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Dear Diary: Benefits of Journaling

The idea of keeping a journal or a diary of thoughts, life experiences and emotions dates back centuries; it’s one way we’ve learned about historical figures and times (i.e., The Diary of Anne Frank).

Many mental health professionals, life and career coaches and self help groups suggest writing in a journal as a means to get to know yourself better – your goals, your aspirations, your disappointments, your dreams, your patterns of behavior. Journaling is different from other types of writing in that it’s private; no one is editing your writing, judging you or giving you a grade. It’s for your eyes only.

Reasons to keep a journal include:

• Self-awareness – Keeping a journal helps to clarify how you feel about an issue or how you’ve been affected by something. It helps you to rehash your day and think about how you handled a situation either brilliantly or how you might have done something differently.

• Goal setting – Journaling helps you decide what you want to accomplish this week, this month, this year. It helps you to decide what kind of job you want, what type of mate you’re looking for, where you want to be in five years.

• Trying on a different persona – When you write, you can be humorous or witty, sad or weepy – sides of you that you might not want to show the world, or even your best friend!

• Improving your health – Journaling can be a way to counsel yourself, a means to reduce stress and get things out on to paper, a way to walk through your fears and your past hurts to resolve them and move on. This has a tremendous impact on your mental health and your physical health as well; research studies have shown that it helps to boost the immune system and reduces the symptoms of certain health conditions, such as asthma and arthritis.

• Identifying patterns – Keeping a diary or a journal over time helps you to identify similar self-defeating or negative patterns of behavior that occur repeatedly in your life. Becoming aware is the first step in the process of being able to change behavior, such as tendencies to overeat, over drink, over spend, or over medicate, choosing the same type of negative friends, or making poor relationship choices.

Many top executives and people in power keep journals for these same reasons. Try it for a bit, say a month or so, and see if it doesn’t make you feel better. Like chiropractic care, the results may not be noticeable in the first week or two, but once you’re on a roll, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it!