Journaling for Better Mental Health

My collection of journals!

Lately, journaling has become an important ritual for me. With the chaos of running my business from a crowded home in quarantine, my thoughts begin to feel anxious. I feel a swarm of bees buzzing in my head. Soon, all positive feelings become sidelined by worry and apprehension, followed by negative emotions.

Journaling cuts through the swarm of bees in your head. When you write your worries on paper, the physical act of describing them helps to free you of them. When certain thoughts are expressed outside of your mind, they will take up less mental real estate, and you will have more room to think about things that make you happy.

“The physical act of describing your negative emotions helps to free you of them.”

Writing down your problems is like deflating a balloon of negative energy. When you write about them, your problems may not fully go away, but will shrink down to a manageable size. You’ll be able to have positive thoughts in your head alongside them.

There are many ways to journal. Some prefer structured journaling. This type of journaling involves writing prompts and specific places on the page to follow them. Many structured journals have spaces to write down things you are thankful for, or positive things that happened to you in a certain day. These are called gratitude journals, which prompt positive thinking. Others prefer to simply use bullets on lined paper for their journaling. Personally, I like to journal paragraph style because it grants the most freedom of expression and enables me to write about the positive and negative at once.

My collection of journals!

“Writing down your problems is like deflating a balloon of negative energy.”

However you choose to journal, it will always shrink the worrisome voices in your head. In times like these, it is incredibly important to focus on the positive so that we don’t get lost in all the negative goings-on in the world. Challenges or negative events in the world don’t need to become bad presences in your head. As long as we acknowledge them, we can manage them and make time for the good.