When you write about a past event that has blocked you, you release the blockage and let life flow more freely. Honesty, however, is paramount in journal writing. You cannot hide yourself behind your own words.

You Can Be Yourself in Your Journal

A journal is the only place where you’re totally, absolutely and completely free to be yourself. It is the perfect refuge for the many irritations, conflicts, disappointments and stresses life throws at you. It allows you to ramble with no sense of direction, to indulge in cliches, to be irrational, and to lament.

“The most important thing,” says Eldonna Edwards Bouton, author of Loose Ends: A Journaling Tool for Tying Up the Incomplete Details of Your Life and Heart, “is not to judge yourself or let any other critics, real or imagined, into the room when you write. If you’re intimidated by a blank page, begin by asking yourself: ‘What do I need?’ or ‘How do I feel about ______?’ Use ‘I feel’ instead of ‘I think,’ when you write, so the inner knowledge comes from your heart instead of your head.”

Bouton adds, “When you release your stories on page [or, a screen], you make room for new truths. The page listens without judgement. At times, your journal may be the best friend you have. Write as if no one will ever read your words, but you. Within the safety of your pages, you face your demons and, suddenly, they lose their power over you. Don’t hold on to them, either. Turn the page. Forgive. Move on.”

The Healing Benefits of Journaling

The benefits of journaling are many:

1. It helps release and review your emotions

Journaling provides a safe space to express and process emotions. It allows you to explore and understand your thoughts, feelings, and experiences, helping to promote emotional well-being and self-awareness.

2. Lowers stress

As science as shown, journaling helps lower stress levels. Writing down your thoughts and feelings allows you to offload your worries, anxieties, and frustrations onto the page, helping to alleviate emotional tension and promote a sense of calm.

3. Brings clarity

Writing down your thoughts can help “unjumble” them, bringing clarity and perspective on situations. When your journal about the problems you are facing, it can lead to new insights and solutions that you probably never occurred to you.

4. Self-reflection and personal growth

Journaling is, by its very nature, an activity of self-reflection and self-discovery. Writing down your thoughts regularly enables you to track your progress, set goals, and identify patterns or areas for personal growth and improvement. It also assists in creating an action plan to improve the quality of your life, and [re]discover your dreams, goals and strengths.

Science Shows the Journaling Promotes Healing and Wellbeing

Researchers have found that people who write about their deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding upsetting events tend to have stronger immunity and visit their doctors half as often as those who only write about trivial events. Holding on to feelings of anger and grief stops you from experiencing life to the fullest. Sometimes, writing a letter to someone who has hurt you is the closest you can get to closure. It is a way of letting go of the past, so you can begin to live in the present.

A study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology examined the effects of expressive writing on individuals with PTSD. The researhers, J M Smyth and J W Pennebaker found that participants who spent time expressing themselves in words experienced reduced PTSD symptoms and improved psychological wellbeing compared to those in the control group.

Another study titled Journaling about stressful events: Effects of cognitive processing and emotional expression, published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, studied the impact of journaling on stress reduction and emotional wellbeing. It found that people who engaged in expressive writing experienced greater emotional release, reduced distress, and improved physical health outcomes.

How to Tap Into the Healing Power of Journaling

Journaling allows you to reassess life events, be it trauma or triumph. Your words cannot change the past, but they can provide a context in which you understand it better and master the lessons that lie within or without. The idea is to write about the good and the bad, so you don’t end up sounding like a miserable person with a lousy life. The secret is to find a healthy balance between the positive and the negative.

There is no right or wrong way to begin a journal. Just take a deep breath and start writing. As an initiation exercise you’d like to begin with a dedication to someone who impacted your life. Or, work with a theme: dreams, nature or people.

Write a letter to a person you have unresolved issues with. Record a slice of family history. Preserve the priceless tales of your past. Maybe, you’d like to write only for yourself. The purpose is to open up that valve of honesty and channel your innermost thoughts, feelings, desires, frustrations and dreams into your journal. Saving a journal entry, or trashing it, is entirely up to you, but the process is an invaluable release of emotion.

How and where do you start your journaling practice?

1. First, have a journal and pen in place
2. Next, get started: your first day of school, your first memory, your first crush, or your first period
3. Write with a pen that feels good in your hand and leaves you wanting to write more
4. Allow your thoughts to unfurl on paper. Think of times that work best for you. Is it the calm freshness of early morning? Or, would it be the stillness of the night and its chores put to bed? Whatever time you choose, shut the outside world and its chaos out
5. Listen to the quiet within. Meditate on paper
6. Dating each entry provides a context and helps you see how far you’ve traveled on your writing journey.

