Writing out your thoughts can provide enormous benefits for your mental health, and it’s something I often recommend to clients.
Diaries (or journals, as we like to call them when we’re grown-ups), give us the chance to reflect on our experiences, decisions and personal growth. It’s like having a conversation with ourselves, and it leads to greater self-awareness.
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Journaling allows us to express our thoughts and emotions, and to process our experiences, and by doing this we can actually release stress, sadness or anxiety.
Getting our thoughts out of our head and down onto paper creates a sense of space and distance, so we can be more objective about any negativity or self-judgement. By just letting those words flow freely we can learn more about who we really are deep inside.
Writing in your diary or journal is a personal practice that’s unique to everyone. For some people a beautiful fancy leather-bound book is for them, for others it can be a scruffy notebook or even a few doodles on the back of an envelope. Nowadays increasingly it’s an app on our mobile phone – but there are reasons why it can be preferable to stay old-school with a pen and paper.
Writing by hand involves pathways in the brain that go near or through the parts that manage emotion, so it can help us access and connect to our feelings in a way that tapping on a keyboard just can’t do. According to research published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, writing by hand activates almost the whole brain, as opposed to typing on a screen, which hardly challenges the visual and motor cortices.
It makes sense when you think about it – when we write, our hands are forming various shapes to create different letters, whereas texting involves minimal finger movement.
These days, young people are increasingly ditching handwriting in favour of tapping on a screen. How long will it be before we simply dictate everything we need to say to AI? Handwriting seems to be a dying art, and I can’t help wondering how this will affect the brains of future generations. I guess only time will tell. Maybe there could be a compromise though, as more devices and apps appear on the market that allow us to actually write on the screen.
Some people can quite happily scribble away for hours filling reams of paper with their thoughts and feelings. But for others it doesn’t come as naturally, and just looking at that empty page is enough to make their mind to go completely blank.
If this sounds like you, don’t give up on journaling just yet. There are plenty of journals out there with questions and tickboxes to help prompt you along.
Pro tip – if you search online for journals for men, that should bring up those kind of journals.
Writing in your diary is usually thought of as quite a secretive pastime – I remember having a diary with a little lock and key on it when I was a kid, which filled me with a completely false sense of security that it would never be seen by any other eyes. I’m sure if my brothers had the least bit of interest they could have picked that lock in a second. But for me it just added that little air of mystery to it all.
Nowadays, with blogging, tweeting, snapchats and social media stories, we have new ways of presenting our innermost thoughts so they go straight out there for others to see. Are we less secretive these days? Is social media our new diary, I wonder?
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