Five Years of Journaling — Learnings and Observations

For the past five years, in addition to maintaining a daily meditation habit, I’ve also kept a daily journal. I’ve handwritten journal entries in a physical notebook and have also used journaling apps. Over the years, I’ve noticed quite a few benefits to journaling, as well as effective ways to get the most out of it and keep up the habit over time.

Why Journal?

I find journaling to be a very effective habit to promote reflection, mindfulness, and building emotional resilience. It’s also a great compliment to meditating. Journaling can be a great therapy tool, great for expressing creativity, and helpful in practicing writing.

Great Therapy Tool

A big component of therapy is thinking through your feelings and processing them out loud. By bringing your thoughts and feelings to the conscious mind, you identify them and make them real. That makes them easier to confront and build emotional resilience. Journaling is a great tool to help with this.

Throughout the traumatizing events of 2020, I found the process of journaling my thoughts to be a useful coping mechanism. I would open up a blank page in my journaling app and write down everything I had felt insecure about at the moment. Complete stream of consciousness. Getting it out in the open acknowledged the feelings. I then wrote down my “response” to what I wrote, which was mostly reassuring and put everything in perspective. At the end of the session, I found myself feeling a lot lighter and less stressed.

Expressing Creativity

Journaling is also great for creative thinking. It gives you the ability to express free-form thought in the privacy of your own, unpublished writing. By writing or typing down ideas and building on them, journaling helps develop and process new ideas.

You can write down any idea that comes to mind, build, expand, and modify them. Like brainstorming, having the freedom to express any idea and building on them in any way you’d like is a great tool to promote creativity.

Practicing Writing

Journaling gives you a private place to experiment with different writing styles, prose, vocabulary, poems, and the practice of putting words on the page. Over time, this can help you gain more clarity in your thinking and develop the most impactful way to say something. Many fear publishing their writing and “putting it out there”. Journaling allows you to experiment in private, allowing you to be bolder in what you try out, without the fear of publishing a “mistake”.

Different Ways to Journal

There are many ways to journal: handwriting, typing, photo journaling, and video journaling to name a few. I’ve handwritten entries or typed them into an app.

Handwriting

Journaling on pen and paper is a great option for openness, creativity, and deep thinking. Having a blank page to write whatever you want on it—including drawings, sketches and diagrams is very attractive to some. Studies show handwriting has a longer-term effect on memory when compared to typing. This is because handwriting takes more time, which means more thinking goes into every word as you write it, and you are thus more apt to remember what you’ve written.

Typing

I find journaling via typing to be much easier for getting words “on paper” as fast as possible. This can be valuable when you need to quickly capture what is entering into your mind as a stream of consciousness. As mentioned earlier, this has been helpful for me in capturing then processing raw emotion as one experiences it.

Many don’t like typing because of the aforementioned benefits of handwriting. The blank page promoting creativity can also be more useful than typing something out. Some might also worry about privacy when putting something in digital form vs offline.

Good complement to meditating

I would often journal right after meditating. This would allow me to clear my head during meditation, or identify any lingering thoughts. Afterward, I would journal on the quality of the meditation, and write down any lingering thoughts that may have stuck around during the session.

This combination allows you to clear your mind, and then mindfully reflect on your emotions. You’ll be better able to get it out on paper, process it, and move on.

Incorporating Journaling into Practice

How does one go about incorporating journaling into a routine? Consider how long and how often you should write.

How Long Should I Write For?

Journal for as long as you feel you need to. Many suggest journaling for at least 5 minutes per session. I usually keep my handwritten entries to about three paragraphs long, or 2 or 3 minutes per session.

When typing, I would be able to journal for a lot longer, since I found it easier to capture more rapidly. I sometimes journaled for closer to 10-15 minutes when typing, mainly when I had a lot on my mind.

How Frequently Should I Journal?

Journal as often as you feel you need to. Try to establish a habit. Keeping a daily journal can yield many benefits, and ensure a consistent routine of documenting your creativity, processing your thoughts, or practicing your writing skills. Keeping up with it daily makes it easier to establish a habit.