It's Never Too Late To Begin A Journaling Habit

“The best time to begin keeping a journal is whenever you decide to.” Hannah Hinchman

Writing your thoughts down as a daily habit is better known as journaling. It’s one of the best ways to track your everyday life. You can use journaling to figure out what is or isn’t working in your life. Things become more tangible when written down on paper. As you write about your motivations, struggles, or things that you feel remorseful about, you will be in a better position to solve them, live with them, or let them go. 

In addition, you will also have a written record of your positive thoughts and feelings, your desires, your dreams, and what makes you proud. Your journal is also a good place to consider the ideas you have for improving relationships with family and friends. And you will want to celebrate your achievements and express your gratitude. A journal can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. Either way, the future you will be thankful you began.

How to leverage a journal in your everyday life.

Choose a quiet place.

It's best when you begin to journal that you choose a place that is peaceful and comfortable. Being in a busy, noisy, atmosphere makes it more difficult to focus on the thoughts and feelings you want to get down on paper. Journaling helps bring stability when your life feels like it’s going through a rough patch. It helps you get to know yourself better by revealing your innermost fears, thoughts, and feelings. When you are journaling, it’s a moment for personal relaxation, a time when you do soul-searching and relieve stress and wind down.

Observe the patterns.

A written record of the challenges in your life becomes reference material for you. You will be able to see the problems that you are facing now and those you have been able to overcome. It allows you to notice patterns, make improvements, and change over time. Being conscious of the strength that you had in other circumstances helps you to move ahead with more confidence. Through journaling, you can create a meaningful connection with yourself which is as important as creating meaningful connections with family or friends.

Gain control.

Many people struggle with stress, depression, or anxiety; however, keeping a journal can help you gain control of your emotions and improve your mental health and memory. You should avoid an excess of stress as it can be harmful to your mental, physical, and emotional health. It has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that journaling is an incredible stress management tool. Having a written record of your thoughts and plans reinforces your control over the things that happen in your life. 

Build accountability.

Journaling is great training in accountability. If you can build a habit of writing each day, then you can also stick to the goals or plans you set for yourself. Moving forward the thoughts you set down are tracking the progress of your plans for the short term. In the future, looking back, you have a broad overview. Writing a journal allows you to discover what makes you happy, what moves you, and how to navigate your feelings and behaviors most proficiently. Developing a habit of journaling as a pre-bedtime meditation habit can help you relax and cool down emotions.

Solve problems.

Every day journaling allows you to work through some difficult emotions you may have such as depression and anger, reducing the intensity of those emotions and comforting yourself.  It also helps you to solve problems through decisive thinking and right-brain reflection. Through journaling, you can realize compassion, resolve conflicts, and cultivate understanding, love, and kindness for yourself.

Connect with inner needs.

One of the best ways to strengthen your emotional function is through journaling. Writing down what you feel when something triggers a strong emotion helps you understand the cause and can help you find a solution. As journaling habits are developed, benefits become long-term. This means that diarists become more in tune with their mental health by connecting with inner needs and desires.

Have a happier life.

Journaling can be a good way to have a happier life. Journaling enhances your mood and gives you a better sense of overall emotional well-being and happiness. Focusing on being grateful for what you have helps to lessen the power of the things not achieved yet. Writing down how far you have come or how thankful you are for your blessings, friends, and families.

Improve your confidence.

Journaling can help you to have a greater sense of confidence and self-identity. In addition, it also helps in the organization of important patterns and growth in life. Research shows that expressive writing can help a person to develop more planned, adaptive, and cohesive schemes about themselves and others.  Through journaling, one can also open and engage the right brain creativity, which gives you access to your creative potential.

Discover the lasting benefits of habitual journaling.

Writing has always been a popular tool for self-expression. It renders what our minds produce into tangible records, either on paper or on a digital platform. Writing your thoughts and plans is insurance against the loss of your mental expressions.

If ever there was a useful method of recording your vision, goals, and dreams, it is journaling. People often confuse this with keeping a diary. The two have similarities such as the fact that both involve writing and are about personal record keeping. Both are an extension of your mind, but there are variations that characterize them.

Journal vs Diary.

