by Jenna Kalinsky, Founding Director, One Lit Place
There’s a reason most writers keep journals. Journaling (the act of freely allowing your first thoughts out into a non-performative space) brings about better clarity, wellness, and creativity far more than holding everything in, trapped and unexamined. Laying down your rough ideas is the first line of “translation,” when you assign words to the tangled thoughts in your head and develop them into something cogent and meaningful.
The benefit of journaling, whether it’s for 5 minutes while waiting for your kid to finish soccer practice or for an hour before bed, is it uniquely shows you you: in all your smartness, vulnerability, and creative glory. Bringing your essential self into relief in words always results in a feeling of overall calm and happiness.
Those who make journaling part of their lifestyle—a habit—find it the ideal form of self-care, and the benefits wide-reaching and transformative.
Journaling has become one of the most gratifying and fulfilling practices of my life. Not only do I derive the daily benefits of consciously directing my thoughts and putting them in writing, but even more powerful are those I have gained from reviewing my journals.
The whole idea of journaling—as opposed to “performative writing”—is it gives you the place and space to freely express your thoughts and feelings without fear of judgment. It’s just not realistic or possible to “strike the terrible crystal” in real life. (Can you imagine going around saying what you truly felt and thought? Oy!)
But in your journal, not only can you be so candid, but that’s the whole point. Get real, get dark, get clear. Going into your depths gives you insight into yourself beyond anything else you could possibly do.
Releasing all that pent-up emotion and truth is a lot like taking the lid off a pot of boiling water: when the steam escapes, there is calm. Feeling an improved sense of wellness (slower heart rate, your decrease in cortisol, your muscles unknotting) is the reward.
Further, by acknowledging and giving voice to your innermost thoughts, you’re acknowledging that you are perfectly fine just as you are, in all your complicated human glory. This level of acceptance is profoundly beautiful and so helpful for teaching you how to process and navigate life’s difficult experiences in a healthy way.
Though it’s most natural to write as yourself, you can try on a different persona to write about a difficult or confusing situation or use third-person pronouns, write about it as if it were a newspaper article or report, or take the perspective of another person who factors into the situation.
Where emotional connection is useful for tapping into your true self, emotional distance can help you see things through a different lens and process the complexity.
This technique is especially useful when you’re dealing with loss, illness, or other challenging life events. Once you see things from this alternative perspective, you will have greater empathy for yourself and others. You may even find a way forward with solutions to things you’d thought were an untouchable mess only half an hour before.
“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
It’s so easy to walk around in your life simply living it “unexamined” (really, examining takes so much time!) Yet if you’re a creative or deep-feeling person, that examination is foundational for keeping up your humanity and restoring your sense of self.
Journaling regularly enables you to tap into the heart of things and go for the jugular in a way you can’t by thinking, processing with a friend or therapist, or chatting with your soulmate. In that sense, you do have time for that- even if it’s a few minutes.
What a world you will create around you as this honest, tapped-in person! Being self-aware is the first line in better humanhood: more grateful, more thoughtful, more empathetic (or at least with the promise of being those things). The people around you will recognize that there’s something about you that is just working.
When you don’t journal, all that not knowing, not exploring, not having clarity: that makes a person brittle and frustrated. But a bit of journalling each day will cut through everything and widen your capacity to be your best self, which will make the whole world you occupy, and those in it, better as well.
If you’re a writer, imagine how much more capacity you will bring to your characters. After all; the only way to write a thoughtful and complicated character is to recognize those traits in yourself and others. That’s the magic of journalling at work.
I write to discover what I know.
When you leave your thoughts stuck in your head, they become ruminations, or undefined masses of concept, that circle around and around going nowhere and leaving you feeling frustrated and anxious.
(Hampster wheel, anyone?)
Journaling is the single best way to pull out the thoughts one at a time and see them become clear and cogent.
Life is complicated, and giving everything you have roiling around inside you the chance to become clear and manageable in a journal improves your mental wellness by making you feel centered and focused valuably allows you to care for yourself (and those around you). It also gives you a healthy and positive discipline that will keep you grounded and happier.
Daily journaling is for some a great help, fun, or useful. For others, it’s a necessity, like putting on your glasses so you can see. Pouring out your thoughts, feelings, confusion, to-do lists, woes, and gratitude is the best way to converse with yourself, understand what you’re facing, process what you’ve done, and gain empathy for yourself in a far more meaningful way than simply going about your business with your phone in your hand.
(Note that not one person on the planet has credited Instagram for giving them a better life).
Journaling regularly means you can look forward to a “mental decluttering.” Seeing everything you’re facing or that’s bothering you in black and white helps you create a plan and become more measured and clear: the ideal antidote to feeling overwhelmed.
Confronting the emotions you have around your life or trigger points is also a way to recognize and normalize them. Making friends with inevitable ups and downs is a brilliant way to reduce stress, much of which comes from not being at home with your responses to life’s challenges. Writing about what you’re facing means you’re in control rather than simply victim to your reactions.
Writing in this intimate space is a beautiful form of therapy. It’s free, always available, and you never have to worry about another person’s wants, desires, or responses. (Did he look at me funny? Did she just check her watch? Should I have confessed to that?)
Journal regularly to make it a trusted outlet for your thoughts and feelings you otherwise would have to keep bottled up, and watch how your mental wellness improves- by a lot.
It’s not only what you’re writing about that is important and helps you grow as a person and a writer; it’s that you’re writing at all. Claiming 10-20 minutes for journaling each day positions your writing—and your needs generally—as important: to your family, friends, community, and to yourself.
Some people say, “I don’t decide whether to exercise or take care of my family; I exercise so I can take care of my family.” (Or in darker moments, they say, “I exercise so I don’t kill my family.”)
