Over the last decade or so, I’ve been leaning heavily on journaling as a tool to work through all the stress. I was adverse to journaling for many years because I likened it to writing in a diary like I did when I was a kid. But the truth is I have found many benefits to picking up a notebook and a pen when I need to sort out my thoughts.

Several years ago, I was experiencing a lot of stress and anxiety during my junior year of college. I didn’t know how to cope with it and it was consuming my life and a lot of my mental energy. My mom had mentioned to me that her boss was a former Navy Seal who was struggling with PTSD, and he carried around a journal and would write when he was struggling with symptoms of PTSD. I knew this was much more serious than my situation, but I was curious whether journaling could be a remedy for what I was experiencing as well. Sortly after, I went out and bought a journal and started trying it for myself. I wrote in the journal when I was grappling with my feelings, and I told myself each time I wrote in it I would be solely focused on getting out whatever was in my head, not worrying about the quality of my writing. It didn’t have to be spell checked, the handwriting didn’t have to be ledgable, and none of it needed to make sense. I felt the benefits of the journaling immediately and adopted it as part of my routine ever since.

I had a lot of misconceptions about the what the practice of journaling would look like and what the point of it was. After doing it for a long time, I don’t think there’s one right answer for what it should look like, the important thing is how it feels. And the point of it is self expression, in whatever form that takes. As someone who can get easily overwhelmed, journaling provides a way to take all the stressful, consuming things I have running in my head and give them a name, a description, and a shape. Sometimes stress accumulates in our mind in such a way that we feel paralyzed by it. When a few bad things happen, it seems to open up the flood gates for a multitude of over things to creep in and demand space in our heads. What I’ve found with journaling is that when you start writing down what these things are, you start to realize there aren’t nearly as many of them as it seemed, no matter how many things are going on, and you can being to work through them more easily.

Compartmentalizing the difficult feelings helps you think about them and work through them individually. Writing down the things I’m experiencing, allows me to separate myself from them so I can really examine what they are, where they came from, and how to deal with them. I find an extraordinary amount of personal growth in this. The act of writing down your thoughts makes your mind slow down and focus on the specific thing that’s keeping your attention, without the distractions of the million other things you’ve been thinking. This takes all the nebulous and exhausting thoughts you’ve been stuck on, and it makes them finite and small. You are able to look at them from a more objective perspective and coach yourself through different ways you can aleviate the stress. You are able to self reflect from a completely different angle than if you were just walking around mulling over these thoughts.

I’m sure people who journal have all kinds of different reasons for doing it and varied outcomes, but for me, it’s helped a lot with stress and processing things that are happening. I highly recommend it as a healthy coping mechanism, and I will definitely continue to harness the benefits of it.

Photo: Steamboat Springs, CO