Top 8 Benefits to Keep a Journal or a Diary

There are many reasons why we journal. From travel journals, dream journals, gratitude journals to prayer journals, we keep specific journals for different aspects of our life. In the past, many people kept personal journals, where they recorded the day’s events and their observations. Without diarists like Anne Frank and Samuel Pepys, we wouldn’t know much about the personal side of our history. Although people nowadays keep blogs or vlogs, and record their lives on social media, very few of us jot in a journal and write down our experiences. So why not give it a try?

There are many benefits of keeping a journal. Here are the top 8 reasons why you should be starting a journal today:

1. Keep your thoughts organized.

Diaries help us to organize our thoughts and make them apprehensible. You can record daily events, thoughts and feelings about certain experiences or opinions. Journey allows you to tag and archive your diary entries.

2. Improve your writing.

Journaling helps you to train your writing. If you want to practice or improve on your writing, the best thing to do is to start a journal. You may not have the perfect topic. All you need to do is to start writing your thoughts in Journey. The more you write, the more your writing improves.

3. Set & achieve your goals.

A journal is a good place to write your goals, ambitions, aspirations and new year resolutions. By keeping them in a diary, you can monitor your progress and feel motivated to continue to focus on your next milestone!

4. Record ideas on-the-go.

The benefits of keeping a journal is that you can record all of your ideas in one place anytime and at anywhere. Whenever an idea comes to your mind, you can write it down in your journal. You can then revisit these ideas later on to look for new links, form conclusions or even get a fresh idea!

5. Relieve stress.

Writing down your feelings helps you to "brain-dump" your anxieties, frustrations and pains on a journal. This can help you to reduce and release any stress which you have accumulated overtime. A good way to relive stress is to write in the stream of consciousness style first thing in the morning called "Morning pages". You can also use the mood tracker found in Journey to indicate your sentiment level. Overall, expressing yourself in a diary is a good way to free up any tension that prevents you from feeling happy.

6. Allow yourself to self-reflect.

As Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Our fast-paced lives can become even more hectic as we start shouldering on more responsibility, making us feel the pressure as others place high expectations on us. This results in us getting frenzied as we are easily caught up with the day-to-day.

Journaling is a good way to help us to stop, take a step back and reflect on ourselves. We can self-reflect on gratitude or what we did today and write it in our diary. Daily reflection can also be done at night before bed. We can look back at our life in a journal and think about how we've changed and what we can do to improve ourselves.

7. Boost your memory.

Your brain is likely to store information that you have written down in your diary. Your brain will make stronger connections with the information you have learnt after you write them down in a diary, making it easier for you to recall in the future too!

8. Inspire creativity.

Writing a journal is a great way to unleash your creativity. Everyone has the potential to be creative, just that most of us haven't discovered it yet. Your journal is the best place to start exploring your inner creativity. Write down anything that comes to your mind. Let your imaginations run wild and record it in Journey.

There are many other benefits to keep a journal. You'll discover more when you start one!