When you journal regularly, you’re fitter to be in service to loved ones, your job, and your community much more capably and with gusto than if you’re confounded, overwhelmed, or scrambling in the dark.
Establishing a consistent journaling practice requires discipline. You may need to wake up early or sacrifice some of your sleep hygiene (though one would argue that journaling is ideal sleep hygiene).
Everyone who maintains a disciplined practice knows that discipline makes you stronger, more confident, and more capable. The tenacity and perseverance required to journal even when you don’t “feel like it” makes you grow.
And if you’re a writer? It teaches you the power of showing up, which according to Stephen King (quoting Woody Allen), is 80% of the battle.
Moreover, once you know how much firmer you feel in your life from the discipline of journaling, you will recognize how valuable discipline in other areas can be and implement changes in your work, home, and personal life.
Look at people who maintain a discipline in any area: exercise, nutrition, work-life balance. They always seem more confident and grounded. Why? Because they’re the boss of their time and behaviour, not the other way around.
Like with writing where consistency is key, keeping good habits make it easier to develop other good habits. And then, you’re superhuman: world, watch out!
If only more people journaled, the world would be a much more compassionate and thoughtful place.
Self-discovery is one of the most magnificent benefits of journaling. And so easy: you sit down, let your pen go for it, and within minutes uncover your real thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Do it regularly and patterns and insights about yourself emerge to the point where you’re your own Rorschach test.
This process can be humbling or even scary. After all, we lie to ourselves and wear masks all day long. To let your true self out can be difficult. But it’s brave, and exploring your imperfections, strengths and weaknesses, fears, and long-held beliefs help you get a clearer understanding of your identity and values.
This authentic expression is liberating, because only with awareness can we make changes, even if those changes are simply acknowledging your frailties and imperfections.
There will always be things about yourself you don’t like or aren’t proud of. Identifying them and facing them head on means you can, if not fix them, then learn how to work with them. That’s compassion in its truest form.
Journaling is the umbrella term that encompasses writing for yourself and writing to give your creative ideas room to bloom. Some people keep one journal for everything. Others keep a personal journal and a separate creative journal. In either case, reaching for it (or a mini version you carry with you during the day) will enable you to maintain an important tether to your creative impulses and catch the ideas before they evaporate.
How often is it that you are struck with an idea and race to write it down before it disappears? Whether you pop it onto a grocery list, a napkin, the back of your hand, or in your journal, the result is the same: you’ve caught the butterfly in the net. Yahoo!
Next, when you spend a few minutes fleshing the idea out, seeing where your unconscious mind takes you, that’s where the idea begin its journey to become.
The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments
What’s lovely about your journal is you can experiment or explore without worrying about looking stupid or fumbling. It’s actually in the fumbling where the magic happens and your best creative material comes out.
When your mind is trained to know that being free and risky in a journal will yield great material, it gets easier and easier to come to that material—and plenty more of it at that. Safely able to go for it, your mind gets better at linking concepts, making your journal writing rich and fruitful.
In time, from the moment you pick up your pen, your hand and mind will show up, and off you’ll go. Writer’s block? Meh. Not a thing. Once you’ve given yourself permission to do whatever you want in the book’s pages, your brain will capitalize on that enthusiasm, giving you more and more interesting material.
Where this juiciness is so valuable is when you’re working on a formal project—a project that does need to stay in its lane, either with story, tone, purpose, deft use of scene, or research, etc. Warming up in your journal means your brain is simply nimbler when it counts.
If this reminds you of how an athlete approaches their sport, that’s because it’s exactly the same. All those lunges and core strengthening sessions always pay off with improved performance on the field.
When you specifically target creative ideas in your journal, you can explore and play without having to fulfill anything, worry about formalizing them into a specific type of writing or genre, or be grammatically correct. You can simply use your journal as a generative space.
There are only upsides to giving rise to creative urges in your journal, and because there’s no well-meaning but finicky workshop group telling you that you did it wrong or to try this or that, and because you don’t have to please anyone but yourself, you can let loose and enjoy the confidence that comes from being in an environment where you’re always right.
Heck, what you write doesn’t even need to be readable! (Though if you do want to return to it later on, maybe a touch of penmanship would be wise).
Ultimately, the page is yours, a place to record material conventionally or less conventionally (write upside down, backwards, with scribbles or doodles? Why not!) as a way to stay loose and limber or as a springboard for new work. That way when you’re feeling a little dried out and are looking for a new spark to begin a project, your journal will have it—and it will be something you already know you care about or are interested in.
Try different techniques to generate ideas that unlock new imagination pathways and boost your creative thinking:
Give yourself the rule only that there are no rules; half concepts, half-baked ideas, half-hearted or halfway developed are as good as fully realized. The only thing that matters is that you let ‘em rip!
Many a novel, memoir, or personal essay has been sparked by scribbles in a journal. Try it and enjoy the feeling of being creatively productive, empowered, and lighter. From all that clarity, wellness, and creativity, you will find your life is simply all-over better.
When you want to partner with someone who can support, guide, and advise you through the inevitable ups and downs of your writing, please reach out. Our personalized writing coaching, editing, and book-writing programs ensure you feel strong, enjoy productivity and accountability, and ultimately see success.
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Whenever family arguments leave my head spinning, stepping outside myself to describe the scene as an objective third person brings instant grounding. That slight emotional distance untangles chaotic thoughts and puts overwhelming things back into perspective without turning into performative writing.
What a fantastic way to process real-life situations and gain clarity (and probably far more compassion for the others involved than if you hadn’t spent the time visioning this from an objective POV). Thank you so much for sharing this!