The Surprising Benefits of Keeping a Journal

Keeping a daily journal or diary can do wonders for your mental health, boost your mood and improve your problem-solving skills. What’s more, keeping a daily journal has been found to have significant health benefits. Since the first known diaries were kept in Japan during the 10th century, people all over the world have benefited from this daily reflective practice.

 

Many addiction treatment centers have incorporated daily journaling into their treatment programs, finding it a useful tool for developing self-awareness and a healthy outlet for all kinds of emotional expression. Visit this site if you’re looking for a women’s rehab that uses journaling as part of its treatment regimen.

 

Journaling Has Emotional Benefits

Writing about your feelings in a private journal allows you to fully express your sadness, anger, fear, jealousy and other negative emotions. Releasing your feelings in this way mitigates their intensity. When you write down your feelings in a journal, you’ll find that you feel calmer, clearer and more in control afterward. You may still experience the feelings, but they’ll no longer be overwhelming.

 

A study from Eastern Michigan University suggests that young people may intuitively understand the benefits of journaling as an emotional outlet. The study found that young people are most likely to take up diary-writing during times of emotional upset. Other studies have found that 83 percent of young women aged 16 to 19 keep diaries.

 

Daily diary-writing gives you quiet time to yourself, since most people seek privacy before journaling. Journaling about the things you’re grateful for or the things that made you happy that day can make you happier in general. Writing about your problems helps you come up with solutions and coping strategies, reducing your stress even further by eliminating some of the sources of it.

 

In much the same way, journaling about your conflicts with others can help you resolve them, lowering your stress levels and improving your relationships. Journaling may even help you combat negative thoughts and negative self-talk, a source of much emotional turmoil for many, provided you’re willing to physically throw away the negative thoughts after you’ve written them down, according to a study published last year.

 

Journaling Improves Your Health

Aside from its many emotional benefits, journaling also offers tangible benefits for your physical health. James Pennebaker, a researcher with the University of Texas at Austin, has found that journaling regularly improves immunity by strengthening key immune cells known as T-lymphocytes. Further research supports the benefits of journaling for relieving asthma and rheumatoid arthritis symptoms.

 

Journaling Makes You More Creative

Keeping a journal may also improve your creative thinking abilities. Evidence shows that writing occupies the left side of your brain, believed to be responsible for rational thought and analysis. This frees up the right side of your brain, which is believed to be responsible for creativity, intuitive thought and emotional responses. With these mental blocks removed, you’re better able to harness your own creative capacities, which may be why journaling is such a powerful tool for understanding yourself and solving problems.

 

Tips for Journaling Effectively

Anyone can benefit from regularly keeping a journal. Set aside time each day when you can have the peace, quiet and privacy to write for 20 to 30 minutes. Write quickly, without worrying about spelling, grammar or punctuation — resist the urge to self-edit or correct your work. Write about your feelings, frustrations, personal and relationship problems, the events of the day — you can write about whatever you want in your journal. If you’re having problems thinking of something to write about, consider establishing daily, weekly or monthly journaling themes — try picking broad topics like “change” or “confusion.” Many people like to write down a few things they felt grateful for that day. Don’t worry about doing it “right,” because there’s no wrong way to journal.

 

Journaling can be a great coping tool when you’re facing emotional hardship. It can help you solve problems, become happier and more optimistic and be gentler with yourself. Journaling can even improve your physical health and make you more creative. So go ahead — grab a notebook and start keeping your own journal today!

 

About the Author: Contributing blogger Briana Rooney has more than 15 years of experience in addiction counseling.

Categories: diary, journalling, Mental Health

Revolutionise Your Workouts by Keeping an Exercise Journal!

To lose weight and keep it off, and to generally take care of your wellness and fitness levels, you need to make small and progressive changes in your diet and exercise regime. Still, the problem with small changes is that it’s hard to see how they impact your wellbeing at all, which means you can throw your hands up and say “what’s the point”. However, there is a simple and effective way to help you make and keep track of those changes; an exercise journal.

 

There are many benefits to keeping an exercise diary or journal:

 

1. They help to clarify and focus your fitness goals.

 

2. You can easily break down your goals into manageable chunks.

 

3. You can plan ahead to your future activities and exercises.

 

4. You can see what you actually do every day, rather than getting a warped sense of reality.

 

5. You can record all those important stats and facts that you’d probably forget unless you’re Rain Man or (good) Will Hunting. This can help to make things more precise moving forward, as it takes the guess work out of the fitness and weight loss equation.

 

6. You can see how far you’ve come, and how far you need to go to reach your goals, which will help to keep you motivated.

 

7. You can get a better understanding of your exercise habits and barriers, and this will help you to adjust your routine where you’re going wrong, and maximise on the things that produce great results.

