Journaling reduces stress, helps you process emotions and can be used to understand trauma, say experts and those who write every day
- Journaling can be especially helpful for those with emotional issues they find hard to express, such as depression and grief
- One author recommends writing three pages every morning, a shamanic healer has been journaling for 13 years and one man says the practice saved his life
Are you in need of a friend who you can trust implicitly? A confidante to whom you can reveal your innermost feelings without being judged, or a therapist to help you deal with stress or a traumatic experience? Maybe a coach to help you to dispassionately examine an issue and reach the right decision?
Look no further than a notebook, a pen and a commitment to keeping a journal. Journaling (the practice of keeping a personal record of one’s experiences, feelings and reflections on a regular basis) has been proven to deliver significant mental as well as physical health benefits through creating emotional awareness, generating mindfulness and reducing stress.
“Writing is a powerful tool to process our emotions and make sense of them,” says Meeta Gupta Hari, a mental health counsellor at Lifespan Counselling in Hong Kong. “It can be a massive help to process difficult events and create a coherent narrative about them. This raises our self-awareness and enables us to detect unhealthy patterns in our thoughts and behaviours.”
Expressing suppressed emotions or acknowledging and understanding a traumatic experience – natural outcomes of journaling – can be cathartic through releasing energy that is otherwise blocked.
“It is important that we process these emotions – and that seems to be the key to the significance of journaling. When we do that, our brains are freed from the enormously taxing job of continuously processing a disturbing experience, resulting in lower stress levels, better sleep and health,” says Hari.