Here are a few tips to help you with your journaling experiment

• Set a regular time for journaling everyday. Promise yourself you’ll write for at least 15 minutes 3-4 times a week
• Don’t worry about spelling or grammar, right and wrong. Just write anything that comes to your mind freely
• It is okay to write about the same thing on the 3–4 days you’ve set for yourself. Or, write something new each day. The choice is yours
• If you feel uninspired, look for writing prompts online to nudge your thoughts
• Find a quiet spot, a place where you’re not likely to be interrupted, and retire there daily. Use colored ink to write on different pages. Or, color-code your entries depending on your mood
• Add patterns, or borders, to highlight, or create page divisions.

7 Journaling Prompts to Get You Started

1. Write a letter to your former self. Write with compassion. What suggestions would you make to yourself? What makes you proud of yourself and how have you changed since then?
2. Write about forgiveness. Do you have anything or anybody that you need to forgive? How has harboring anger or resentment impacted your wellbeing? What actions can you take to forgive and let go?
3. Examine the limiting ideas or self-talk that you frequently use. Put each one to the test by writing them down. Replace them with optimistic statements or realistic viewpoints.
4. Describe three positive aspects of your personality; also mention why you chose them. Celebrate your accomplishments, good traits, and talents.
5. Write about a circumstance or a relationship that you have been having trouble with. How do you feel and what are your opinions about it? How can you tackle this situation with kindness and respect for both yourself and others?
6. Describe a place or activity that brings you joy and peace. How does that activity or surrounding make you feel? How can you increase its presence in your life?
7. Write about a time in your life when you felt hurt or deceived. How has it affected you? What actions can you do to get over this hurt and earn back your trust?

This is an updated version of the article that first appeared in the February 2007 issue of Complete Wellbeing magazine.

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Have you ever tried talking when you are with a group of women? It’s like waiting for a customer care executive to attend to your call. They’ll keep telling you how important your call is but make you wait till you’ve achieved the impossible, like grown a beard.

So I did the obvious—I started scribbling my thoughts, safe in the knowledge that the middle of my sentence will not be interrupting the beginning of someone else’s. I was convinced of my mediocrity and took refuge in self-deprecating humour, the best defence tactic. It’s a lot like predictive input—before someone else can even start making fun of you, you jump in and do it on their behalf.

These days I have graduated to making fun of others and often get made fun of instead. Like when I write about our childlike love for cows or the government’s passion for bans, I get suggestions for alternative employment like soliciting for customers on streets of disrepute or I am asked to relocate to Pakistan.

Why they think I am a moron

I write because it gives me a sense of purpose. But, in India, when you try to tell your friends and relatives that you’d rather pursue your passion than engage yourself in the futile pursuit of earning money in a nine-to-five job, you’re treated like a moron.

What do you do for a living?

Oh, I blog.

Scenario 1—If, by some stroke of luck, they do happen to know what a blog is

They: Hehehe… Isn’t blogging just graffiti with punctuation?

Me: [Trying to smile with clenched teeth]

They: Does it pay? How much?

Me: [Oh god; are they now going to ask how many bedrooms my apartment has!]

They: You must be recently unemployed. If I had so much time I’d be blogging too.

Me: [Still trying to smile with clenched teeth.]

Scenario 2—They have no idea what a blog is, which is almost always the case

They: [deafening silence], [brows furrowed in confusion], [an awkward laugh], [shuffling of feet], [tentative “wow!”]

Me: I think I’ll go and die.

Then there are those who read your blog.

Thankfully, there exists a populace that reads your blog. You readily believe them when they say you are the best thing to have happened since butter chicken. Sadly, they will also insist that you’re wasting your talent on a blog and ask you to waste it on a magazine or a newspaper instead! [Now you know why I am writing for Complete Wellbeing]

Writing a book is considered a natural extension to a blogger’s life. Three popular posts later, you get tired of saying “no” to all your well-wishers eagerly waiting for you to write a best-seller. It’s a lot like what a Mom to a single child faces. She wastes all her fertile life telling the world and its aunt that she has no interest in siring another child!

Fan “males” and fan base

Once your blog gains some readership and a reasonable amount of popularity, you see a sudden spurt of newly formed blogs on your Facebook newsfeed. You realise your writing has managed to inspire your friends and relatives in a “if she can write, I can write too” way. You start getting fan mails, a few of them from love struck males. They usually gather momentum after you’ve written about busts and butts and the Bengali woman’s love for sleeveless blouses. Men are such simple creatures. When a woman writes about the female anatomy, they promptly imagine hers.

