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The Productive Benefits of Journaling (plus 11 ideas for getting started)
What you write, you learn
The key to learning is to stop passively consuming information and start actively engaging with the ideas we encounter.
One effective way researchers have found to reinforce learning is through reflective writing: It promotes the brain’s attentive focus, boosts long-term memory, illuminates patterns and gives the brain time for reflection.
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Journaling approaches
- The Gratitude Journal: Simply write about something that you’re grateful for.
- Morning Pages: Before starting work each day, write 3 pages, long-hand, of anything that crosses your mind, to clear your head.
- The Goal Journal: Incorporating your goals into a daily journal is a huge step to getting them done.
- The Values Journal: Identify the values that are important to you. Then write about how the events of your day connect back to your values.
- The Curiosity Journal: Challenge yourself to write about one thing every day that made you stop and ask a question.
What you write, you control
- Recording your thoughts in a medium outside your own head helps your mind to become quieter: It stops returning to the same worn-out mental loops over and over.
- When you recount and reflect upon your thoughts and experiences you are, in effect, telling your own story. Journaling helps us clarify, edit, and find new meaning in these narratives.
Journaling and personal goals
It serves as a tool for identifying what you should prioritize on a daily basis, and what you should let go of. And it also gives you a record of the progress you’ve made toward your goals to keep you motivated.
Getting the most out of journaling
- Use pen and paper, to reap the psychological and productive benefits of journaling;
- Make it a habit: Keep your journal in the same spot where you’ll see it at the same time every day.
- Embrace slowness. Resist the instinct to rush through it to get to the next thing.
- Don’t edit; just write.
- Experiment and find out which approaches work best for you.
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Journaling as self-improvement tool
The practical reason to keep a journal: To manage yourself. Most of us still see journaling as a hobby, something that we do for fun or to relax. Sure, those reasons might be true for some. Bu...
The quality of your thoughts
Things to write about in your journal
- Write about your activities.
- Write about what scares you.
- Write about your decisions.
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Write About Your Values
Writing about our personal values can make us feel loving, powerful, connected and in control while increasing our sense of power and empathy. It also makes us connect them with the events in our l...
Integrity Report
Three-step action of working with your personal values:
- List out and elaborate on your core values.
- Conduct a self-assessment of how you have lived and worked by those core values in the past year.
- Hold yourself accountable for the misses and unachieved value-targets, if any.
This self-assessment is essential towards improving your life and the ability to manage stressful events and circumstances.
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Learning from old experiences
When looking back on her previous journal entries, Virginia Woolf remarked that she often found the significance to lie where she never saw it at the time.
Reading...
Journaling sharpens your memory
Our beliefs change slowly as we gain experience. Journal entries remind you of how you once thought.
Time will change your face without you noticing, but it will also change your thoughts without you realizing it.
Journaling motivates you
There is something about knowing that your day will be recorded that makes you want to make at least one good choice before the sun sets.
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