Journaling Challenge: Week One

It’s the end of the first week of our 30 Day Journaling Challenge! Have you been journaling this week? I hope so! If so, good for you! Are you stuck at the beginning with deciding what kind of journal will work for you? If so, check out Dianne’s post on bullet journaling. It gives a brief overview of different styles of bullet journals. Also, it has a link at the bottom to our free email course on how to get started journaling. Join us! It’ll really help you get going on journaling.

I was very resistant at first to the idea of journaling. I didn’t think I had the time to sit around and reflect on myself and write out my thoughts and feelings. To be honest, now that I’m doing it every day, I found that I absolutely do have the time to bang out at least one page per day. And, I think that it’s helping me!

Time to Process

The first thing that I’ve noticed about about journaling daily is that I needed time to process the way that I feel about things! I spend a lot of time complaining about the way that I feel. I feel depressed, I feel stressed; whatever I feel, I don’t really spend a lot of time processing why I feel that way. This week I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety and depression, due to an upcoming medical procedure that I have to have done. Writing about why I feel the way I feel has turned out to be really therapeutic for me.

Taking the time to process why I feel a certain way really allows me to put my feelings into perspective. Journaling allows me to shrink down my feelings to their proper size, taking away the overwhelming and urgent feeling that I have to do something to change the way I feel right now. Journaling has really given me permission to sit in my feelings and go through them.

Time to Reflect

The second thing that I learned about journaling is that it gives me a chance to reflect on my triggers. If you don’t know what a trigger is, you can find out more here. In this context, it’s an event or a situation that causes a person to feel an intense (usually negative) emotion. I’ve been through some hairy situations, and because of that, I often have intense reactions to events that probably don’t warrant it.

When I journal about a situation, I’m really examining what caused me to be triggered by an event. I can go through a situation, step by step, breaking it down to what’s causing me to freak out. What I’ve found out this week is I’m feeling really insecure about getting older. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Knowing what’s causing you to feel the way you feel about something can let you acknowledge the feeling, and put it away. It gives the control back to you.

Join me!

So I hope that you’ve already started journaling along with me this week. If you haven’t, get started! The things that you will learn about yourself are totally worth the time that you will put into it. I’ve only been doing it for a week, and I’ve already discovered so much about how my mind works and why I feel the way that I feel at any given time.

Please share your experience, strengths and hopes about journaling below! I look forward to hearing about what you learned about yourself!

Photo Credits:

Think – Lara Torvi

Reflect – Regina Rioux