Tips For Keeping A Journal, Express Yourself Through Writing

Keeping a journal can be a useful way to learn more about yourself, you can routinely record pleasant or unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Sometimes it can be a painful process to write about things that are unpleasant or difficult for you to deal with, but that is exactly when you may want to consider writing in a journal.

Practice writing those uncomfortable feelings down so you can reflect and deal with them in a positive way later on if you choose to do that. Keeping a journal is also a constructive way to keep track of events in your life such as medications you are taking, an illness you may be doing battle with, exercise routines, or just about everything else going on in your life at any given moment.

The Many Tips For Keeping A Journal

• Write about events and occurrences affecting your life at the moment, focus your thoughts and feelings about what those events mean to you. If it is a magnificent wedding or a bleak funeral, write about how it made you feel. Try not to hold anything back. Acknowledge everything going through your mind. Be brutally honest.

• Get out as much feeling and emotion as you can. Take advantage of your journal to reconstruct what you feel. It can be purely simple or more deeply complex. The most important thing is that if you feel like venting, it's better to let it out, than it is to keep it in. It is your journal, you are the only one who has to see it. Therefore, being honest will benefit you in the long run.

• Write for no one but yourself. If you write with the intention of permitting others to read what you write, you may not be as direct as you would like to be. The the point is to be candid about what you are feeling. Expressing yourself truthfully and openly through writing is a way to discovering and understanding your emotions genuinely, learning to grasp problems you have been trying to come to terms with. Often seeing it in writing makes it real and able to clearly work through it.

• Keep your journal out where it is visible to you, therefore you can write at a moments notice. You don't want to have to dig through a drawer or a shelf to find your journal. You also want to be able to have a relaxing place where you can just write when the impulse represents itself. If it is hidden on a shelf, or tucked away somewhere, by the time you find to it, your thoughts may have evaporated or you don't feel like writing anymore. So keep it where you can see it. Grab it and start writing.

• Write every day, whether you feel like it or not, try to spend at least 15 minutes writing about your day or simply you have nothing to write about. Some folks from benefit writing at the same time every day. Write as many times a day as you wish. Your writing will improve the more often you write. Make it a daily habit and before you now it, you'll be on your way to your next journal.

• If you don't know what to write about, write about how your day began, how did you feel when you woke up. What do you have planned for the day? Are there some goals you need to set? Friends you need to call, family you want to write about? Pick a memory about high school, someone you miss, a favorite pet, there is always something to write about. You just have to start with the first letter.

• Buy a journal or notebook you will enjoy using, perhaps with large or colored pages You want it to be functional, yet serve it's purpose. I find a simple notebook is the easiest to use. Plain and simple. Some people like to draw, or sketch using paints or colored pencils. Others use their journals as a scrapbook. It is whatever brings out your creative artistic self. It is your journal, use it how it will benefit you the most.

• Experiment writing in different places. Some people like to listen to music playing to get in the mood, some people need complete silence. Others like to have the TV on for background noise. It is up to you, whatever works the best for you. Find the most relaxing place so you can write, write, write!

• Write about your first love
• Write about the first time you drove a car
• Write about how you feel about therapy
• Write about your favorite animal
• Write about what you think of gay marriage
• Write about what makes you sad
• Write about who you would like to meet dead or alive
• Write about your first funeral
• Write about what kind of kid you were at 10 years old
• Write a description of your first apartment
• Write about who is better, Blockbuster or Netflix-and why
• Write about the worst movie you ever saw
• Write about a poem that you like
• Write about something from history
• Write about your experiences in elementary school
• Write about trying to break a drug habit
• Write about who you love most

There is always something to write about even if you are having a non writing day. You can start with how you feel. If you woke up happy or in a bad mood. Anything will do. Starting a journal can be easy. You will develop your own style, find your own preferences. In a notebook, or even on the computer. It's all in what you like or don't like. Before you know it, you have a journal full of emotions and feelings. And then you are ready to move onto your next journal.