A diary is a record of daily events. It is a description of what the day has been like, with details of activities one has engaged in, and feelings evoked by the events. It is an exploration of one's emotions as triggered by events. Diaries are private entries, which is why some come with locks. When one hears the term diary, thoughts go to the teenage kinds where one records crushes, heartbreaks, and rivalries. That is not only what a diary is for. You can keep a diary at any stage of your life with more mature investigations of your thoughts and feelings. We can also use diaries when making nostalgic reminiscences for different stages in our lives.

A journal is more extensive as it includes more than just emotional examination. Journals let you write your thoughts and experiences around future goals and plans. It is less about ranting as people assume a diary is for and more about writing for reflections on important issues. Keeping a journal allows you to assemble your ideas and observations, so you can create a plan to move forward. An example would be a journal of personal goals where you can record a weight loss goal and a detailed plan to achieve it. You can record the small steps of victory and any drawbacks along with your plan to overcome them. 

You use journals as organization tools whereas diaries are about exploring feelings. A journal can be a tool for tracking progress for personal or corporate goals. It helps you keep track of everyday life.

There are different journals that one can keep. The list includes a personal journal, a business journal, a prayer journal, a workout journal, a gratitude journal, a bullet journal, and so on. All these journals explore different areas of one's life.

The use of a gratitude journal would involve recording what you are grateful for on a regular basis. You could record daily or as often as you can, citing people that you are grateful for. This process is more reflective, allowing you to examine your life for what you have around you that adds meaning and value to it. In that journal, you could plan how to express gratitude for others and record how doing so has improved your perspective on life. You can even record how doing something for others as a sign of gratitude makes you feel.

In a business journal, you can describe your vision for your business and write plans to take it to new heights. You can record completed daily tasks that feed into your dream and allow for evaluation of previous achievements or failures and suggestions for future enterprises. What matters is honesty and imagination. Your journal is a safe space where you can convey your dreams and reflect on your life. 

Benefits of journaling.

A personal journal is like a memoir. It is a window into history- a pathway of your life that other people can trace generations later. There are several prominent people in history whose journals were discovered and studied long after they died. These contain information on some of the most pivotal moments in the history of humanity. From the travel journals of explorers like Marco Polo to creative journals by Leonardo da Vinci, they offer us glimpses into the world of inventors and people who made significant contributions. There are scientific journals from Marie Curie documenting findings in the early research into radioactivity, and memoirs of captains of great wars on their battle strategies. All these are records of the lives of people who made an impact in various sectors of the history of mankind. 

You can also record your history for your family to trace for generations to come. Here is a link to my What Is A Grandparent’s Journal? If you are a pioneer in a certain field or continuing with research done before you, you can add your contributions and let others know your achievements by keeping a journal detailing the progress from their work to yours.

Keeping a personal journal helps you analyze events in your life and explore your feelings more constructively, without limitation. It can be as therapeutic as finding someone to confide in, helping you to process your feelings and thoughts much better. This impacts your mental health as you unload the burden of thoughts and feelings onto paper. Your journal can help you deal with stress and ensure overall wellness. 

A gratitude journal helps you to focus on the things that matter. It improves your outlook on life by keeping you positive about what you have.

A creative journal gives your mind the freedom it needs to capture and expand a dream. You can be as creative as you want in articulating your vision without judgment.

Writing your goals for your business or your personal vision makes them more real to you and encourages you to go for them. A journal allows you to focus on what you want to accomplish. 

Keep a journal as a way of finding clarity in any area of your life. It is the best form of expression and evaluation we have at our disposal.

My final thought.

Grab a cup of tea or coffee and begin putting what’s on your mind into your journal. Just begin where you are. This is good for you — physically, mentally, and emotionally. You don’t have to be the greatest or most skillful writer for you to begin journaling. But you do need to set aside a dedicated space and time for journaling.

For more information on journaling, read this post.

8 Spiritual Benefits Of Journaling (That Might Surprise You).

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Pass it on if you know someone who would benefit from the information.

Pandemic Prompts For Your Grandparents Journal

This post is a direct result of the jump in numbers of a past post.  A kind of addendum if you please. So, if you choose not to read this don’t worry. I will be back next week with something along the usual lines.  

Are you getting along with your pandemic?

You see, here’s the thing, this pandemic is not the same for all of us. It neither treats us all the same nor do we react to it in the same manner. What does appear to be similar is we are all missing someone or something.

Who are you missing?

