PUTTING PEN TO PAPER

Instead of spending hours scrolling through social media, why don’t you do something more productive and write a journal?

Why Keep a Journal ?

Why Keep A Journal?

Life is an endless journey and each day starts a new chapter in life, but are you keeping track of your life and the different experiences that it brings. If not, this might be the right time to start writing a journal that captures each day of your life, thoughts that cross your mind, gratitude, affirmations, identifying passions or interests, setting goals and tracking results.

Establish Future Goals

Journal writing allows you to write down your experiences and thoughts and use them to identify your future goals and aims. Writing down even everyday experiences helps in identifying various mistakes that have been made or decisions that have proven to be ineffective. Writing will allow you to clarify the future course of action that will enable you to achieve your goals.

Problem Solving

A journal will help you to solve your problems more easily. Just like talking to a friend about problems helps reduces stress and provides relief, writing in a journal helps clarify the problems in your own mind and allows you to concentrate on finding a solution. Many journal writers believe that journals are similar to friends with whom one can share thoughts, problems and feelings.

Kinga Cichewicz

Self-Dialogue

Writing a journal will result in your taking some time out for solitary purposes and can prove to be an important means of self-dialogue. Journal writers often believe that writing a journal provides them a means to express themselves and dwell over their experiences in life. This results in mental clarity and allows writers to connect to their inner thoughts and feelings.

A Memory to Remember

Life changes rapidly and although certain significant events are stored in the memory, many other events tend to be forgotten. A journal will allow you to keep track of your life and the events that took place. The journals can serve to be a valuable piece of writing later in life when you want to sit back and reminisce over the past years and see how far you have come.

Personal Growth

A journal can also facilitates the growth process as you can establish goals, achieve emotional stability and connect to your inner self. Over a period of time, you will start to realise the small changes that affected your life and how writing those down helped you to avoid the same mistakes in the future.

Tap Inner Creativity

Writing a journal can prove to be an important way of relaxing and just letting your thoughts flow. It is not necessary that you write about your day’s experience. Writing about the ideas that flow through your mind can allow you to tap your inner creativity and might also be helpful if you want to discover new passions or interests.

Danielle MacInnes

Tips for How to Write a Journal

So we know that keeping a journal can be helpful, but how should you journal? It is very personal, and you should do what works best for you however here’s some tips to help you get started.

Tell the truth

The journal is a record of how you felt and what you did. Telling the truth will make you a reliable storyteller. If you haven’t done your yoga every day then don’t write that you did simply because you want your readers one hundred years from now to think you had great well-being.

Choose your kind of journal

Write in a book that is not so pretty you are afraid to write in it. Keep the size small enough you don’t mind carrying it in your bag and big enough you can read your handwriting. The advantage of paper is you can write without having to be plugged into an electronic device so you don’t increase your screen time or worry about a dead battery. The disadvantage of a paper journal is if you lose it you wont have a copy of it.

There are several software applications on the market you can use to journal. Be sure they sync to the cloud, as you don’t want to lose your entries because you fry your computer hard-drive. Journey and Day One can add photographs and text and export all of your entries into a PDF.

You can also journal in Microsoft Word or Scrivener and save your files to a cloud-based program that will keep your files safe if you lose your computer or pour water on your keyboard.

Hannah Olinger

Date your entry

You think you will remember when it happened, but without a written date, you might forget.Write down details

Record details like the time, location, who you were with, what you were wearing even. Details will help bring the memory alive.

Write down what you felt

What you were thinking? How were you feeling? Write down why. What are you grateful for? Think of the positive not just negative and if it was negative, what can you do differently going forward. What are your passions? What do you feel strongly about? New goals, new ideas….

Write a lot or a little

A journal entry doesn’t have to be three pages long, it can be a few sentences about the highlight of your day or it can be a short description of an event from your day. Where you describe details to help you remember what happened, try and use your five senses when writing, what you see, hear, smell, feel and taste? Your journal entry might be a drawing or a list of words or cities you drove through. It is your journal, and you have the freedom to be creative as you like.

These are only suggestions, a journal can be anything you want it to be, a daily important tool or a dip in from time to time, it’s up to you.