Create Your Daily Journaling Practice
People choose to start journaling for all sorts of reasons, but one of the most common is that they’re using it for wellness and self-improvement.
When it goes well, journaling can be an incredible tool for introspection and self-reflection, whether that’s digging into the things that worry us, our hopes for the future, or even just what we can appreciate right now in this moment.
The challenge, of course, is that if you’re reading this, journaling likely isn’t an established routine. We tend to face a number of hurdles when building a new habit, from the external struggles of finding time to add one more thing in our busy schedules to our own procrastination.
Our newest blog will go over some of the ways journaling is a beneficial habit and how to stick it out, even when it’s hard.
Reduce Anxiety and Depression
Studies have shown journaling can help alleviate anxiety and depression. This effect has even been found in patients suffering from terminal illnesses. If journaling can help them, it can help you, too.
This practice is not a replacement for therapy or medication, but a great addition. Journaling enables you to make sense of reality and heal your mental wounds.
You don’t need peer-reviewed studies to know if something helps your mind. You can try it for yourself and see how it affects you.
Understand Yourself
Journaling means writing about your unique experiences in life. It helps you make sense of your journey and the things that happen to you. Journaling creates a seamless narrative for your past, present, and future.
By journaling daily, you get to know yourself better. You’ll discover your blind spots when you make a particular mistake repeatedly. You’ll be able to congratulate yourself on your daily progress.
In this process, you consistently improve. Your mistakes become less frequent as your self-awareness increases. You learn what makes you happy on a deeper level and begin doing more of that.
Clear Your Mind
We take in too much information each day. According to Statista, the average person has 12 paid media subscriptions and spends 473 minutes – nearly 8 hours – per day consuming media.
Once all that media takes up residence in your mind, what space is left for your thoughtful creativity? How much of your mental capacity remains to make good decisions?
Taking time to journal helps to clear your mind. It gets the result of all that consumption out on the page.
When you have a thought stuck in your mind, it can spin in there like a wash cycle all day. Journaling is the act of taking the laundry out of the washer, leaving it empty and ready to use.
How do you feel after taking the time to journal about your life? You might feel a sense of peace. Or experience greater clarity of thought and purpose.
Define Your Plans
Everything created in this world was once just a thought in someone’s mind. The way to bring your ideas into reality starts with writing them down.
It’s been said that if you don’t know where you’re going, there’s no path to get there. A journaling practice can help you understand your desires and goals. and ensure they’re aligned with your higher self.
Having a clear future vision is essential for mental wellness. Depression can happen when you don’t think your future will be better than your past. Through journaling, you create a better future one step at a time.
Make Better Decisions
Journaling can completely change your life by helping you make better decisions. It’s impossible to hold each choice’s pros and cons in your mind at once. That’s often the root cause of indecision.
Our minds are not designed to look at all options simultaneously. You can only focus on one option at a time. By journaling, you take that decision and write out all of the factors.
Instead of holding it in your mind, you put it in front of you. Often, this practice is all it takes to make the right decision obvious.
Track Your Wins
It’s easy to reflect on your day and see where you could have done better. Sometimes a week will fly by, and you’ll feel like you didn’t accomplish anything.
Looking back and seeing everything that went well is less automatic. It takes work. These benefits are worth the effort.
Tracking your wins daily helps build self-esteem. When journaling daily, you can point out your wins and accomplishments. As the list grows, so will your confidence in your ability.
Now you know why journaling is so important. It’s time to learn how to fit it into your life.
How To Build Your Journaling Habit
In BJ Fogg’s book Tiny Habits, he advises starting small to build your journaling habit. His experience as a Stanford behavioral scientist is what led to that conclusion.
He describes the process like this: “Take a behavior you want, make it tiny, find where it fits naturally in your life, and nurture its growth.”
That’s where the ByteLyfe Microjournaling app comes in. Its features are tailor-made to help you start small with your journaling practice.
It helps you do all of the things mentioned in this article:
- Make Better Decisions – You can use hashtags to keep track of your past choices
- Clear Your Mind – You can write about your experiences at length
- Define Your Plans – You can journal using photos and videos too
- Track Your Wins – You can pin a post to the top of your journal that contains your daily wins
- Build A Journaling Habit – You can set reminders to journal daily
Download Bytelyfe today to experience the benefits of journaling.
