Why You Should Keep a Journal (and How to Start Yours)

Alan Henry
3/19/14 11:00am

Some of the most influential people in history kept detailed journals of their lives.
Those journals served two purposes: a permanent record for posterity, and cathartic
release for the people writing them. Even if you don't think you need either, keeping
a journal has great benefits you can enjoy immediately. Here's why you might want
to sit down regularly to jot down your thoughts.

Even if you don't think there'll ever be a documentary that uses your journal for flavor
commentary, there are plenty of reasons to keep one for yourself. Maybe you want
to leave something behind for your children that tells your story and what you
accomplished. Maybe you're more practical, and want a way to harness your
creativity. Maybe you just want the cathartic release that comes with regular writing.
Whatever it is, these are all great reasons. Let's look at each one, and why they
matter so much.

Regular Writing has Mental Health Benefits

Writing can do wonders for your health. Beyond keeping your creative juices flowing
—a separate topic we'll get to shortly—regular writing can give you a safe, cathartic
release valve for the stresses of your daily life. We've discussed some of those
mental and emotional benefits of writing before, from the angle of creative writing—
but you don't have to write fiction to get them. For example, we've mentioned that
keeping an awesomeness journal can do wonders for your self-esteem. Not only
does regular writing make you feel good, it helps you re-live the events you
experienced in a safe environment where you can process them without fear or
stress.

Harness the Mental, Creative, and Emotional Benefits of Regular Writing

In fact, there's so much data about the mental and emotional benefits of journaling
that counselors, social workers, and therapists often encourage their patients to do it.
This study from the journal Advances in Psychiatric Treatment is a great experiment,
and a solid summary of current research on the topic. In the piece, the researchers
noted that 15–20 minutes on 3–5 occasions was enough to help the study
participants deal with traumatic, stressful, or otherwise emotional events. It's been
specifically effective in people with severe illnesses, like cancer, for example. In fact,
the practice is so well regarded, there's a Center for Journal Therapy dedicated to
the mental health benefits of regular journaling, both in therapeutic and personal
settings.

It's not just what you write about though. How you write plays a role as well. This
University of Iowa study showed that journaling about stressful events helped
participants deal with the events they experienced. The key, however, was to focus
on what you were thinking and feeling as opposed to your emotions alone. In short,
you get the best benefits of journaling when you're telling your personal story, not
just writing about your feelings on their own. It's a great example of how telling your
own personal story can make a huge difference in your well being.
Keeping a Journal Helps Harness Your Creativity

The creative benefits of keeping a journal are also well documented. You've likely
heard that the best way to get better at writing is to just keep doing it. That's true, but
the benefits go deeper than just crafting better sentences. For example, regular
writing can help you learn to process and communicate complex ideas effectively. It
can also help you memorize important information, and brainstorm new ideas. In
other words, writing about your experiences not only helps you process them, it
helps you see opportunities that may not have been apparent at first glance. It also
helps you learn to break down complex experiences into relevant, useful bits of
information organized coherently.

Even if you don't think anything special has happened to you, the very act of keeping
a journal can help you brainstorm. How often have you caught yourself writing about
something that seems dull on the surface, but led you to a spiderweb of other
thoughts, ideas, and memories as you were processing it? Regular writing opens the
door to those opportunities every time you sit down.

Even If You Don't Do Creative Work, Regular Writing Has Practical Benefits

Regular writing can be functional, too, and serve as a reminder of mistakes you've
made, accomplishments you're proud of, and great moments you want to remember.
For example, keeping a work diary can serve as a track record of mistakes and
successes. That written record can come in handy later when you're feeling down,
but they can also help you right your personal ship when you're feeling lost. Pick up
your work diary and look back over the things you did really well with—you may be
able to pick out a pattern of things you want to follow, career-wise. Similarly, those
achievements and awesome moments don't just boost your self-esteem, they give
you great justification for a raise or promotion when it comes time to talk to the boss
about an increase. You don't have to be a creative worker to appreciate looking back
over the things you did well, and the things you need to work on. Seeing your own
mistakes before they're pointed out to you is a great thing, and documenting your
achievements makes sure they're never overlooked.

