Transform Your Emotional Well-being with Journaling
written by Micah Brown
Any therapist will probably tell you that journaling can be a great way of dealing with and understanding your emotions. While some therapists may provide a specific way to journal, others may just recommend that you journal to comprehend your thoughts and feelings.
How to Start Journaling
First, there is no correct way to journal. Everybody will have a way of writing that works for them, but that does not mean that they may not need some help to get started at times. If you want to sit down and spill your thoughts and feelings onto a page without any formal process or structure, then do that. Maybe you need to make precise lists of how you feel at certain times of the day to comprehend how you come to terms with events that cause significant emotional responses. Or maybe you need to tell the story of your day as though it were a piece of a book or turn the events into some kind of fantasy. Or, finally, maybe you need to write it all out as poetry. When you journal for yourself, you are the only person who needs to understand what you wrote.
If you have never journaled before or if it has been a long time and your therapist has suggested a particular method to get you going, always try to make it work. It may not work for you, but it will start you down a path of discovery that will lead you to what does work.
If you do not have a therapist, it may behoove you to take a trip through YouTube and look up various ways of journaling. There are a plethora of resources out there and many ways to journal.
Strengthening Bonds with Co-Journaling
We spend a good deal of time talking about partner dynamics here because our goal is to help you succeed with your partner(s) regardless of your dynamic. Whether you are part of a couple, a thruple, a quad, or more, keeping various lines of communication open between you is essential.
Journaling together is a fantastic way to help keep that communication open and honest. As stated above, this type of journaling will not be where you want to write out your thoughts and feelings without structure. If there is something difficult you need to bring up, or even if you don’t know how to find the words you want to use, then spewing words onto a page in a solo journal may be the best way to begin. When it comes time to bring those feelings to a journal that you share with your partner(s), take the time to clean up those thoughts so that they are easily understood by those who are reading them. We recommend trying to focus on “I feel” statements, their explanations, and consequences.
Co-journaling is an activity that requires all participants to participate in shared journaling. It is a way for all involved parties to be open with their feelings even when they may not feel as though they are talking about them. If there are sensitive topics you want to discuss, then after finishing up here, you should visit our blog on how to approach sensitive topics.
Our relationships rank among the most important aspects of our emotional health. How we deal with our partners, how we respond to them when they are experiencing large emotions, and how they respond to us in similar circumstances is an important part of our emotional well-being. Co-journaling can help foster a better understanding of your various needs so that everybody involved in the dynamic is better able to provide the support and understanding needed for the others in your dynamic. Having healthy relationships means having a better sense of stability and a solid foundation where we can feel free to be ourselves and know our partner(s) have our backs.
Journaling With a Purpose
How and why we journal will differ depending on our goals. While most journals’ primary goal is to improve our emotional well-being, how we journal, when we journal, and the objective of our journaling may change from entry to entry or depend on the events in our lives. Beginning a journal can sometimes feel daunting, so understanding why others do it may help guide you.
Find out what you want to accomplish by journaling. Is it a better understanding of yourself? Is it the hope of finding an answer to a question that has alluded to you? Are you simply trying to make sense of things that happened over the day? Our lives are so noisy that sitting down to write in a journal could be the only time we have to ourselves.
Goal Setting Through Journaling
Setting and meeting goals for ourselves is an important part of how we interact with the world around us, as well as how we feel about ourselves in general. If we haven’t taken the time to sit down and determine what our goals are and how we wish to proceed in meeting them, they can float around at the edges of our minds and may become a great source of frustration for us. Using a journal to set goals, build a plan for reaching them, and then tracking your progress can help reduce stress caused by the sense that you’re not moving forward on your goals.
It has been demonstrated that seeing even the smallest amount of momentum toward completing a goal can provide a sense of accomplishment and reduce overall stress. These benefits result in a deeper sense of satisfaction and better-regulated emotions.
Healing Emotional Wounds with Writing
Perhaps a breakup, a death, or a traumatic event has left an emotional wound that you are having trouble finding relief from. A journal can help you understand your feelings about the event. It is a tool that allows you to look at your thoughts in a tangible format so that they cease to be something amorphous that sits inside you and weighs you down.
A journal is not a magic cure that will fix your emotional distress.
It is a tool that helps you to better understand your emotional distress and may help guide you toward ways to better manage it in the future. Coupled with therapy, this can be a powerful tool to help heal emotional wounds.
Reducing Stress with Journaling
We have all had days so bad that the stress feels like a physical weight on our shoulders. Perhaps the day ends in a tension headache or shoulders so tight somebody could crack a walnut on them, and we just want to scream. Having a journal into which we can pour our frustrations and stressors can help reduce the stress, take the edge off the headache and the tightness in our shoulders, and even allow us to put down the weight we carry when we are stressed.
Having a separate journal for when you need to vent may be helpful, especially if you are using a journal for tracking goals or emotional healing. Having a journal set aside just for venting your stress can keep the negative energy out of your other journal and allow you an open space to let those frustrations out.
If you have a stress journal, it would be best that it is not shared with others in a co-journaling scenario unless you feel there is something vital there that your partner(s) need to know.
Keep Journaling
Turn your journaling into a habit that you keep up with every day. Maybe you only start with a sentence or two per entry, but keep it up and let it turn into something that works for you and your partner(s) should you decide to go the co-journaling route.
If you are using Embrace, you can look at the prompts at the top of the screen to get ideas on how to proceed when you suffer writer’s block. There are also many tools online that will help generate prompts and even ask pointed questions to help you get your writing started.
