Showing posts with label benefits keeping journal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label benefits keeping journal. Show all posts

How To Journal For Mental Wellness

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Photo by Jess Bailey Designs from Pexels


A journal can be whatever you want it to be. For some people, it’s a record of each day. For others, it’s a creative outlet. For others, it’s a way to manage their mental wellness. Journaling for mental wellness has gained a lot of focus over recent years (especially since the pandemic). If you’re thinking of trying it, here are three points to consider.


Journal on paper


You can journal electronically if you really want to. It is, however, a good idea at least to try paper journaling. Many people find it a very different experience from journaling electronically and a better one for mental wellness.  


Apart from anything else, journaling on paper, by definition, takes you away from screens. It can also help to force you to slow down. Even if you’re a slow typist, using a keyboard is still often much quicker than writing. That’s fine if you just need to get a job done but sometimes there’s a case for going slowly and mindfully.


Journaling on paper also provides a high degree of privacy and security compared to journaling electronically. You don’t have to deal with tech fails or cybersecurity issues. There’s also less danger of you accidentally publishing something you meant to keep private.


Balance structure with freedom


Even though the names are similar, bullet journaling and regular journaling are different. You can, however, draw inspiration from bullet journaling. In particular, you could look at its balance of structure and flexibility as a guide for your journaling. For example, you might want to include prompts and trackers alongside blank space for you to use as you wish.


You can also keep a “temporary” journal as well as a proper one. Your temporary journal can essentially be your “catch-all” for whatever thoughts you want to record. This can literally mean anything from basic to-dos to your thoughts on the Yelp extortion issue. You would then distill these down into your proper journal.


This approach is particularly useful when you’re still figuring out what you want from your journal. Even once you do have an established journaling process, it can still be handy to have an “overflow” notebook.


Push your creative boundaries


As previously mentioned, your journal can and should be whatever you want it to be. If, however, you’re journaling for mental wellness, then you may find it very helpful to push your creative boundaries. At the very least, it’s worth trying and seeing how you feel about it.


Pushing your creative boundaries will mean different things to different people. Basically, it will depend on where your starting point is. If you’ve never considered yourself to be creative then you might want to start with the likes of stickers and stamps and doodles. If you are more artistic, then use your journal to try out new techniques.


Regardless of your previous artistic experience (if any), you might want to try exploring neurographics. This is a technique for drawing out your inner feelings and expressing them on paper where you can address them. Many people find it very soothing and relaxing.


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The Benefits of Keeping a Bullet Journal

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The Benefits of Keeping a Bullet Journal



Bullet journals provide an easy way to track all of your thoughts, feelings, appointments, and goals for your life, whether for today, next week, or 10 years from now. Here are some of the different benefits of having a bullet journal.


You Can Reduce Stress and Anxiety


First of all, if you struggle with a lot of stress and anxiety on a regular basis, the bullet journal can help with that. You are able to record your moods and behavior changes, which help you to determine triggers for your anxiety and panic attacks. 

Since you aren’t missing appointments or schedules and become more focused on a daily basis, you can also find great stress relief.


It Helps Keep You Organized

You can also become a more organized person with the help of a bullet journal. Perhaps you remember to get to work on time and bring your kids to their dentist appointments, but you tend to forget about your daily fitness regimen or don’t feel organized enough for meal planning. The bullet journal can help with these tasks and much more.


The Journal Replaces Your Traditional Planner

Planners are great, but there tend to be some limitations with the store-bought varieties. They aren’t very customizable, so you are forced to use whatever calendar layouts and note pages are provided to you. This limits you to how much you can include on each page and what sections there are. 

With a bullet journal, it replaces your planner and includes absolutely anything and everything that you find important.


You Get More Information About Your Personal Goals

Bullet journals can give you a better idea of what your personal goals are and what is required to reach those goals. You will start including lists, aspirations, and bucket lists. This, when looking back on it, really gives you a good idea of what you want out of life and what tasks you need to do in order to achieve them.


You Can Track Your Regular Habits

When you enter detailed information in your bullet journal about your daily life, you will then be able to track your regular habits. 

For example, if you have a food and exercise log section, it lets you see what you are eating on a regular basis, how often you eat out, and what areas of your fitness routine need work. 