Everyone I know misses someone. I see it when I go to the grocery store. People talk to strangers behind a mask as if they are long lost friends, I miss my grandson Nathanial. This brings me to my real focus. Ideas you may want to integrate into your Grandparent’s Journal. I will place the link at the end of this post to one I wrote in October 2019 giving how and why reasons for you to leave a journal for your grandchildren.

What do you miss?

Out of the home entertainments and activities being considered unsafe at this time find many people spending their time differently than they had in the past. For some, new hobbies are coping mechanisms to battle the loneliness they feel. While others see this time as their chance to take up something, they may have felt they hadn’t the time to do until now.

“Love is the greatest gift that one generation can leave to another.”

— Richard Garnett

Leave your thoughts behind.

When this situation has finally become a thing of the past, there is no doubt that one of the questions people will want to know from one another, is “what did you do to pass the time?”

I had asked my Gram about the Spanish Flu pandemic. She was a young girl of 10-12 years old then. But she had no real answers for me other than they were lucky. They lived out in the country and seldom saw anyone.

So, I thought about some of the questions I should have asked her and turned them into journal prompts. These will make an interesting addition to your Grandparents Journal or to the journal you keep for yourself.

10 Pandemic prompts.

1 | How has the pandemic altered my day-to-day life?

2 | How has the pandemic changed the way I work?

3 | What has become more difficult to do now?

4 | What has become easier to do now?

5 | What do I miss the most due to the pandemic?

6 | What do I miss the least due to the pandemic?

7 | I have begun a new hobby and it is ______.

8 | How has the pandemic changed the people in my life?

9 | What precautions have I taken in my environment to keep myself safe?

10 | What am I grateful for, especially in these abnormal circumstances?

My final thought

I hope to come out on the other side of this pandemic and like my Gram I want to feel able to say, we were fortunate. In the meantime, some of the silly or seemingly insignificant things that get left out of the phone calls to my grandson have been included in my grandparent’s journal.

Here is the link to What Is A Grandparent’s Journal

I hope you enjoyed this short post. Please share it with your family and friends.

What Is A Grandparent’s Journal

A grandparent’s journal is written for the express purpose of revealing your early life to your grandchildren or even your children.

Remember when you were younger, and it felt as if the people you loved would always be there? You believed you would have all the time in the world to do all the things and have all the conversations. Sadly, you don’t know how much time you will have with anyone.  

How much time do you spend with your grandchildren? Regardless of the frequency or length of time, does it ever feel like it’s enough?  I will bet you aren’t spending that precious face to face time discussing your childhood with your grandkids.

Of course not. First, you’re listening to their dreams, what they want from their future life. Second, you want to make your time together into lasting memories, with them and for them.

Unfortunately, perhaps after the loss of a loved one, you begin to wonder what their earlier life was like, what the times were like when they were growing up. And when it’s too late, there is no one you can ask.  

I was fortunate enough to have my Gram live near me for 55 years. We talked all the time and she brought to life many stories of her girlhood for me. I heard about some of her pets, her home life, and her parents. Not everyone has this opportunity. Which is why I began writing a journal for my grandson.

“If there was no other motive in view [except] to have the privilege of reading over our journals and for our children to read, it would pay for the time spent in writing it.”

— Wilford Woodruff

 Creating a grandparent’s journal

Nothing could be simpler to do. I suggest a spiral-bound 8 x 10 or larger journal with at least 100 pages. This will allow you space to add photos, stickers, and doodles to add color and personality. So, don’t forget the colored pencils. Write from your heart and let the words bubble up and flow onto the paper.

To make this easier I’ve included a list of prompts.

