Scientific benefits behind Journaling
The Idea of self-Improvement becoming more and more popular makes me curious about the ways people can go about it. Like me, you might have heard that journaling every day can bring a lot of benefits. But is this true? What can writing a couple of pages a day really do for you?
Now when we talk about journaling that is not only straightforward writing about your everyday happenings, we have to talk about writing down your emotions, feelings, and goals and thinking about them deeply during the process. Now there are a lot of claims about the benefits that this type of journaling can do to you, but let’s talk about a few big ones.
• Mental Health
• Physical Health
Journaling is a tremendous way to keep your mental health in check but it does not stand in comparison to professional help. Now a lot of studies have shown that frequent journaling can result in a decrease in things like stress, anxiety, depression. Now, these three things are often quite closely tied together with one influencing the other. So, the decrease in symptoms of one could lead to a decrease in symptoms of the others. Studies have even shown that writing a journal can sometimes be as effective as cognitive-behavioral therapy or CBT in dealing with these issues. CBT is a frequently used method of therapy that has a whole bunch of evidence supporting how effective it can be.
Journal writing is also a form of meditation, it forces you to slow down and focus on one thing in this case a singular thought for an extended period of time. Essentially different types of meditation can potentially decrease stress and have positive effects on our ability to control attention, regulate our emotions, and have self-awareness and can also impact our memory and learning abilities. Studies showing that it causes actual changes to the make-up of your brain.
Journaling can also help with our physical health, there is evidence that this type of journaling can strengthen your immune system and speed up healing times from injuries. I know this sounds pretty bizarre but there might be a lot of indirect effects of decreasing levels of stress and stress-related hormones like cortisol which at high levels for a long period of time can weaken the immune system and slow down healing times.
“The benefits of journaling” is a really interesting topic because there really isn’t a lot of evidence-based on the questions of Why? Or how? It could potentially help reduce things like stress or depression it’s clear from the mountain of studies that people have benefited from it. The information on the mechanisms of how journaling affects the body or brain isn’t published yet. But it is clear that journaling does help people and whether or not this is some kind of a placebo effect or not, the fact that it is an extremely cheap, accessible, and easy thing for people to do makes it not completely unnecessary for people to just give it a try.
It is also not necessary to write a journal every single day of your life because there will be days when you don’t have things or thoughts that are super important to write and this will lead you to overthink and hover over unnecessary thoughts. Researchers say that writing for the sake of writing is bad as that doesn’t lead to any growth. So, it’s completely up to you to decide what works for you the best. In the end, this can be the start of an aesthetic archive of all your important life happenings that are close to your heart.
Written by : Anindita Aich