 

8. You won’t skimp or overdo it on rest days as these can be easily scheduled and monitored.

 

9. You can better understand and improve your sleeping habits.

 

10. You have a better chance of preventing and managing injuries if you record every wobbly moment.

 

As you can see, there are a ridiculous amount of benefits to keeping an exercise journal, but you’ll only see those benefits if you rigidly stick to filling it out all the time, right? Maybe keeping an exercise diary is good in theory, but in practise it’s just too complicated and time-consuming. On the contrary, not only can an exercise diary be simple and quick to maintain, this is exactly how it should be done. As I’ve already mentioned, in order to succeed with regards to health and fitness, you need to make small, maintainable changes, so you should see your diary as just another little change.

 

So what should you record in your exercise journal? After a workout, note down the date and time your exercised as well as the exercises you did. How intense was your exercise? If it was aerobic activity, measure the intensity in terms of your heart rate and write down your weight training in terms of the number of sets and reps you performed, plus the size of any of the weights you used. If you’re walking, jogging, cycling or swimming, make a note of the distance you covered. In any case, you should estimate how much energy you’ve burned while exercising.

 

Once you’ve started the basic journal, you can start to mix it up with all kinds of fun extras. Remember, you don’t have to add all this info, but think of it as customising your journal to fit your needs. Additional information you can use includes the amount and quality of sleep you get, your daily energy levels, your weight or waistline measurements and your daily emotions. None of this information you’re including needs to be complicated or technical, but having a rough idea of what does on each day can let you see exactly how you progress, and exactly how the exercise is impacting your life.

Categories: Benefits, diary, exercise, exercise diary, Exercise Journal, fitness, Journal, journal nbsp, nbsp, Progress

Calorie Counting: How Many Do You Need to Lose Weight?

Calorie counting is a popular method for losing weight, but how many you need to count depends on you as an individual, and your wellness needs. Fortunately, there are many ways in which you can determine the amount of calories you need to lose weight, while looking after your wellbeing.

1. Dear Diary – Before you start any weight loss programme, spend a week writing down everything you eat and the number of calories in each food. Then, add the total number of calories for each day and divide by seven to get an average daily caloric intake. That way, you’ll have a rough idea of the number of calories your body needs to maintain its current weight, and you can simply subtract 500 calories per day for a weight loss guideline. Remember, you must be specific about measuring and recording your food portions.


2. Crunch the Numbers – Use an online calorie needs calculate to get a quick and easy estimate of the number of calories you need to eat to lose weight. Once you know your daily activity level, current weight, height and goal weight, the calculator will use the Harris-Benedict formula for determining basal metabolic rate (BMR). While this is a widely-recognised formula, it is only as accurate as the information you provide and the answer is based on general guidelines.


3. Test it Out – You can now get a metabolic test from many gyms and other health centres, which measures the number of calories that your body burns when you’re resting (RMR) and the number of fat and carbohydrate calories your body burns while exercising at various exercise intensities. Your trainer may also give you a metabolic training plan as part of your metabolic assessment, which will help you to burn more fat calories during exercise so that you lose weight more effectively.


4. Ask the Experts – If you consult a registered dietician, he or she can determine the number of calories you need to eat to lose weight, and the proportion of carbohydrates, protein and fat. Your doctor may be able to refer you to a registered dietician, as this service is often recommended for those with health conditions which are affected by weight. Your dietician can also help you to develop a weight loss plan, and overcome typical barriers that have prevented you from losing weight in the past.

Categories: Calorie Counting, diary, online calculator

Smartphone App Helps Dieters Shed Weight More Effectively

Losing weight and maintaining that weight loss is a matter of watching what you eat and doing more exercise than before. But often dieters struggle to stick to their weight loss program without a little support and that’s where a new smartphone app is stepping in.

The NHS in the UK has set up My Meal Mate, an app that allows dieters to monitor their exercise and food intake, and a trial shows that the app is helping them lose weight and keep that weight off.

My Meal Mate can be downloaded from the NHS Choices website for free. It sets a weight loss target for the user and sends a text message weekly to update the user on their progress.

A trial run by Leeds University’s School of Food Science & Nutrition involved 128 slimmers who were split into three groups to monitor their food intake and weight loss over a six-month period. Group one used the My Meal Mate app; group two used an online diary; and group three used a paper diary.

The slimmers who used the app lost an average of 10lbs while the dieters using the other forms of a diary lost 6.5lbs on average over the same period. The app was used on average every other day during the trial while those using the paper diary only wrote in it on average once a week.

Obesity is a growing health problem in the developed world – in the UK, it is estimated that the annual cost of treating obese and overweight people for the related health conditions is £1.5billion.

The Leeds trial demonstrates that the latest technology can be put to good use in helping people shed the pounds. Calorie counting can be done more effectively using the smartphone app while keeping a food diary that can be updated in a few keystrokes allows users to track their food intake quickly.

My Meal Mate can be downloaded for Android smartphones from NHS Choices.

Smartphone App Helps Dieters Shed Weight More Effectively

Categories: diary, Food, food intake, meal mate, Monitor, nhs choices, paper diary, smartphone app, weight, Weight Loss