1.      Where you were born, the date and place.

2.      Who named you, and how was your name chosen?

3.      Your parents, names, birth dates, and places of birth.

4.      Your aunts and uncles.

5.      Your siblings oldest to youngest.

6.      Who were you closest with in your family?

7.      The history of your family.

8.      The origins of your family.

9.      How you got to where you are now.

10.  What is your first memory?

11.  What kind of child were you?

12.  What special memories do you have of your mother?

13.  What memories of your father?

14.  What memories of your father’s parents?

15.  What memories of your mother’s parents?

16.  Did your parents read to you as a child?

17.  What were your favorite pastimes?

18.  Did your family play games together?

19.  If so, what were you favorites?

20.  Did you have pets?

21.  Describe your bedroom.

22.  Did you share or have it to yourself?

23.  What was your favorite Television show?

24.  What was a special meal your mom made for you?

25.  Did you help around the house?

26.  Did you get an allowance?

27.  Who were your childhood friends?

28.  Where did they live?

29.  What was your neighborhood like?

30.  Where did you first go to school?

31.  How did you get there?

32.  Did you like school? Why?

33.  What were your favorite books?

34.  What was your favorite kind of music?

35.  How did you listen to it?

36.  Did you go to concerts? Who did you see?

37.  What were your favorite movies?

38.  Who were your favorite movie stars?

39.  Did you keep a diary?

40.  What did you do during the summers?

41.  Where did your family go on vacation?

42.  How did your family spend the holidays?

43.  What were your favorite holiday foods?

44.  Do you have a favorite recipe to share?

45.  Who was the clown in your family?

46.  After school did you play any sports or belong to any clubs?

47.  Did you ever leave school with your friends without permission?

48.  Did you do something that you were never caught doing?

49.  How did you wear your hair? Did you wear makeup?

50.  What did you think you would be when you grew up?

51.  What was the biggest thing you remember happening while you were in high school?

52.  Who was president?

53.  What’s the best thing that’s been invented since you were a kid?

54.  Did you imagine what kind of house you wanted or where you would live someday?

55.  Tell all about your first date. How old were you? The who, the where, the when.

56.  Did you go to college?

57.  What was your first place like? Did you live alone?

58.  What was your first job? How much money did you make?

59.  What was your worst job?

60.  Did you go on any road trips?

61.  What about your love life? Was there one that got away?

62.  What is your best relationship advice?

63.  What was the most romantic date you ever went on?

64.   How you met grandfather, and what about him now?

65.  What about your first home and baby together?

66.  Did you enjoy being a mom, what was your favorite thing?

67.  How was it when you brought home my dad/mom for the first time?

68.  Tell me about my parent as a child?

69.  What kinds of hobbies, activities or vacations did/do you enjoy as an adult?

70.  Where have you traveled that you love best and why?

71.  When you heard you were going to be a Grandma the first time, how did you feel?

72.  How old were you when I was born?

73.  Did you babysit me? What did we like to do, just the two of us?

74.  What is a favorite family recipe, and why?

75.  Will you write it down here?

76.  What is your favorite quote, and why?

77.  If you could be any age, which would you choose?

78.  If you could do it all over again, would you change anything?

79.  What hopes and dreams do you have for the future?

80.  What would you most like to be remembered for?

81.  What is your best life advice?

82.  What makes you the happiest?

83.  What is the most important thing you have learned?

Wouldn’t you like to leave some of what you saw, thought, and felt, for someone in your life? I truly feel that it is never too late nor even too early to begin.

I hope you liked this post, and that you will share it with those you love.

How Journaling Improves Your Life

Discover Journaling Benefits

How you keep your journal, be it pen and paper or digitally is less important, but just as personal a decision as what you record. You can record the events of your days, plan a vacation, analyze your dreams, remember your gratitude, or use a bullet journal to organize your life. Journals can help you capture your thoughts, plot out your future career path, or provide light-bulb moments of clarity for a better understanding of yourself.

As well as decluttering your mind, keeping a journal can have many other benefits. Here are four important ones.

1.     Stress reduction

By putting your feelings on paper, you acknowledge your stress rather than ignoring it. All those anxieties and worries stop swirling inside your head, allowing you to step back and view from another perspective the things that are troubling you. It can even help with problem-solving!

2.     Improved mental health

Journaling is often recommended by psychologists and therapists. Journaling helps you to work through the issues that come up in your therapy sessions, supporting and complementing the healing process. It can be a powerful tool in removing psychological blockages. And, once you feel better, burning or throwing that journal away, can feel positively liberating.

3.     Improving your cognitive skills

Your journaling habit helps your brain to function more efficiently. Studies have shown that the act of writing strengthens the learning process and stores facts and concepts more firmly in your memory. Writing helps to develop new neural pathways in your brain, connecting new information with data already stored in your memory.

4.     Goal achievement

Studies have found that you are 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down! Journaling gives you the space to work through ideas, setting out the details and the possibilities. Writing about the process helps you to track progress, so you can see how close you're getting to achieving your goal or where you may need to pivot instead to reach that goal.

