What Do You Yean By Journaling?
What do you mean by Journaling?
Journaling is a great, simple technique for improving your mental health. It can be as low-cost and simplistic as writing down your thoughts and feelings on paper.
It’s the is the act of keeping a record of your feelings, personal thoughts. It brings clarity to your thoughts.
It's so simple: you write down your thoughts and feelings so you can get a better understanding of them. It can also help relieve stress.
Journaling can help you to better understand how your thoughts and feelings may be manifesting. If you are dealing with stress, it gives you a sense of relief from the chaos that the stress brings.
Benefits Of Journaling
It helps with obsessively thinking
Writing about an emotional event can help you break away from the nonstop cycle of obsessively thinking and brooding over what happened, but the timing matters.
It creates awareness
Writing down your feelings about a difficult situation can help you understand it better.
The act of putting an experience into words and structure allows you to form new perceptions about events.
It regulates emotions
Brain scans of people who wrote about their feelings showed that they were able to control their emotions better than those who wrote about a neutral experience.
This study also found that writing about feelings in an abstract way was more calming than writing vividly.
It encourages opening up.
Writing privately about a stressful event could encourage some to reach out for social support.
This can help with emotional healing.
Speed up physical healing.
Journaling may also have an impact on physical health.
A study on 49 adults in New Zealand found that those who wrote for 20 minutes about their feelings on upsetting events healed faster after a biopsy than those who wrote about daily activities.
Similarly, college students who wrote about stressful events were less likely to get sick compared to those who wrote about neutral topics like their room.
Women with breast cancer who wrote positively or expressively about their experience with the disease had fewer physical symptoms and fewer cancer-related medical appointments.
But researchers also noted that writing about negative emotions may increase anxiety and depression levels.
Source :
Cleveland Clinic: “4 Tips for Keeping a Gratitude Journal.”
Harvard Health Publishing: “Expressive writing for mental health.”
JMIR Mental Health: “Online Positive Affect Journaling in the Improvement of Mental Distress and Well-Being in General Medical Patients With Elevated Anxiety Symptoms: A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial.”
Mental Health America: “How to keep a mental health journal.”
NPR: “Feeling Lots Of....Feelings? Journaling Can Help.”
Psychological Science: “Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli.”
Psycho-Oncology: “THE EFFECTS OF JOURNALING FOR WOMEN WITH NEWLY DIAGNOSED BREAST CANCER.”
Psychosomatic Medicine: “Expressive Writing and Wound Healing in Older Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial.”
More ressources
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