3 Ways Journaling Can Improve Your Life

If you never take the time to care and love for yourself, how can you truly love and care for another? Have you ever tried sitting down, without any distractions, and tried to understand yourself better? Do you ever feel caught up in the madness and insanity that is modern life?

It is easy to get lost in your thoughts.

Days, weeks, months and even years can go by for many people who never take the time to sit down and ‘cleanse their mind’. I truly believe that dedicating time to self-reflect and outline your goals is an important task that should be carried out at least once per week. In addition to this, once or twice per year, you should identify your most meaningful values and define your life vision. This will help ensure that the daily actions that you take are aligned with both your mission and purpose in life.

Journaling is a great activity and habit to practice for those who feel lost and unsure about their purpose in life. It is also a great tool to use if you are seeking to better understand yourself and the world around you.

This article will discuss five different ways that journaling can help improve your life. Below is a list of reasons.

1. Increased Gratitude

“Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you will have even more to express gratitude for.” — Zig Ziglar

The practice of gratitude is essential in our modern society. Constant reminders from social media and advertisements tell you that you need to purchase and consume more and more. It will never be enough if you are not mindful and appreciate what you already have. You have to learn to understand and learn to understand the fact that ‘life is short’, and, you only have one chance to make it count.

Why dwell in the past? Why worry about future circumstances that typically never occur? I am not saying that money is not an issue. You should all be striving to earn more money, (passive, if possible), to ensure that you can provide for yourselves and close family when needed. Meanwhile, you all should practice gratitude, as much as possible, to appreciate the fact that you live in the most comfortable time alive as a human being and have an infinite number of opportunities when compared to your ancestors.

Journaling is a great way to consider the various things that you are grateful for, write them down and appreciate them at that moment.

2. Reduces Stress and Anxiety

“The life of inner peace, being harmonious and without stress, is the easiest type of existence.” — Norman Vincent Peale

Stress is a silent killer. A cliche, yes, but one that is not taken seriously. When considering your modern environment, you may have a whole host of different stressors. They can be related to noise, pollution, financial, relationships, health and so forth. It is essential that you determine the stressors in your life. It is also imperative that you minimize the negative stressors while simultaneously maximizing the positive stressors, such as exercise and cold shower therapy.

Journaling enables you to better understand your environment, stressors, and activities which help de-stress. Using a journal, you can understand why a certain day or week was stressful, and what events were occurring at the time. As mentioned above, you can then apply this knowledge to optimize your day so that you have the least amount of negative influence from stress possible.

3. Improved Self-Awareness and Self-Reflection

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” — C.G. Jung

Our modern environment makes it easy to fall victim to vicious, negative cycles such as alcoholism, food addiction, and smoking. These addictions can make you feel trapped with no way out.

Habits that provide short term satisfaction but long-term consequences are also ones that give a false sense of accomplishment and destroy the reward system of the brain. These activities include, but are not limited to; video gaming, drinking alcohol, drug consumption, gambling, watching competitive sports and celebrity TV.

These activities will leave you feeling deflated, drained of your energy and will only make it harder for you to practice gratitude and reach your goals and objectives. Journaling can help you be mindful of any time you slip into these activities. In addition to this, it can help you better understand your triggers to self-reflect and become more self-aware.

I strongly encourage you to begin the process of journaling. As mentioned above, journaling can help you find your purpose in life while also holding yourself accountable for positive habits or actions that you wish to take.

Thanks for reading,

Happy Journaling!