I will start journaling
Daily Keys to Success
These daily excerpts from Randy Kay's book Daily Keys to Success will show you how to grow your potential while expanding your personal success to lead a life of significance. You will benefit from 365 topics with ideas, tools, and tactics for living life fully.
Dear Journal: I feel like I can’t share this with anyone. I’m beginning to hate my life because of all of the stress from…” Do you journal? If not, starting a successful habit of five to ten minutes of daily journaling can take the initial jolt out of the intensity of your days.
When people say or do things that are hurtful to us, we tend to repress those hurtful feelings for fear of overreacting, or we feel a loss of self-esteem in doing so. Bottling up these emotions causes increased risk for serious illnesses, such as heart disease and cancer. Studies at Southern Methodist University of Texas have shown that individuals who were encouraged and supported to express their emotions demonstrated an improvement in the function of their immune system. These people visited their physicians less often than those who did not express their feelings. Experts have also found that journaling represents one of the most convenient and effective ways to express many of the emotions we tend to push down until they explode into something more serious. If you feel like even the slightest negative comment could push you over the edge, then you’re probably at the point where your perception of what’s going on around you is distorted by these pent-up emotions. Journaling has been proven as a successful way to give these repressed feelings an outlet so that they don’t take over our lives and well-being.
Just grabbing a pen and notebook and writing about the disappointments and hurts in our daily lives helps eliminate our tendency to suppress our feelings. According to clinical psychologist Thomas Conte Manheim, who specializes in the treatment of anxiety and depression, “Writing down our feelings is a therapeutic way of expression and reflection on our day. When we journal, we are able to tease out of ourselves the deeper meaning of our lives and make sense of the hurt by reflection.” He explains that when we process these emotions through our mind through journaling, the toxicity is released, preventing harm to both ourselves and others. According to research, people who journal report sleeping better and having a more positive outlook on life.
“A page of my journal is like a cup of portable soup. A little may be diffused into a considerable portion.” ~ James Boswell