Journaling as a stress management practice
How journaling can help ease stress and cope with uncertain times
Stress is pervasive in today’s culture. And that’s not good.
Our ability to manage stress impacts our mental and emotional well-being, but also affects our health and our longevity. Finding ways to cope with stress is essential in today’s fast-paced, productivity culture.
Journaling is a healthy way to deal with stress and find solutions to improve your overall well-being.
Intensity buildup
This week was insane!
It started with an attempt at a home invasion, then my boss quit. Later in the week, my hubby’s cat had to be put down. I couldn’t sleep, afraid that the home invader would retaliate, and I felt overwhelmed by all the stress I’d encountered during the week.
It was just too much.
Yesterday, my nerves frayed and menacing to give up, I sat down and collected my thoughts in writing.
I tried to relativize. I was safe, lucky that the police showed up promptly, grateful. But also exhausted from all these intense emotions that built up over the week.
Journaling to unpack
I wrote for a long time, unpacking the events, my feelings about them, and my needs to get back to a sense of calm. Journaling has been a long-time friend in this regard.
I’ve encountered this article, published by Day One’s team this week, about managing stress with the help of journaling. It identifies 7 benefits of journaling as a stress management practice and includes a list of prompts to help get your pen moving across the page.
Some of the benefits are :
Identifying the causes of stress
Processing a releasing emotions
Identifying your triggers
Practicing positive self-talk
You can read more in the article
Journaling as a mental health resource
I’ve recently been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, a diagnosis that I’m slowly starting to unpack. Journaling is a great help in this regard also. Noticing the occurrences of my symptoms and expanding on their causes has been a great help so far.
I use the Remarkable 2 as my capture tool, and the tagging feature allows me to indicate clearly the days when my anxiety shows up. I can get a bird’s eye view of the frequency and gravity of my symptoms which is also a great help.
How can you implement journaling in your life?
If you are currently experiencing stress, you can start jotting down your thoughts, brain dump style.
A few scribbles on a page, or typed up on your iPad can go a long way in identifying the causes of your stress and possibly finding actionable steps to decrease it.
You can start by looking at the list of prompts in Day One’s article to get you started.
Do you have a journaling practice in place? Can you make some time today to try it out?