Tag: journaling

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Finding Inspiration for Your Journal

As you begin using your journal more often, you might find that your entries become really repetitive. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes you just want a little creative inspiration to make it more interesting. Here are some different ways to find more inspiration for your journal, to keep it fun and engaging.

Experiment with Different Writing Styles

Your lack of inspiration or interest in journaling might not be journaling itself, but the style you have chosen to use. For example, if you have been using journaling prompts for each journal entry, maybe it is time to try a brain dump. This is where you don’t know what you are writing about – you just write about any thoughts or feelings you have. Another change to make is if you have been trying to fit too much in each journal entry with too many rules. Just because you started out by writing out goals and lists every day, doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it if you don’t feel you are benefiting from it.

Shop Around for the Best Journal and Writing Utensils

Yes, what you use to journal matters! If you are using a pen that isn’t comfortable for your hand or has ink that only works properly half the time, it becomes frustrating and you won’t want to use it. The same goes for the journal or notebook you are using. It doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive, but be a good size and something you will enjoy using. Hardcover journals can be great, but if you have a hard time opening up the pages to write in them, they are useless.

Make it Fun and Get Creative

A big part of journaling is writing, but that doesn’t have to be all you do. You can feel free to get as creative as you want, whether the title of each journal page has a design around it, you have intermittent doodle pages, or you have little drawings on every journal entry. Use color, different pens or colored pencils, embellishments, stencils, and anything else you have available. This makes it a lot more fun and can give you different types of inspiration.

Keep Reading About Journaling

To be inspired, sometimes you need to see what others are doing. Follow some blogs and social media accounts that talk about journaling, whether they show pages of their own journal, give tips and advice, or offer journaling prompts for you to use. This can be really helpful when you get a little stuck and need more journaling inspiration.

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How Journaling Can Change Your Life for the Better

How Journaling Can Change Your Life for the Better

You may not have journaled since you were a kid. Or maybe you’ve never tried it and don’t see the point. But, the action of putting pen to paper is an extraordinarily beneficial way to improve your life. Journaling is an effortless way to change your life when nothing is going right.

Discover what’s important

When you free write, you end up writing about the things that are most important to you. They may be things that you don’t even think of as that important but looking back over your writings later will give you a strong inclination of what you find the most rewarding in your life. For example, if you find yourself coming back to the idea of starting your own business over and over again, it’s obvious that it’s a dream that’s important to you. When your life is in chaos, you have less to lose, and you might decide to go for it and see what happens.

Track successes

We get used to living in a routine and frequently overlook the small actions we make that add up to beneficial changes in our lives over time. Journaling helps us see all the successes we’ve had, even when life isn’t going the way we want it to. Using a journal as a form of tracking our successes can bring us a great deal of comfort when times are tough.

Let go of old emotional blocks

We can share our deepest fears and worries in a journal. When we feel down, we often need a sounding board more than we need advice, and journaling gives us that. We can let out and then let go of past hurts and failures, our needs and wants, without having to tell anyone about them but ourselves. Writing is cathartic and can help us release old emotions and beliefs that are no longer serving us.

Find the answers

People who journal often report that they find the answers to problems within themselves by using journaling to tap into their unconscious. Each of us has the answers to every problem already inside of us and journaling is a way to access those answers in a positive way. It’s amazing how allowing ourselves to be honest and open to our struggles ends up making the answer we’ve been seeking so obvious – it’s all there in black and white.

Encourages creativity

Many people who journal find themselves writing poetry or drawing to express themselves. A journal is a safe place to be creative. There’s no judgment from others, just an open invitation to express ourselves in whatever way comes up. Allowing this creativity to spring forth is another way that our problems get solved because we allow our minds to be in a different, creative space that is open to all possibilities.