Week 14

I started this week looking into how and why people should journal. Teenagers are better known to journal as the stereotype of their diary being stuffed underneath their mattress. Only to take it out to write about high school crushes and bitchiness of fellow classmates. But the theory behind these diaries is to allow the person to confess their struggles and fears and to output their thoughts and feelings without judgement or punishment. Journaling is a great way to understand your thoughts more clearly. And if you struggle with stress, depression, or anxiety, keeping a journal is a great idea. It can help you gain control of your emotions and improve your mental health

One of way to deal with overwhelming emotion is to find a healthy way to express yourself. This makes a journal a helpful tool to manage a person’s mental health. Journaling can help to:

• Manage anxiety

• Reduce stress

• Cope with depression

Journaling helps control your symptoms and improve your mood by:

• Helping you prioritize problems, fears, and concerns

• Tracking any symptoms day-to-day so that you can recognize triggers and learn ways to better control them

• Providing an opportunity for positive self-talk and identifying negative thoughts and behaviours

When a person has a problem and is stressed, keeping a journal can help them identify what’s causing that stress or anxiety. Once they’ve identified their stressors, then they can work on a plan to resolve the problems and reduce their stress. – this is where the CBT part of my project will help.

But we must keep in mind that journaling is just one aspect of a healthy lifestyle for better managing stress, anxiety, and mental health conditions. To get the most benefits, other factors of healthy living can affect well-being such as:

• Relax and meditate each day.

• Eat a healthy, balanced diet.

• Exercise regularly—get in some activity every day.

• Treat yourself to plenty of sleep each night.

• Stay away from alcohol and drugs.

People could also use their journal to make sure that they follow these guidelines.

These are tips on how to journal:

• Try to write every day. Set aside a few minutes every day to write. This will help you to write in your journal regularly.

• Make it easy. Keep a pen and paper handy at all times. Then when you want to write down your thoughts, you can. You can also keep a journal in a computer file.

• Write whatever feels right. Your journal doesn't need to follow any certain structure. It's your own private place to discuss whatever you want. Let the words flow freely. Don't worry about spelling mistakes or what other people might think.

• Use your journal as you see fit. You don't have to share your journal with anyone. If you do want to share some of your thoughts with trusted friends and loved ones, you could show them parts of your journal.

Keeping a journal helps you create order when your world feels like it’s in chaos. You get to know yourself by revealing your most private fears, thoughts, and feelings. It's a time when you can de-stress and wind down.

Why is daily planning so important? Introducing daily planning into your routine is an easy way to create balance in your life: it allows you to clearly separate the time you spend working and the time you have for everything else (this is essentially important if you work from home, these lines tend to get a little blurry). Here are a few reasons why introducing some planning into your life is benefical

• It can make your life a lot less stressful: Knowing what to expect from the day ahead of you (and having an action plan to go through it all) considerably reduces the amount of stress for the next day.

• It allows you to evaluate yourself: Having plans allow you to analyse whether you’re sticking to them, evaluating your own ability to stay – or not – on schedule.

• It helps you be prepared: You can’t predict the obstacles that may occur, but part of your planning routine can be having a contingency plan for an emergency or unexpected situation – it’ll help avoid panicking.

How to daily plan? Each person works differently so, your daily planning will be as unique as yourself. Some experts advise you should plan your whole day the previous afternoon, others prefer doing it at the first thing in the morning. Talking about crossing things of your list, that’s another thing that comes with daily planning: the sense of accomplishment of moving card after card into the “done” phase – small victories are important and motivating, so each task you get done is a small victory in itself. The one thing that doesn’t change is: you have to start your planning by clearly defining your goals – from then, you’ll go on to the necessary tasks to accomplish the goals you’ll define. If you’re only planning the day ahead, those will be smaller tasks but, if you’re planning your entire week, you can broaden your horizons. It’s very important that each task has a priority level, an estimated time to be completed and, if possible, a due date – that’ll allow you to better organize them all throughout your days. If you decide to trace weekly planning, it’s important to take a few minutes every day to evaluate your progress and analyse the tasks you have to do for the day – if your planning is on track, if you’ll need to re-prioritize tasks, change due dates, etc.