Six Important Reasons To Keep A Journal
Memories
A trail of memories, one so precious it follows behind you reminding you of who you were yesterday. Just like a picture, a memory frozen in time at times can guide your steps: journaling entails a picture drawn so vividly with your thoughts and words.
Mapping The Way Forward
It is thinking aloud, projecting the conversations in our head in an organized manner to map our path forward.
Journals Are Tools For Mindfulness.
Keeping a journal creates an opportunity for one to channel their inner selves, to converse with oneself, and get a clear picture of what is within. It allows you a chance to get to know more about yourself. Just like when we get to have dates with people we are trying to get to know, journaling can be equated to going on a date with yourself, writing the different facets that make you who you are. It is meant to be a collection of your ideas, observations, and even to record anything of importance you wish to get back to at a later day. Day after day we find our perception of life, our thoughts, and even our beliefs evolving and we need to keep these on the record as they show us how much we have grown.
Keep Track Of Your Decisions.
A journal is a tool to keep track of the important decisions that you make, and serves as a reminder of why you made them in the first place. It allows you to lay down your goals in a clear and organized way. When goals are not written down, they forfeit their importance and just remain in a realm of dreams. To realize your goals, you need to keep track. For a goal to be realized there is a need for a plan to be put forward and constant journaling allows you to make step by step plans to reach your goal. By journaling, you can ensure accountability and make it possible to go back and re-evaluate the progress of your goals concerning the plan detailed in your journal. Having a written plan of the path to your goals also allows one to be able to re-strategize.
When you keep a journal, it is fairly easy to sort through the mental clutter and be left with what really matters daily. It also allows you to understand your coping mechanisms. It allows you to improve mental clarity and focus by emptying your mind as you are writing down your thoughts. Giving you a better insight of how things are supposed to be.
Growth and progress cannot be seen when there is nothing to compare them to and journals facilitate that growth. The person you are has been built over a long period, being molded together from your experiences and decisions. A journal is a way to document your experiences, the hurts, mistakes, joys, and lessons that have brought us to be where we are. Being able to go back and get a reference from your past experiences when your memory fails you is priceless. You get to refer to past lessons to give you an idea of how to handle the situations at hand.
Help You Keep Your Life Organized.
A journal enhances your organizational skills. They can be structured in a way so that things are written in order, maybe in chronological order or perhaps in some order that makes sense to you. This in turn can help you to plan and structure your day, your week, your life. Knowing when to do what, in turn helping you escape from procrastination. You get to structure your life into a clear vision on paper making it easier to follow through.
It is more beneficial to brainstorm when you are recording the thoughts flowing through your mind. When you keep a constant journal you rarely go through instances where you lose an idea to the wind because the very moment it crosses your mind you write it down before it fades from your mind. Journals expand your mind and keep you creative and innovative as every moment of writing down your thoughts gives you time on your own to discover what you really think and feel.
A Journal Can Be A Therapy Tool.
Journaling is therapeutic. It can serve as a way to heal oneself from different kinds of trauma. It allows you to be free, to open up about your feelings, to embrace those feelings, and get to understand them. It allows you to be vulnerable even without having to share your thoughts when you find it uncomfortable or having witnesses during those moments of vulnerability. You allow yourself to delve deeper into your relationship with your own feelings and reactions, in turn, it can help you be more in control of how you react to situations. For instance, you could work on anger management and strategies to control your temper by resorting to writing down why you are angry and why you feel that way and then how to deal with it and cope with it.