Keep a Work Diary to Minimize Mistakes and Document Successes

Regular writing can apply to more than just work, too. Keeping a journal is a great
way to build better habits, as it forces you to be aware of your actions and behaviors.
If you're looking to watch what you eat, keeping a food diary is a great way to stay
paying closer attention—one that's been proven to help people eat more healthfully.
Similarly, just writing down positive things that happened to you or tracking your
mood can help you identify good patterns in your life that are repeatable that you
should make time for—not to mention things that make you feel bad or throw you off
your game that should be eliminated.

Keep a Daily Food Diary to Track Your Diet, Lose Weight, and Build Healthy Habits
Which Medium You Should Choose, and Why
Once you've decided to keep a journal, your next decision is the medium to use for it.
You have plenty of options, and what works for one person won't work for another.
You have to choose the one that works best for you. Here are a few options:

Paper Notebooks
If you love the feeling of physically writing down your thoughts, a paper notebook
may be the best option for you. There's really nothing like setting pen to paper, and
we even have some paper notebook suggestions to get you started. Keeping a
paper journal gives you total physical control over your writing, and it gives you the
most privacy, since there's little chance of your journal being "hacked" or "lost" when
a service shuts down or is compromised. However, paper journaling means you don't
have backups in case something happens to your work—theft, fire, or just a lost
backpack means your journal is gone forever.

Five Best Paper Notebooks

If you don't want just a plain empty notebook, the Bullet Journal productivity method
fits in nicely if you're already using your paper notebook for to-dos and notes, and
the previously mentioned Sorta has unique notebooks with removable pages. If
you're afraid you're too busy to journal, consider the Five-Minute Journal, a paper
notebook that's sets you up with a motivational quote, then gives you daily writing
prompts to fill out like "Today I'm grateful for," "What would make today great?" and
"3 Great Things that happened today."
If you just can't separate yourself from your phone or laptop, there are plenty of apps
that promise privacy and security as well as a great writing environment. We've
featured a few before, but some of the stand-outs include Penzu, an all-online
private journaling webapp with mobile apps, and Day One, a good looking iOS/OS X
app that's location-aware, lets you add photos, and more. If you prefer free and
open-source, try RedNotebook. It's a fantastic wiki-style journaling tool that's cross-
platform.
How Can I Keep a Personal, Private Journal Online?
Of course, you don't have to use apps at all. You could just keep an encrypted text
file in Dropbox, use Evernote or Google Keep, or any other note-taking app you
prefer. You can even roll your own custom journaling system with whatever tools you
prefer, but keep in mind that the more you automate the process, the less you're
actually journaling, so you don't get quite the same benefits.
Blogging is another great way to get the benefits of journaling, regardless of whether
you get started to make a name for yourself, or to just get your thoughts and feelings
out in the open. Keeping a blog opens the door to the widest possible audience, but
it comes with the sacrifice of privacy. If that's your preferred route, you have a wide
array of tools and hosts to choose from, both free and paid. We've walked you
through some of the most popular blogging platforms, and even introduces some of
the new contenders you may have heard of. All of them offer different looks, cater to
different audiences, and are designed for different kinds of people. Whatever you
choose, keeping a personal blog may not come with writing prompts or fancy mobile
apps (although some do), but they can come with community, and option to share
your story with the world.
Better You
25 Nov 2018
Five reasons why you should keep a journal
Thought about keeping a journal? Life coach and author Jackee Holder explains the
benefits of journalling
by Psychologies
For more than 25 years I've been keeping a journal. I started around the age of nine,
squirreling away my thoughts in one of those diaries with a padlock and key that all
girls seen to have had at some point in childhood. I wrote mainly about events of the
day, too afraid to commit to paper what was really going on behind the scenes.

In my teenage years I drifted away from keeping a journal as I got caught up in the
world of boyfriends, A levels and completing my degree. Then, one snowy weekend
in Leeds on a counselling retreat, I had a remarkable breakthrough where the painful
words inside me that I’d been holding in for years escaped and turned themselves
into poems. For the whole weekend I wrote pages and pages of poetry based on my
experiences and unexpressed feelings and emotions. There was no stopping me. It
was as if the words wrote me. I was possessed, and read aloud to the group every
chance I could and to anyone who cared to listen. I was broken open and as the poet
Mary Oliver writes, ‘To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.’

