5 Reasons to Use Journaling For Mental Health & Happiness
1. Process Unresolved Emotions
Journaling helps us make sense of the cacophony of voices within. We often get stuck thinking about what happened a week ago and how we could have done better or how somebody mistreated us. If we take some time to write down our feelings, we’ll resolve any complicated emotions and free ourselves mentally.
Unresolved emotions can drain our energy and affect our performance at work and our relationships too. Therefore, you can use journaling for mental health and clean your “emotional windshields” to stay happy and high on life.
2. Build Self-Awareness
When you write in your journal frequently, you start to notice patterns in your thinking. For example, I tend to think about work a lot and how I want to be perfect in every area of my life – waking up early at 5 am, going for a run, working a solid 8 hours, meditating for thirty minutes every day and so on. Because I’m aware that I am a perfectionist, I take it easy on myself when I’m being too self-critical.
Others may think about their spouse, friends, money, etc. Whatever it is, journaling will help you understand the person you are, the things you value, and your dominant emotions that control your life. Yes, take a hard look at your dominant emotions. Because emotions are the driving force in life.
How do you feel most often: driven, happy, sad, anxious, numb, or angry?
To use journaling for mental health, use this complete list of emotions to better understand how you feel on a daily basis.
Reading back your writings will reveal the person you are.
3. Find Solutions to Problems
Once you become aware of the patterns you are living, you will find creative solutions to move forward in life. If there is an upcoming project at work that is stressing you out, you’ll find a new resource or solution by journaling.
By journaling for mental health, you bring spaciousness to troubling thoughts and can think from an expansive mindset – a state where creativity, equanimity, and infinite possibilities exist.
4. Live A More Empowering Story
We all tell ourselves a story of how things are and the role we are playing in our lives. And because nobody is perfect, many of us live a disempowering story – telling ourselves that we’re not enough and we can’t make anything of ourselves.
When you become aware of this story you’re living by journaling for mental health, you can take action to change this story and transform into your empowered self.
For example, if you tell yourself often that you are not good-looking, you can change this story by telling yourself that “I am beautiful from within because I make people feel happy and safe when they’re around me. And it’s all that matters.”
5. Build Your Intuition
One of the greatest gifts you have is your intuition: your ability to understand something without conscious reasoning. We use intuition in our lives without realizing it – to make decisions, to judge how a stranger is from the inside when we first meet them, and so on.
Intuition helps us see what cannot be seen by the eye. It helps us form connections between things that are seemingly disconnected. Many great people throughout history, such as Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, have stressed upon the power of intuition.
By journaling for mental health, you can hone your intuition as it creates a conduit, a passage for your underlying emotions. It takes us beyond our mental chatter and lets us create to our spirit.
Examples: Journaling Prompts to Get You Started
For each sentence stems below, write naturally without overthinking.
I feel happiest when….
If I were to open up completely to the happiness that life has to offer me, I would….
The ten words that describe me are…
The three things that I think about most of the time are….
The questions which I want to urgently know the answers to are…..