Journaling is an easy and profitable pattern to establish in your life, and if you have reservations, you only have to journal for a short time – a few days or a week – before you start to see the benefits of putting your thoughts and ideas down on the page on a regular basis.
Before you know it, you will have a journaling habit that helps you identify positive habits and make changes that improve your wellbeing and success. Think of journaling as the rudder that steers your life in the right direction. Here are 10 lessons you can learn from the practice.
Perspective is Important
When we have a challenging life event like a breakup or the loss of a loved one, we experience strong emotions that fill up our minds creating confusion, stress, and unbearable sadness. But while it’s difficult to experience these things at the moment, with time comes new perspectives.
Through journaling, exercising, and talking through difficult feelings, we find ourselves back in a more harmonious state of mind. When we feel better, we have new thoughts, ideas, and perspectives on past events. Reading old journal entries with new perspectives can feel foreign.
Relationships End
Like your journal, everything in the universe has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that includes relationships. Sometimes, we think about past relationships and how they have shaped us. Would we be the same person today without them? Probably not, but they came to an end.
Our culture teaches us that relationships should last forever, especially when we tie the knot with someone and invest in a family lifestyle. But even well-established relationships don’t last forever, and while painful, it’s useful to maintain some perspective and look for the positives.
It’s Easy to Hate
When something happens that hurts us in some way; it’s easy to point the finger of blame at someone and fill ourselves up with anger and retribution. The reason we have such a hateful response is because of the emotions we are feeling at the time, emotions of anger and pain.
Although someone might have hurt you in some way because of what they did or said, chances are they have their own issues to handle. While that isn’t an excuse to cause you suffering, it is a route to understanding why they acted that way. Remember, your mind state is more important.
It’s Easy to Love
With the right perspectives, it’s easy to love anyone, even people who have hurt us in the past. Looking at past journals, we can see the times when we were happy, angry, confused, and sad, and we can see what was happening in our lives at the time. We can use these as inspiration.
Whether it’s your current partner, someone you loved in the past, or your favorite animal, bring them to mind and experience the loving feeling you have towards that object. Understanding that all people and animals are ultimately interconnected, we can tune into universal love.
Gratitude is Important
In the moment, we think that we will never forget a particular feeling or event, then we fall asleep, and when we wake up, the memory is gone forever – that’s unless you have a journal and you write it down. Keep a gratitude journal by your bedside and use it every night before your sleep.
Gratitude helps us to increase our wellbeing and happiness by focusing on the good things that happen to us in our lives. Not only can we bring good things to mind regularly, creating more happiness in the here and now, but we also build up positivity that inflates our life like a sail.
Embrace Challenges
One of the main purposes of journaling is to express ourselves on the page and communicate our worries and insecurities in a safe space. For that reason, journals tend to be filled with concerns about life events like going to college, moving to a new place, or meeting someone.
Reading old journals helps us to see how far we’ve come and gives us a sense of fulfillment and confidence that we were able to embrace our life challenges and work through them with integrity. This inspires further confidence in us that we can meet any challenges that come up.
Develop Mental Maturity
Chances are your old journal entries will look like they have been written by a younger person, a less mature person, or someone with less mental skill than you have now. That’s not surprising since it’s where you were at the time, but on reflection, you can see how much you’ve matured.
If this is your experience of journaling, then it’s a good sign; it means the process is working and helping you to develop. In order to develop mental maturity, we need life challenges, but we also need the right attitude to approach them. Journaling helps us to lead more skillful mental lives.
True Passion Counts
As we grow up, our ideas of who we are and what we want to do with our lives are constantly shifting and changing. We might have thought we could be one thing growing up, but that changed at university, then the world changed, and now we are somewhere unexpected.
Hopefully, reading past journals shows that you have followed a life path that’s in tune with your passions and interests. If not, you probably had a reason for following that path, perhaps to earn money to support a life goal. In any case, passion counts; tune into passion, and you can’t fail.
Develop Patterns
Journaling is great for lots of things, but one thing it’s particularly good for is discovering life patterns that help us to make better decisions about how we spend our time and what we do with our lives. If you haven’t already, try to think about patterns when you write in your journal.
Patterns might consist of exercise routines, diet routines, or meditation routines. Often, these patterns develop naturally, but when you note them down, you can start to measure your progress in certain areas and make changes that support healthier and stronger life patterns.
Be Proactive
It’s useful to think of life experience as an ocean with certain currents acting on us; if we do nothing, the currents take us in a natural direction, but we might not end up in a desirable place or even a good place. It’s better to be proactive, so choose a direction and start swimming.
If you’re worried about choosing the wrong direction for your life and missing out somewhere else, that’s always a concern, but it’s still better to choose a direction. The best navigation device you have is the inner voice that tells you what your passions are, so follow this voice.
Final Thoughts
Not everyone journals but they should because it gives us a place to be honest with ourselves and develop as individuals. Not only that, journaling helps us to discover helpful patterns over time and see how we’ve grown by looking at the past and reflecting on our life experiences. There are so many lessons we can learn from journaling as well as peer pressure worksheets.
If you don’t know how to start a journal or you aren’t convinced of its value, there are some easy routes in. First, choose a notebook you feel happy with – it might be plain, or it might reflect your personality in some way. Next, create some time in your life to write in your journal every day – make the time comfortable and use some journal prompts to get you started, then see results.