One of the easiest ways to stay on track with your wellness/fitness/lifestyle/relationship goals is to journal to paper.
To encourage more journaling, we tapped Mo Seetubtim, the founder and CEO of The Happiness Planner, to share the life-changing benefits.
Journaling helps us explore our inner world and observe thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that might be otherwise overlooked.
“It’s hard to see negative patterns unless we learn to observe them. Journaling helps us identify helpful and unhelpful patterns of behaviors so that we can cultivate ways of being that enrich our lives and eliminate what no longer serves us.”
Journaling helps rewire the brain.
“As mentioned in the previous point, journaling helps shed light on some of our patterns. Once we recognize what we’d like to change, we work on changing them. Journaling can help us create new thought patterns (as we put thoughts onto paper). Our new thought patterns generate new emotional patterns. We can learn to master and cultivate the thought and emotional patterns we like through practice and repetition—we have to do it over and over until the new patterns override the old patterns—aka go into our subconscious mind and become our new default.
Journaling helps us keep ourselves accountable. And as we keep ourselves accountable, our willpower grows. Change no longer seems as scary but something we grow to be proud of.”
Journaling helps us cultivate a relationship with ourselves.
“Journaling is like talking to a therapist, but we are actually talking to ourselves. We act as our own therapists through the process of journaling. Are we best friends with ourselves or are we our own worst enemy? The relationship we have with ourselves is the most important relationship. By learning to journal, we can cultivate better self-talks and build more confidence and belief in ourselves. We all have anxieties and scars in some ways, which may subconsciously affect how we live our lives. Journaling helps us understand why we do things the way we do and what our limiting beliefs may be. Eventually, as we dig deeper into personal-development work, we learn to remove limiting beliefs that we adopted in the past and cultivate expansive ones.”
Journaling helps us manage our distressing emotions.
“Thoughts and emotions come and go. Through the process of journaling, we can observe these passing thoughts and emotions and know that they will pass. Journaling can help us cultivate calmness and patience within our own minds. Instead of taking our anger out on destructive behaviors, we can learn to journal and be still. It’s a form of meditation and a form of therapy. The world would be a better place if people were taught to journal as a way of channeling their emotions since they were little.”
Now that you’re ready to jot down all your thoughts, goals, and intentions, find the journal that’s right for your wellness path.