How does journaling help you? People have probably always heard that journaling your feelings is helpful but how does it do that really? In this article we will explore how journaling helps you and the ways that it can bring healing to your mind and body. It’s important to understand how to journal your feelings and the benefits it can bring to your healing process.
If you have heard that you should journal your feelings you might be wondering: Does journaling help with stress? Does journaling help with depression? Does journaling help with anxiety? The answer to all of these questions is simply: yes.
It’s important to understand how journaling helps your mental health especially when working with other healing modalities. Journaling can be a very important aspect of your healing process. Journaling can help you to understand your feelings so that they are not overwhelming to you causing emotional dysregulation.
If you are new to journaling, and wondering how does journaling help with mental health, this article by Healthline can be very helpful.
Journaling has many important benefits including increasing your connection to spirit. This connection can allow you to gain clarity and answers to some of the questions that have contributed to the emotional imbalances you may be experiencing.
Journaling can help you to realize that many of the answers you are searching for already are within you. Once you have emptied your mind out of overwhelming thoughts and feelings new information and guidance can flow in.
Continuing reading to learn about the seven important ways journaling helps your body and mind. After reading this you will understand how journaling will help you balance your feelings, mood and emotions.
7 Ways Journaling Heals Your Mind and Body
Journal Helps To Move Energy Through Your Body
How does journaling help with stress? Well first it helps with stress by moving energy through your body through the act of writing.
How does it do that?
When you are stressed, depressed, anxious or overwhelmed, stress accumulates in your body. You might sense this feeling of stress in your body as agitation, tension or anxiety.
By slowing down and taking the time to write out what you are noticing in your body, you are bringing more attention to your feelings and emotions. This discharges some of this energy from your body.
The act of writing itself can be very helpful as the movement of your hand across the page aids in moving the energy out of your body and your system.
When You Write You Activate Both Hemispheres of Your Brain
The act of writing by hand stimulates both hemispheres of your brain allowing your mind to process difficult feelings and emotions. Through the act of processing you allow these feelings and emotions to be integrated.
There are powerful trauma reprocessing therapies such as EMDR and Brainspotting which do this as well but in a more concentrated, structured and intense way.
The act of journaling is not nearly as intense as these two modalities which only can be done with a trained therapist. But they can be similar as the act of writing moves your hand across the page. Your eyes move back and forth across the page as you write. All of these processes stimulate both hemispheres of your brain.
This allows for the reprocessing of difficult experiences to occur leading to greater understanding, clarity and insight.
Journaling Brings Greater Clarity To Your Feelings And Emotions
The act of journaling helps you to gain clarity around your experiences. When your emotions are jumbled up inside of you, you don’t know how you feel and lack clarity. Clarity can be an important first step in validating your own feelings. After years of ignoring and suppressing your feelings it gives you permission to feel however it is you are actually feeling.
Often when you stifle yourself, and suppress your emotions, nothing else can come through to you. You feel stuck. When you write you release. You are releasing the stored up energy out of your internal system, mind and body. You are finally releasing what has been stored up inside of you for so long.
When this energy is released onto the page you can look down onto the page at what you have written. You understand yourself better leading to clarity and lifting some of the emotional confusion you might have experienced.
Journaling Allows Your Innate Inner Wisdom To Flow To You
When you are journaling you are allowing your innate inner wisdom to have space to come through you. When there is space inside of you, your inner wisdom is able to be recognized. Journaling allows the release of energetic emotions and makes room for your innate wisdom to flow there.
Often when you are depressed, stressed or anxious it overwhelms your system and nothing else can get in including your wisdom. There is a light inside of you that is trying to communicate with you but you need a certain amount of mental and emotional space to hear, see and recognize it.
Journaling Decreases The Feelings of Stress and Anxiety Within Your Body
When you begin writing you are releasing your feelings and slowly allowing the stored stress and anxiety to leave your body. Often when you are journaling you can notice what you feel and where it is located in your body.
When these things are stored inside of your body, without your conscious awareness, the pressure builds up creating the feelings of anxiety and tension you may feel within your body. Journaling can be a wonderful and soothing antidote to the internal pressures you may feel inside.
Journaling Helps To Increase Your Connection To Your Body
Your connection to your body is the most sacred thing you have on this earth but it is unfortunately one of the most disregarded.
The connection with the body can often be lost due to many life experiences and the day to day stress of modern life. We don’t move enough. We are not present enough. And we definitely don’t breathe as we should. All three of these things are pivotal to you having a deeper connection with your body.
When you slow down enough to journal it helps to increase your connection to your body. It brings you into the present moment with your body. Being present with your body is often a space most people try to avoid. If you want to bring additional mindfulness to the experience you can focus on your breath and notice the rise and fall of your chest as you write.
The connection you have with your body is the most sacred thing that you have and most people are not even aware of it. This powerful connection to life is something that most people are missing and don’t even know it.
Journaling Helps To Make You More Present To How You Feel
As mentioned above, present moment awareness is instrumental to your healing process. So often in western society we are indoctrinated to be logical and to be in our head. That leads to the often wrong belief that the head is where all valuable information lies. We become enslaved to the overactive chattering mind.
We need to become present to our moment to moment experience in order to process, feel and heal. This can be scary for a lot of us especially if you are a black woman. Being present with yourself can often be a scary place to reside even momentarily. But it is necessary in order to assess ourselves and understand what is going on underneath the surface of our day to day experiences.
So if you weren’t clear before, I hope you are now able to see how journaling can help you and be immensely healing! We discussed how journaling helps with stress, how journaling helps with anxiety and how journaling helps with depression. And some key ways it can bring more healing to your life. My best to you on your healing journey!
other posts you might enjoy:
{JOURNAL PROMPTS FOR ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION | 19 SOMATIC JOURNAL PROMPTS FOR YOUR HEALING}
{HOW TO BE MENTALLY HEALTHY AND HAPPY | 7 TIPS FOR MENTAL WELLNESS THAT YOU MUST KNOW}
[…] for your mental health that is often taken for granted. I recently wrote two blog posts about the benefits of journaling and shared nineteen somatic journal prompts that help you connect with your […]