Okay, hear me out.
Practicing journaling everyday helps us relief stress and make us more mindful. It’s the old concept of having a diary. A safe place to come back to and talk about your day, your secrets, things you would never share with anyone. To relief your pent up stress, your creativity, to doodle some ideas or drawings, song lyrics, anything you find interesting really. Although you may think it’s a waste of time, writing, specially as an adult can be very healing.
It is described as the habit of writing thoughts, emotions, sensations, dreams and ideas. It is a very open practice and only requires pen and paper. Some of it’s main advantages are:
- Connecting with yourself: to understand how we think and know ourselves better.
- Freeing your mind: To release all the emotions that overwhelm you, and express yourself without filters. Knowing no one will judge you.
- Having a more mindful day: to understand our feelings and reactions better.
- Acting towards your own goals: to monitor and detect what is blocking us from moving forward and how to move on.
So how to begin?
Well, I gave a few ideas above but there are no restrictions to what you can do, just write until you surprise yourself! but if that is not helpful there are common starting practices like: making a gratitude journal, expressing how you feel, make a to-do list, an emotions tracker or just planning your next day. And despite the fact that most people will tell you to only write these things outside the digital world, with your old pencil, there are some cool journaling projects that can motivate you to write daily and keep a consistency just from seeing how nice it is, such as making your journal entries folder with the thumbnails of book cases or old CDs like these ones:
This one too if you enjoy building websites
sorry i thought it was funny lmao
Jokes aside,
Another unusual approach is this dope idea I found on Tumblr. TLDR: Imagine future historians uncovering secrets of your civilization through your story…
There are thousands of other ways to do this but it all comes down to self expression and showing up to register how you’ve been, like a friend or a prayer. To help you be a little bit more comfortable in this world.
Curiosity: A journal or diary were also called a commonplace book, having been used more from antiquity to the renaissance and nineteenth century to compile and store knowledge. Similar to scrapbooks they contained notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas and recipes. They just differ from journals and diaries due to being written by subjects while the previous two were more intimate and subjective.