Since then I have accumulated over 10,000 journal-writing hours and attribute
journal-writing to saving my life. I’ve extensively researched the growing body of
evidence about the many physical, psychological and emotional benefits of journal-
writing and how it can help you.

Here are five reasons why you should keep a journal:

1. Your journal has the potential to be both therapist and a dear friend who listens
without judging or interrupting and is open 24 hours a day. You can tell your journal
things you wouldn’t dare verbalise to someone else. Writing it down takes the edge
off more toxic feelings and emotions and helps you better understand what you’re
feeling, freeing up thinking space to gain clarity on what to do next.

2. By getting into the habit of consciously and attentively looking back over your
journals, you’re able to track your personal patterns of behaviour that help you
achieve goals and respond effectively to challenges. You’re also able to see the
patterns that get in the way of personal and professional growth, and healthy
relationships with self and others. By becoming mindful with what you are
discovering, you can move yourself from knowing into a doing state.

3. Journaling is inexpensive, accessible and is easily self-managed. It carries very

few side effects and can be applied almost anywhere. Hence my naming it the new
paper therapy.

4. Journals are creative portals. Because you’re in dialogue with your inner life when
you write in a journal, you solve problems and get creative. Keeping a journal can be
both a clearing-house and – in the next word, sentence or page – become an
incubator where you tap into your imagination and unleash your creativity and ideas.
Paul Smith and Betty Smith both fashion designers who both keep their creativity
alive by regularly writing in a notebook. Writers like Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Sylvia Path and Alice Walker along
with hundreds of writers across time who all kept diaries and journals which has
informed their writing and creative productivity.

5. You give yourself permission to write yourself into history – consider how many
women are left out of the history books? Journals give voice to your dreams and
aspirations but are also safe spaces to release negative feelings, hurts and
disappointments that could get in the way of those dreams and aspirations being
realised.
ESSAY PREVIEW
Do you remember when your sister used to write in her diary and how curious you
were on finding out what she wrote in it? If you didn’t have a sister – do you
remember keeping your own diary hoping that your mom would not find it one day
and read it? At a young age, we all learn to keep a diary or journal. In elementary
school, we may have been required to write in a journal in class replying to a
question asked by the teacher like “How was your weekend?” or “How was your
break?” Simple questions were asked to help generate ideas in our young minds and
help us write our own story. But now that we are older, do we still have the
opportunity to write our own story the same way we used to? Are we still able to
release our emotions and reflect on events in our lives? Though many people see
keeping a journal as childish or a waste of time, the effects of recording ones
thoughts are beneficial.
Most people question the purpose of writing a journal. People who write a journal
keep it to fulfill a basic human need – “self expression and reflection” (Sagan 1).
Writing is known as one of the easiest ways to express your personality and who you
truly are. You can write in a journal without having anyone judging you – unless you
chose to have someone else read it of course. You may reflect on your writing while
you are writing your journal/diary entries. Then, once you have expressed your
thoughts, you can even go back to your past entries to reflect on what you have said
before. Reflecting on your writing can help you develop as a person. It helps you
think through a situation and possibly solve it. Reflections help generate ideas for
how to improve as an individual. But really, it’s entertaining to re-read past memories
and see how much
The Balance
Distinguishing Between Wants and Needs
Scale balancing heart and money
Learn the difference to live a happy, fulfilled, and frugal life
BY ERIN HUFFSTETLER Updated June 13, 2018
The trick to investing, saving money, and reaching your financial goals is to make
sure you’re wisely balancing your long-term needs and your short-term wants to
allow you live well, but frugally, and find joy and contentment in life. There is no
formula for that as only you can determine which trade-offs you are willing to make

The difference between a need and a want is pretty simple—until you set yourself
loose in a store. Double chocolate chip ice cream? It's a food, so mark it as a need.
That designer T-shirt that fits you perfectly? Well, you need more shirts, so why
shouldn’t it count as a need, too. It's easy to mix up wants and needs, break your
budget, and lose sight of your goal to live frugally. Read on to learn how to easily
distinguish between the two and avoid falling into this financial trap.

