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"It girls" across the world have turned to 5 am journaling to clear their minds, set daily goals, and be their best self. But does journaling actually work? Or is it just a waste of pencil, paper, and time? Here's all about the art of journaling and how you can use it to de-stress and achieve your objectives.
"It girls" across the world have turned to 5 am journaling to clear their minds, set daily goals, and be their best self. But does journaling actually work? Or is it just a waste of pencil, paper, and time? Here's all about the art of journaling and how you can use it to de-stress and achieve your objectives.
Benefits
Benefits
increased self awareness
By writing down your day-to-day activities and thoughts, you can reflect on decisions you've made and their consequences, creating a hightened sense of self-awareness.
increased productivty
Journaling your goals and steps toward them toward them helps increase productivity as you can track progress in real time. This makes it easier to adjust for more efficient methods to achieve your goals. For example, journaling the goal of trying to reach a 200lb squat can help you see if you increase weight/week faster with hypertrophy (low reps, high weight) or with endurance lifting (high reps, less high weight).
facilitiates self-reflection
The act of writing by hand is considerably slower than speaking or even thinking. Therefore, writing makes you be present when reflecting on your emotions, decisions, and interactions with other people. Additionally, journaling activates the Broca's area (responsible for speech/sentence production), the libic system (associated with emotion, anxiety, and fear), the hippocampus (converting short term memory to long term), frontal lobe (to control movements for writing), and various lobes for sensory processing (sight, touch, smell, hearing). Since journaling is an immersive experience that requires such a diverse range of regions of the brain, it helps make further connections in the brain as well as strengthen old ones (relating to emotional or episodic memory) that facilitiates self-reflection through our emotions and thoughts.
helps ground yourself/stay relaxed
Writing in a journal about one's daily experiences (or the goals to create future ones) helps ground you beyond self-reflection. A journal is a tangible thing that you can manage entirely and create order however you please (via different journal organizational methods). Journaling can also help you realize your fears and social/emotional tendencies that helps relax you at the begining or end of the day. Putting everything in perspective can also manage stress an anxiety, giving you a supplemental way to rely on yourself for stress management, rather than a friend or therapist.
Just ten minutes a day of self-reflection can make a difference in your productivity, emotional awareness, or stress-management.
Written by: Siena
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