What a Few Minutes of Journaling Can Do for You

Do you keep a journal? Chances are the last time you wrote in one was for a primary-school Chinese composition. Finding a suitable topic and then counting up the word count — back then, journaling really was a chore! In truth, journaling can be a very personal thing. It needn't come with too many rules; all that matters is that it feels good to you.

Journaling has a long history — traces of it can be found as far back as the Eastern Han dynasty or the era of the ancient Greeks. As modern lifestyles have changed, keeping it up isn't all that easy for people today. Yet by spending just 10 to 20 minutes each day, you can bring enormous benefits to your mental health.

1. Reducing stress and anxiety

In everyday life, we run into all sorts of problems day after day. Without quite realising it, we end up feeling frazzled and unsure of ourselves. Often, all it takes is to stop, spend a little time observing how we feel, and we discover that the stress or anxiety we sense isn't as bad as we'd imagined. The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus (Epictetus) once said: "People are troubled not by things themselves, but by the views they take of them." (“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.”). Epictetus himself had a habit of writing in his journal every day, no matter the various hardships he endured that day as a member of the Roman slave class.

Modern psychology has also done a great deal of research into the effects of journaling. The findings can broadly be grouped into a few categories:

(a) easing the severity of depressive symptoms (e.g. Gortner, Rude & Pennebaker, 2006, and Krpan, Kross, Berman, Deldin, Askren & Jonides, 2013),

(b) lowering anxiety (e.g. Hasanzadeh, Khoshknab & Norozi, 2012), and

(c) relieving stress (e.g. Ullrich & Lutgendorf, 2002).

As a low-cost method (all you need is a pen, a notebook, and 20 minutes a day!), journaling has plenty of scientific evidence behind its benefits for mental health.

2. Ordering your thoughts and sparking new ideas to solve problems

As the knowledge economy has gradually become the main economic activity of 21st-century cities, many of the problems we face each day call for intensive thinking. During working hours it's genuinely hard to find time to stop and reflect carefully. And yet, more often than not, this is exactly the space and time we need to sort things through and spark a way to solve the problem. Tangled thoughts are rather like a cluttered desk, with stationery, documents, and all manner of odds and ends piled together. It's hard to find what you need, let alone work efficiently.

After a day's work, we often feel worn out and want to do something "mindless" — bingeing a TV series, gaming, watching television, and so on. I'm sure many people will relate: after all that entertainment, you still feel just as tired as before. The truth is, your mind is in real need of a tidy-up, a clear-out. Through the process of journaling, we can reclaim the "driving seat" of our thoughts, focus our energy on the problems that truly matter, and then unpick the knots and draw out fresh ideas to solve them.

3. Talking with yourself, exploring who you are, and leaving notes for your future self

I'm sure this thought has crossed everyone's mind out of the blue: what is life actually for? In a bustling metropolis, how many of us truly know the things, the possessions, and the people we really want to pursue? Eason Chan's song "Ferris Wheel" perhaps captures exactly what so many people feel inside.

When you first start journaling, these topics may feel rather "heavy". But after a while, all of a sudden, you'll write down thoughts that even surprise you — perhaps ones you simply never noticed all along. Besides recording the day's events and the weather, a journal can also help you unearth and explore yourself. What exactly is it that makes me feel happy, miserable, excited, and all the other emotions? The human brain isn't very good at storing feelings. Quite often, we easily forget the sources of our own happiness. As you journal, identifying the things that bring you joy means that, next time the chance comes, you can seize it and savour it fully; identifying the things that leave you unhappy lets you think of ways to make them better.

A journal offers exactly that — an "external hard drive" for our brain, somewhere to keep our thoughts and feelings safe. Whenever the mood takes you, you can leaf back through old entries and always learn a little more about yourself. Without a journal to record it all, we'd find it very hard to recall the joys and sorrows we've lived through.

Beyond these direct benefits, journaling is also thought to bring the indirect benefit of "building a daily habit". Once we get into the habit of journaling every day, we find it easier to develop other habits measured day by day.

Key points for building a journaling habit

Having gone through the various benefits of journaling, how can you, the reader, begin to cultivate this habit? The author has put together a few key points below.

(1) The only rule is that there are no rules: write as much or as little as you feel like on any given day. As long as, once you've finished, the thoughts in your head feel safely stored away in your journal, that's enough. Life always has its rich, full days and its more downcast ones.

(2) As for topics — the events of the day and the feelings of the moment have no right or wrong to them. If you don't have many thoughts to begin with, the author suggests starting from one of the questions below:

• From the moment I got up today until now, what have I been through?
• What three things am I grateful for today?
• What is one thing I could have done better today? And specifically, how could I do it better?

(3) Find a spot where you feel comfortable: you might switch off the notifications on your phone, pour yourself a glass of warm water, or play some quieter, gentler music, so that you feel a sense of privacy and freedom from interruption.

(4) Be honest with yourself: this point is crucial to the benefits journaling brings. As you write, your thoughts needn't be filtered — only then can you have the most genuine conversation with yourself.

References

Gortner, E., Rude, S. S., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2006). Benefits of expressive writing in lowering rumination and depressive symptoms. Behavior Therapy, 37, 292-303. doi:10.1016/j.beth.2006.01.004

Hasanzadeh, P., Khoshknab, M. F., & & Norozi, K. (2012). Impacts of journaling on anxiety and stress in Multiple Sclerosis patients. Complementary Medicine Journal of Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery, 2, 183-193.

Krpan, K. M., Kross, E., Berman, M. G., Deldin, P. J., Askren, M. K., & Jonides, J. (2013). An everyday activity as a treatment for depression: The benefits of expressive writing for people diagnosed with major depressive disorder. Journal of Affective Disorders, 150, 1148-1151. doi:10.1016/j.jad.2013.05.065

Ullrich, P. M., & Lutgendorf, S. K. (2002). Journaling about stressful events: Effects of cognitive processing and emotional expression. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 24, 244-250. doi:10.1207/S15324796ABM2403_10