Reflect on Important Live Events
Journals are a great place to record important events in your life. For example, when was the last time you celebrated a birthday? Did anything special happen that day? These details can be easily forgotten if they aren’t written down. Journaling helps us remember and reminds us of many important facts in our lives we may otherwise forget.
Joshua Smyth, a distinguished professor of biobehavioral health and medicine at Penn State University explains in How Journaling Can Help You in Hard Times:
“Journaling is a tool to put our experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and desires into language, and in doing so it helps us understand and grow and make sense of them.”
By writing about the important events of your life, you can clarify your thoughts and feelings, and gain new insights. Keeping a journal also serves as a reminder of what has happened in our lives so we don’t repeat past mistakes and avoid making destructive choices over again. We can also gain perspective about all the good things in our lives, which adds more satisfaction and gratitude.
14. Better Express Thoughts and Emotions
Keeping a journal helps clarify confusing thoughts, feelings, or situations so that you’re better able to manage them. This can make it easier to understand yourself, find clarity in times of confusion, and find solutions to problems. Journaling allows us to practice self-expression so that we become better at communicating our needs in real-life situations. Regularly expressing how we feel gives us the opportunity to think critically about ourselves so that we can improve accordingly.
Sometimes, writing down the things that are making you feel sad or angry is enough to help you deal with them. Other times, journaling can help you realize that there’s nothing wrong with you for feeling a certain way about something. Expressing emotions through writing them down can help us see that feelings are normal, or even necessary.
In a 2006 study, researchers asked 98 young people to journal or draw about a stressful event twice a week for a week. Even though 80% of the participants were not used to journaling and only 61% were comfortable doing it, writing about their feelings helped significantly reduce their symptoms of depression, anxiety, and hostility.
15. Gain Self-confidence
Nobody’s born confident. You have to work on it like you would any other skill. Sure, some people have help from family or friends and that can be a great asset when you’re trying to see yourself in a different light and gain confidence, but there is something powerful about picking up a pen and writing down your feelings.
Because journaling is an effective way to express thoughts, feelings, and insights freely, it is a useful tool for self-discovery and healing (Rowe, 2012). Journaling is a great way to help you clear your head, calm down and, ultimately, gain self-confidence.
The process of journaling helps you identify and understand your strengths, as well as your weaknesses. Journaling can give you new insights into who you are and what you’re capable of. By creating a journal where you can freely document your thoughts, you’ll be able to look back through the entries and see just how far you’ve come.