The habit of keeping a journal gives you a physical and mental discipline and focus that will influence other areas of your life. Writing down your goals and aspirations gives you a strong motivation to achieve them!

“In the journal I am at ease.”

— Anais Nin

Activate Your Creativity

Keeping a journal is not just recording the events of your life or how you’re feeling. It can be a way of supporting your creative life. It’s a low risk, private as you want, way of writing down your brilliant thoughts, your ideas, your dreams, and your resolves.  And once allowed to soar, there’s no telling what sort of creative magic your mind will come up with.

It can be very instructive to read the journals of writers, artists, and actors and get an insight into how they used journaling to grow and develop in their field.

Here are five ways that keeping a journal can enhance your creativity.

1.     Capture your ideas

Between the pages of your journal, you can keep safe all those ideas that are just beginning to form, that are not quite ready to be explored on canvas or turned into a short story, book or article.

2.     Ignore your inner critic

Journaling can help hush your inner critic, that little voice that polices all your thoughts and ideas. Research has shown that when you write without expectation of an outcome, the part of your mind that acts as a sensor steps aside and lets you get on with it. Journaling, free writing or morning pages allow you to write for the sake of it, no editing, no agonizing. And that frees up your creative flow!

3.     Find your voice

Journaling is freeform, messy writing. No one is going to read it, so you can feel free to test out and build your own voice rather than copy someone else. It’s a time to experiment, explore styles, and not worry about what doesn’t work.

4.     Create new ideas

As you get into the creative flow of journaling, you free your mind to bring forth new ideas. The process makes space for ideas to well up, ideas you may not have had if you were trying too hard. And there’s no commitment to take any of them further unless you want to, and it feels right.

5.     You choose what is important

Your journal is yours and yours alone. You can write down your secret fears; you can write your truth. Once it’s down on paper, then you can decide if you want to do anything with it. You can take aspects of your truth and turn them into a poem or a painting. Journaling gives you practice in acknowledging and embracing your truth. And your art will sing more authentically because of it.

Create A Journal Jar 

You may have bought yourself a beautiful journal, all ready to get going. But maybe it’s hard to start. Perhaps it’s hard to think of what to write. After all, you don’t want to spoil that beautiful new notebook.

Help yourself get into the habit of journaling by creating journal prompts, and making your own journal jar, using these five easy steps.

1.     Find a suitable jar. You can use anything, a mason jar, cookie jar or a vase.

2.     Then write down the prompts suggested below onto slips of paper and put them in the jar.

3.     Whenever you’re stuck for journaling ideas, just pull out a prompt.

4.     Set your kitchen timer for thirty minutes.

5.     Put your prompt in front of you and simply write down whatever comes into your mind.

Here are some suggestions to help get you started.

Lists

Start easy by making lists. You can write as little or as much as you want under each listing.

1.     Dream vacation destinations

2.     Best meals you’ve had and where you ate them

3.     Favorite movies

4.     Favorite books

5.     Favorite songs

6.     Top goals to achieve this year, in five years, in ten years

Reveal

1.     Something people don’t know about you

2.     Things you wish you had done

3.     Your secret desires

4.     The most outrageous thing you’ve ever done

5.     Biggest gamble you’ve ever made (this could be a career, relationship, travel – anything that felt risky)

6.     Letter to someone you’ve wronged

What if

1.     If you could meet anyone from history, who would it be?

2.     If you could meet any fictional character(s), who would they be?

3.     If you could host a dinner party with anyone from history or fiction, who would you invite?

4.     If you could go back in time and fix anything, what would you choose?

5.     If you could change one thing about yourself right now, what would it be?

6.     If you could make money doing what you love, what would that be?

It’s the little things

It’s easy to think of the big things you love in your life, what about the little things? Like maybe the way your dog greets you when you come home, or the narcissi that bloom without fail every spring? Think across every part of your life.

1.     Family members

2.     Pets

3.     Movies

4.     Books

5.     Food

6.     Activities

7.     Nature

8.     Home

Take a backward look

Try to think as widely as you can, from managing to get the early bus to trying a new recipe or meeting your exercise goals.

1.     Write down all the things that made you feel good.

2.     What did you learn this week?

3.     What did you achieve?

4.     What promises did you keep?

5.     What were you grateful for?

I hope this post encourages you to begin your own journaling habit. In many ways, it is one of the most rewarding and empowering habits you can adopt.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it with your family and friends.