Definition
The difference between wants and needs is quite simple, at least on the surface:

Need: something you have to have

Want: something you would like to have
PERSONAL FINANCE
What You Need vs. What You Want and How to Tell the Difference
By Sarah Winfrey on 11 January 2008

"But Mo-om, I want it!" How many times have you heard that in the grocery store, or
the toy store, or anywhere else, for that matter? Probably more than you can count.
And what do you think when you hear it? That poor parent? Or, thank God that's not
me anymore! Or, What is wrong with that child? Most of us go on our way, relieved
for some reason. It's not our kid, it's not us, and we don't have to deal with it.

Or don't we? The truth is that, as adults, there are times when we keep ourselves
from throwing these sorts of tantrums by buying something we don't need. We see
an item, feel the same desperate need that child felt, and assuage our own feelings
by buying the item. We have the power to do that for ourselves as adults. But these
are the purchase we often feel guilty about, and one of the main ways to get rid of
the guilt is to find a way to classify that purchase as something we do need. Actually,
we can do this any time we regret a purchase. (See also: 9 Simple Ways to Stop
Imipulse Buying)

So it's time for all of us (and I include myself in this) to grow up, time to stop looking
like adults on the outside but acting like chidren on the inside. To do this, we must
learn to distinguish between what we need, what we need in certain conditions, and
what we want.

Necessary Needs
These are the obvious things that every person needs to stay alive. I include food,
water, shelter, and not much else in this category. These are the things without
which we would not be alive. You'll notice that I don't include a certain kind of food or
shelter here. If you're in a truly desperate situation, spending what money you have
on the best food, water, and shelter that you can makes the most sense. If you're in
less desperate circumstances, it's up to you to determine what sort of these things
would be best for you, on your budget, etc.
Slightly Less Necessary Needs
We each have our own circumstances that dictate some other needs. For instance,
in order to keep my job, I need reliable transportation. Since public transport is
wretched where I live, that means I need to have a vehicle. Since I don't have a
motorcycle license, it means I need to have a car. It doesn't have to be the nicest
car, or in the best repair, but it does need to work consistently. I also need a few
items of a certain type of clothing, because if I don't dress a particular way, I will lose
my job. These aren't basic needs, but they are things that I need in order to be a
responsible adult in my life as it currently is. Stay-at-home parents will have these
sorts of needs, but theirs will be different than mine. It requires a certain level of
maturity to determine what these needs are, but this develops over time and as we
put in the effort. (See also: 5 Ways to Snag Budget-Friendly Business Clothes)

Pure Wants
Everything else is a want. Read that again. Everything (every single, little, tiny thing)
is a want. They're not needs. Now, there are levels of wants. Some are much nearer
to needs than others. For instance, I want a new computer. I could tell you that I
need it to do my writing, but that would be a lie. I have a computer that's not dead
yet. And if it dies, there are other computers I can use with enough ease that a new
machine is not necessary for me to do my job. But a new computer would help. For
instance, it would be faster, which would mean that I could do more work in less
time. It would also have a must lower chance of crashing, which would mean that my
work would be safer, which would also help me immensely. So there are aspects of
a new computer that would aid me in legitimate ways. So a computer might be closer
to a need for me than, say, that library of GK Chesterton's work that I've been
eyeing, or the several new pairs of boots that I know I would enjoy.

It's hard to transition into thinking this way. I know; I've been working on it for months
know. It requires us to be ruthless with ourselves, to tell ourselves the truth, no
matter how much we don't want to hear it. It requires us to say NO! when we really
want to say YES!, and it requires us to value skills that some people don't develop
over an entire lifetime. However, in a world where we're constantly bombarded by
advertisement, by people telling us what we do and do not need, this ruthlessness is
essential to our financial survival. We must constantly evaluate what we see, hear,
and even what we think, because only then will we have money to save and
complete honesty with ourselves.