Journaling Can Change Your Life

One Page At A Time.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Journaling is the best habit anyone can have. It helps you get clarity and set’s your mind at ease. Journaling gives you the most freedom one can imagine. It eases your mind from anxiety, fears and thoughts that seemed unbearable but when put to paper, they turned to mush.

Why Is It Important?

There’s this embarrasing thing that happend today and its bothering you alot. Its bothering you to the extent that you’re thinking about it continuously. Its hindering with your work, its making you anxious, stressing your mind and affecting your performance at work.

You take out your journal and just write that thing down. Write the whole thing that happened and that’s bothering you, and a little while after that, you would feel relaxed and this huge thing, is not that big of a deal now. It appears nothing.

That’s the power of journaling.

You take your thoughts way too seriously until you write them on paper.

3 Levels Of Journaling

There are no set patterns for journaling, you’re free to write anything, but just for the purpose of explaining, there are 3 levels of journaling.

What You Did Today?

So there’s a book called Storyworthy by Mathew dicks in which he says that, write about the, one most storyworthy moment of your day.

It doesn’t matter if you had a very boring day and can’t find anything worth writing about, just think a little too hard and find out a moment that you can write about.

This helps you relive your memories and give you a sense of nostalgia when you reread your entries after a while. It also gives you a highlight of the day that you can remember later.

Photo by Prophsee Journals on Unsplash

What You’re Thinking/ Feeling

So Julia cameron wrote about this in her book called The Artist’s Way. She wrote about the habit of writing ‘Morning Pages’. Basically its just journaling but doing it in the morning, at the beginning of your day in which you can describe what’s going to happen today, like what’s your plan for today and just simply how’s today gonna be like.

You have to write 3 pages atleast or less if you’re new to this and later you’ll develop a habit of writing more and more.

What Are Your Goals And Plans

This is the third level of journaling in which you write about meeting your goals and plans and it helps you analyse how to go about a certain thing.

Like if your goal is to achieve Financial Freedom, then you would go on a deep dive about it, and think about what comes with financial freedom that you actually want. Maybe its Time freedom that you desire, so that you can do some other thing in that time that you love or wanna do.

Journaling externalizes your thoughts and feelings.

How To Actually Start Journaling

So now I’ll be telling you some actionable tips that will help you to develop this amazing habit of journaling.

• Get a physical journal

The first step to developing this habit is, as basic as getting a journal. Get a journal that appeals to you and that you’re drawn towards, so you’ll actually write in it.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

• Journaling apps

There are many journaling apps that can help you write your thoughts down on the go, or when you don’t have your journal nearby. You can use anyone they’re all good in their basic functionality. It can be your phone’s Notes app or Apple’s Journal app or Day One. All are good you can choose anyone of your liking.

• List of promts

This helps you not start from a blank mind. When you have a question to answer or a scenario to write about, your mind starts drawing from those scenes and you can write.

But remember to write honestly in those prompts, otherwise it won’t be helpful.

• Talking to AI

You can talk to AI about all this if you’re not in the mood to write or you’re good with conversational stuff. You can use any of the AI’s available.

• Daily habit or deep dive

Its upto you that how you want to go about journaling, if you wanna keep it simple and just write about your daily routine than that’s good and if you are thinking of doing it as a deep dive in your mind or feelings, on a weekly basis than that’s amazing also.

Just pick your pick and start writing.

Hopefully this was helpful to you, and if this was, do let me know what you thoughts are about this. Happy journaling.