Journaling for your mental health - Smart TMS

Journaling can be beneficial for your mental health

Journaling presents you a daily opportunity to recover from the stresses of that day and leave all the unimportant stuff behind. It helps you identify things that may have gone unnoticed. Journaling gives you a chance to put everything down on paper in a way of emotionally letting go of your stress and releasing tension. It can help boost your sense of gratitude and sensitivity to all things you are grateful for. It is also a way of learning, it creates a written record of key ideas that you may have discovered. Whilst also recording your experiences which can be helpful reminders and precious memories to you in the future.

Journaling can help promote and enhance your creativity in a way that every once-in-a-while feels like nothing else can match. It can help guide you towards your goals and help bring your visions to life.

The benefits of journaling

Journaling can be helpful in dealing with an emotion that is or has become overwhelming. It can help to control symptoms and help to improve your mood by helping to try and prioritise any fears or concerns that you may have. By doing this it can help you to recognise the things that may trigger your mood or your anxieties which would, in turn, help you learn better ways to control them. 

Keeping a journal can help you try and identify the sources of your stress or anxiety. Once everything is written down for you to see, you can then identify triggers and work on a plan attempting to reduce your stress. Providing order in what can seem like chaos at times. Writing down all your private thoughts, feelings, frustrations and fears, can help you de-stress. 

Using journaling effectively helps to channel all those intense built-up feelings and emotions positively. Journaling can reduce anxiety, stress, and depression, helping to improve sleep and give us greater clarity. With this clarity comes self-healing and better focus. Enabling you to concentrate on other healing opportunities, like meditation which enables you to open up to yourself and let go of all that is bothering you. 

Research does show that keeping a daily journal can help improve your mental health and help get control back over your life to be able to move forward with your future goals and dreams. It can also help to reduce psychological distress. Journaling can be a helpful way to manage symptoms of depression alongside therapy and other forms of treatment. 

Journaling helps to:

• Become more aware of your symptoms 
• Identify any patterns of thinking or behaviours that can lead to depression 
• Take back control of your emotions 
• Reduce negative thoughts and feelings and challenge them 
• Then ultimately move forwards

Things to help you move forward

Here are some tips in moving forward in life to help overcome stressors.

• The opinion of others that control your life: it is not what others think but what you think about yourself that matters the most. You must do exactly what is best for you and your life and not what is best for everyone else around you.
• The shame of past failures: your past does not have to define who you are as a person; it does not equal your future. All that matters is what you are doing to move forward.
• Not appreciating the present moment: too often we try to accomplish something big without realizing that life is made up of small individual things that make up that whole.
• Being indecisive about what you want: being able to decide where you would rather be. Deciding to figure out what you want and then being able to pursue it.
• Procrastinating on the goals that matter to you: there are two primary choices that we have in life, accept conditions as they exist and accept the responsibility for changing them.
• Choosing to do nothing: it is extremely hard to be able to move forward until you can fully understand why you are stuck. You can only decide how you are going to live right now so every day is a new chance to choose your destiny.
• Your need to be right: aim for success but never give up your right to being wrong. If you do you will also lose your ability to be able to learn new things.
• Running from problems that should be fixed: try and face these issues, fix the problems, communicate, appreciate, forgive, and love the people in your life who deserve to be loved, including yourself.
• Overlooking the positive points in your life: what you see often depends entirely on what you have been looking for. You will have a tough time being happy if you are not thankful for all the good and positive things in your life right now.
• Making excuses rather than decisions: most long-term failures are the outcome of people who make excuses rather than decisions, set a goal and make some decisions right now.

Author, Nikki

Smart TMS Birmingham Practitioner