Peculiarly, your friends start claiming that they have met your fans who swear by your writing. For some strange reason, you’ve yet to meet any such fan. A few years later, you’ve won a couple of awards. You have thousands of followers on Twitter. You’ve become so famous that your opinions, your style of writing, your feminist leanings get trashed regularly. You start fancying yourself as a celebrity, eagerly waiting to be mobbed by your fans every time you visit a mall or a popular restaurant. You even think of buying a pair of binoculars so you don’t miss the frantic waving of hands that your myopic eyes are missing out. Once I even did the impossible—went up the escalator going down, because I thought I had spotted a flicker of recollection in a lady’s eyes. Alas, you just keep waiting!

I finally did get my fan moment, though, and that too in the distant land of Brisbane. While I was crossing the road, an Indian man stopped me to ask if I was Purba Ray. I looked at him with gratitude-filled eyes and shook his hands furiously in relief, unmindful of honking cars. When I posted about this great achievement on Facebook, my heartless friends insisted he was a stalker.

We want to know that we matter too

The thing is, we all have an overwhelming desire to be relevant. We seek it through our jobs, relationships or interests we pursue. We hope that in some insignificant way we are making a difference in someone’s life—whether it’s a Mom who slaves for hours to fix that perfect meal for her family, a photographer who traverses miles and risks her life to click that perfect shot or a novice completing a cross-country marathon. Just an acknowledgement that my passion for what I do, in some way, may have ignited somebody else’s desire to do something significant, eggs me on to work harder. I guess this is the reason we have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day or even Boss’ Day—when we finally get to hear how much we are cherished and appreciated [conspiracy theorists dissing it as commercialisation of love be damned!]

So, the next time you spot an eager looking woman moving her head clockwise and anti-clockwise desperate to be recognised, go up to her and exclaim: Are you Purba? I love reading your articles in Complete Wellbeing! Trust me, she’ll hug you so hard, your tonsils might get ejected to outer space!

The post Things people say when you tell them you are a blogger appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

The whole process of maintaining fear diaries includes three simple steps, which are described below along with their advantages.

Put your fears in black and white

Make a section in your personal diary, or better still, get a separate ‘fear diary’ that you can keep in a safe but easily accessible place. Whenever you are worried about something, write down your fear in plain and clear terms, on the top of the page. This statement should also include the consequences you fear and not just the thing or event you fear.

For example, instead of writing “I am scared of public speaking”, write “I am scared that people will laugh at me when I make a speech on the Annual Day”. It is in your best interest to be brutally honest and very specific. Now, leave at least two sides of the page for the next steps. Other fears can go on the subsequent pages in the same manner.

What is the whole point of writing down fears? According to Dr Reid Wilson, Ph D and a specialist in anxiety disorder treatment, worrying causes the same thought to repeat in our head. However, writing down worries changes our perspective on the issue. We may even begin to realise how repetitive and senseless some of our worries are.

Lynn Robinson, an intuition expert, coach, author and consultant believes that writing down worries leads to awareness of both our worries and the habit of worrying.

Chart an action plan

The next step is to write down an action plan to get rid of or deal with your fear. For the example given above, you may decide “Write down and practice my speech in front of three trusted and capable friends for at least a week before the function”. Now that you know what to do, what is left is doing it.

According to William Sanderson, PhD, worry can help you resolve problems, anticipate and prepare for future events. This happens only when you are ready with a plan to deal with the worries.

Lynn Robinson has a bit of advice about writing down solutions and action plans. She recommends writing down only four simple steps to resolve your worry. The simpler they are, the better it is, as it increases your likelihood of actually implementing them.

Evaluate the plan

Below each action plan, you will write the evaluation. This consists of two parts. Firstly, you need to evaluate the action plan.

Analyse and evaluate your way of dealing with your fear. Find out what worked for you and what did not. Evaluation of action plans tells a lot about the effectiveness of your coping mechanisms.

The second part is evaluating yourself. This can be done in retrospect and at ease. What do your fears say about you? Is there a common pattern emerging?

For example, if most of your fears are related to people and social events, does this tell you something about yourself? Do you need to get more help overall in that area? Do you need to change your attitude or even get some basic changes in your life? Of course, when we look back at our past fears we learn so much about our lives and ourselves. Studying all your fears together forms the second part of evaluation.

Davis, Eshelman and Mc Kay in their book Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook rightly advocate evaluation of worries, which becomes easy to do if you have all of them written down in one place.

They suggest that this habit will make it possible for us to see if our worries are realistic or if we are overestimating or ignoring certain crucial factors.

Once you have a fear diary, do remember to refer to it time and again and make an effort to learn from it. Real fears run deep and wide. You may choose to include every little fear or just deal with the more serious ones. A fear diary will make all the difference if maintained and used properly. And yes, it will also make for interesting reading few years down the line!

This was first published in the October 2009 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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