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Highlighting The Importance Of Journaling For Women
“Dear Diary” is not just reserved for the awkward recluse or high school sweethearts. Previously, journaling was considered as a stereotype of Napoleon Dynamite and Sweet Valley High; however, writing is essential to keep your mind in shape without any age boundaries to maintaining it.
People may see writing as a tool that is invaluable in life, but psychology has continued to dissolve the skeptics. Regardless of gender, journaling has innumerable benefits for physical, mental and social well-being. However, the impact has much more important for a woman as compared to man because of their fragile and sensitive nature. It helps you to keep yourself organized as well.
A study conducted by King Essay found out that; people who were dealing with anxiety and depression had an improvement in their symptoms by 60% with just 30 minutes of daily writing as compared to patients who were on medications by 22%. Another survey conducted by them proved that journaling regularly helps to improve handwriting and thought processing by 77% among students. Similarly, journaling helped many students to deal with their psychological issues like expressing and communicating their thoughts to other fellows.
In this article, we will highlight the importance of journaling for women who loves to sit on the fence with a pen and a diary with them. Below are 11 benefits of keeping a journal. Let’s start with it.
1. Stretching Your IQ
Some of the most durable cases show the ability of journaling to enhance your IQ. The University of Victoria published a report that concluded that as a part of language learning, writing has a positive impact on changing a person’s IQ. Also, it has a positive correlation with intelligence. Hence, journaling is not just an exploration of languages. It awakens a natural urge in yourself to search for new words to express your feelings that ultimately improves your vocabulary. Also, the vocabulary test is one of the best single measures of overall intelligence, and that is enhanced by journaling regularly.
2. Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability of a person to manage emotions with perceptions of themselves and that of others. Women are needed to be more emotionally intelligent. Journaling serves as an outlet for them to express and process their emotions and improve their self-awareness. With this, intimate familiarity enables you to bridge the gap of empathy and let you intuit better by understanding other’s feelings and experiences. Hence, being able to be on the same page with others is called emotional intelligence and allows a person to establish a deeper connection with someone.
3. Boosting Memory and Comprehension
Scientists have proved that there is a unique and strong connection between hands and brain, which is sparked by the composition of ideas and thoughts of a person. Psychology believes that words are the representation of ideas and formation of words causes the mind to compose and recompose thoughts while writing. This also improves your memory and strengthens your information processing by engaging your brain in a cognitive recall.
4. Strengthen Your Self-Discipline
Discipline begets discipline. Setting a daily routine to take time out for writing will teach you an act of self-discipline. Journaling is just like a workout, the more you stretch it, the more it will get stronger. Furthermore, habits formed once have a tendency to spread to every aspect of life. Just like keeping your office tidy can lead you to keep your bedroom clean as a habit, your writing punctuality will dominate discipline and punctuality in your daily regime as well.
5. Healing
Expressive writing has the ability to heal you physically, mentally, emotionally and psychologically. Professional therapists have seen improved immunity in patients participating in writing exercises. The reason behind the outcomes is that stress dominates when we have an emotional blockage and hypothetical overthinking.
When we express an emotional experience into words, we make them graspable, and by doing this, we free ourselves from mental traumas and untangle ourselves from invisible boundaries. There are a number of researches that proves that journaling lowers stress, anxiety, depression and induces better sleep.
6. Spark Your Creativity
Writing can unlock creativity in anyone and everyone. It doesn’t need you to be creative; it’s all about how you let it flow freely. Journaling is a powerful tool when you write all about what you think. It is like a stream of your consciousness and unconsciousness in writing. Journaling boosts your creativity by bringing out your ideas and thoughts that you never knew you had hidden in you. These unnecessary thoughts loosen your expressive muscles and let you flow your every insecurity to wave off with words. Thus, including even a single page of writing in your daily routine will gets your creative blood flowing.
7. Improve Communication Skills
According to vocabulary rules, writing has a crucial connection with writing. As we know that journaling is written communication hence tracking your natural thoughts in writing actually translates vocalizing. Undoubtedly, any woman who is writing will have an aim to make her journal tidy in writings to see benefits in her verbal communication. Hence, making a decision of handful writing will ultimately improve your communication skills.
8. Self-Confidence
Gratitude journaling allows your inner self to relief. Writing about positive experiences and thankful thoughts will make you feel more peaceful. It also reaffirms your abilities in ugly heads of self-doubts. Positive thinking releases dopamine and endorphins that boost your mood and self-esteem, which ultimately reflects for you to become successful and satisfied with happiness.
9. Evoking Mindfulness
There is a robust connection between mindfulness and prosperity as the buzz of evoking mindfulness is of a good reason. Journaling brings you a satisfactory state of mindfulness to overcome frustrations, anxieties, depression to prevent you lose the edge in the present moment. Journaling will make your mind attentive actively to engage with your own wandering thoughts and keeps you aware of your inner self.
10. Achieving Goals
Writing about your wishes, dreams, desires and goals is the most common way to keep yourself ambitious and committed. The reason is, words can help you achieve your objectives. It is just like building a house without a blueprint. Hence making your plan for attaining goals does make sense. Continually writing about your goals will make your brain take then as important. Therefore, your RAS (reticular activating system) will alert your brain to flag relevant possibilities to help you achieve your goals. Also, writing in detail about your goals and objectives will make a psychological blueprint in your mind, and this will improve your like the hood of achieving those goals.
11. Stabilizes Mental Health
Everyone had a hidden diary under their mattress when they were teenagers. Diary was then considered as a place to confess our grudges, note our struggles and discuss our fears without being judged. It always felt good to get all of those feelings and thoughts out of our mind to make our world clearer.
When we reach adulthood, we stop exercising writing. However, the benefits and concepts of journaling still apply them in a similar manner. Keeping a journal in adulthood help us to write down our thoughts and feelings more clearly. Hence, if you are dealing with anxiety, depression, stress or any other psychological issue, journaling is a great idea to make yourself relived. It enables you to take the control of your emotions and helps to improve your overall mental health.
How to Journal?
Set aside a few minutes and try to write every day. It will make your habit of writing in your journal on a daily basis. Keep a pen and diary handy, always. It will make it easy for you to write down your thoughts whenever and wherever you want to write. Real-time expression of opinions is a magical way to keep all of those feelings noted.
Your journal and writing do not have to follow any structure of style. Write whatever feels right to you. Your journal is your own private place to share your thoughts and discuss whatever you want to share. Let your words flow freely and don’t bother spell and grammatical mistakes. Also, don’t consider what others are going to think because no one is going to read it except you.
Journaling helps you to keep your own awareness when you are in chaos. You can know yourself better when you reveal, recognize and acknowledge your most private fears. Your writing time then serves as your relaxation time when you can wind down, de-stress and untangle yourself. Choose a place for writing that is calming, and soothing with a cup of tea or coffee. This will nourish your mind, body and soul more than you can imagine.
Foreword
As you start to incorporate journaling in your daily routine. Stick to the approach that an elephant is eaten best one bite at a time. Hence, be patient and consistent in making new habits and including them into your life. Start with weekly once then twice then thrice and then daily. Take a perfect time out and make a morning routine or before going to bed to make yourself comfortable with writing and relaxing at the same time. Good luck!
Author Bio:
Stella Lincoln is a qualified therapist and a mental health expert. She has worked with many NGOs and rehabilitation center for providing counseling. She loves to write, as well. She often contributes to different blogs.
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