How Keeping a Journal Can Improve Your Health

Please share with your friends… Tweet Pixabay There is more to journal writing than just being creative, sharing significant memories and building up vocabulary – it has proven to be beneficial to one’s emotional, mental and physical health, especially to aging adults. Journaling isn’t just for writers or students and you don’t even require special writing skills to reap the benefits. If you want to know how this practice can be advantageous to your health, just keep on reading. It can enhance your dexterity. As you age, it’s natural to experience stiff joints, weakened muscles and also arthritis, which can eventually make daily tasks more difficult to do. The act of writing is one of the many ways to improve your fine motor skills. You don’t need to write a complete essay every night. Just writing down some notes or a short to-do list on your journal before going to bed can definitely help enhance your dexterity. It can help fight age-associated memory impairment and dementia. Memory loss is one of the common problems among aging adults. Fortunately, there are a number of brain stimulating activities that can combat this problem and help preserve memory. In one study , it was found that people who participated mentally stimulating activities such as writing (both early and late in life) experienced a 32% reduction of memory decline. It can help you heal faster. Surprisingly, another study showed how expressive writing helps heal wounds faster. This study was conducted among 49 healthy adults aged 64-97 years. The participants were asked to write about either upsetting events or daily activities for 20 minutes, three days in a row. After two weeks, a biopsy on the arm was done for each participant. Eleven days later, 76% of the group that wrote had fully healed. […]

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