You can also track your moods and resulting anxiety or stress, or track your daily expenses to see where you might be able to cut back.
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Bullet Journalling: The Parenting Savior No One Tells You About

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Even if you don’t realize that you need a bullet journal in your life, you were drawn to this post for a reason. And, that reason is that journaling in this way could be your parenting savior.

Nurture Your Creative Mind Through Journaling

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Nurture Your Creative Mind Through Journaling


Journaling can really help you to nurture your creative mind.  Whether you’re a photographer, artist or writer, your creativity is crucial to your ability to carry out your job.  Therefore, it consistently needs to be nurtured. So, how can journaling help with this? Below you’ll discover how to nurture your creative mind through journaling.

First things first – Choosing the right journal


If you want to get the most out of your creative journal, you’re going to need to make sure you actually enjoy using it.  As silly as it may sound, the first step to this is to ensure you like the look of the journal.  You will notice I mention this in almost every post.  I can't tell you how many journals I've stopped using because I didn't like the paper or pens bled through all of the time or it had lines.  Whatever.  #papersnob - what can I say?

How the journal is presented can make a surprising difference on how inspired and motivated you feel to use it. So, take your time to browse through the various journals on the market and choose one which speaks to you.

The benefits of a dream journal


There’s a lot of ways you can use the journal to inspire creativity. However, one you may not have considered using is dream journaling.  Many authors, artists, and musicians have discovered dream journals can help nurture their creativity. Dreams take on many different forms and can, therefore, be used to inspire creative ideas.

The lead singer of the band “Train”, famously opened up in an interview that the smash hit “Drops of Jupiter” was written after he had a dream.  So, if you are stuck for ideas, recording your dreams can be a great way to unlock your creativity once again.

Learning to trust the authority in your voice

When you start to keep a creative journal, it trains you to trust the authority in your voice. So, what does this mean? Well, it basically means you learn to stop double guessing and questioning your creativity.  A creative journal doesn’t have rules. Instead, it encourages you to write or draw freely. There are no corrections made to anything and nothing you put in the journal is ever wrong. So,  you’ll start to trust your creativity, rather than question it.

Growing your thoughts and insights

Creativity often stems from thoughts and insights. After you’ve jotted your thoughts down into the journal, you can go back to them another day and expand upon what you wrote.  Look at the ideas you’ve written down and see how they can be expanded. Often, it’s just the initial ideas which are the hard part. Once they’re written down, you should find it easier to expand upon them.

As you can see, nurturing your creativity is pretty simple if you follow the above ideas. The key is to use the journal every single day. You may need to force yourself to use it some days, but the effort you put in will definitely be worth it.
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Boost Your Creativity with These Journaling Ideas

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Boost Your Creativity with These Journaling Ideas

Are you looking to boost your creativity through journaling?

While a creative journal can really help to develop and nurture creativity, it can be difficult knowing where to start. There’s also going to be times where a certain journaling method may stop working for you for a while. Whether you’re looking to start a creative journal, or you’re simply looking for a new method to try out, below you’ll discover some awesome journaling ideas.

5 Styles of Creative Journaling

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5 Styles of Creative Journaling


Did you know there are several different styles of creative journaling? 

Motivate Yourself to Journal Daily

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Motivate Yourself to Journal Daily

Knowing why you should journal is just the beginning; you then need to motivate yourself to keep up with it. It is generally recommended that you write in your journal every day but doing it on a regular basis is also helpful. Look at these easy ways to motivate yourself to keep writing in the journal.

Gratitude and Incorporating It into Everyday Life

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Gratitude makes what we have enough


We all get into the rush and tumble of everyday life. When we do, we tend to forget being grateful for what we have, tend to only focus on the negative, and/or keep imagining all of the other stuff we want/"need". I am certainly guilty of all of these. In fact, as I reviewed my gratitude log, I realized in 3 weeks time, I only did 6 entries. I didn't exactly meet the everyday goal...

Journaling For Mental Health

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Journaling For Mental Health

If you are someone that suffers from stress, anxiety, or depression, you should definitely be writing in your journal every single day.  Journaling is therapeutic, helps you get rid of all those thoughts and feelings without burdening someone else, and provides a host of benefits for most everyone.

Why Everyone Should Have a Journal

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Journaling is not just something certain creative individuals do, but it should really be something everyone does. Journaling helps in so many ways, from finding triggers to your stress, to helping with physical and mental health, and of course being a creative outlet.