Keeping a personal journal is good for our physical and mental health, according to scientific studies

Writing a personal diary seems to be a teenage habit, or it reminds us of some romantic movies in which pink notebooks with padlocks hid all the characters’ secrets. However, keeping a record of what happens in our daily lives for literary purposes or just as a reminder of our actions is good for our physical and emotional health, and numerous studies confirm this.

O awesome.club wants to tell you how spending a few minutes writing can generate changes in your daily life.

It doesn’t matter if you write a diary of your travels, a diary about your work, narrate the important events of your days or simply enjoy drawing, expressing yourself in a way other than writing. In the long term, a diary becomes evidence of our experiences and what goes on in our mind, it has great benefits for our mental health, keeps our memory in shape and favors our ability to learn. According to an Ohio University study, learning is greater after a reflective exercise like writing. What happens is that becoming aware of past events and taking the action of expressing them on paper makes memory more meaningful, helping us to reinterpret our memories.

Narrating our own life and giving new meaning to our memories is a great exercise to stimulate creativity. And not just those who are dedicated to some artistic activity, as ingenuity also works to find new forms and perspectives within any aspect of our life. A diary gives us the possibility to make diagrams, drawings and wish lists and to paste photographs and any kind of expression that can be put on paper. At Wright State University in Ohio, a study was applied to business students to measure their creativity, and it was found that one of the determining factors was the habit of journaling.

Therapeutic diaries are those in which we relate the events experienced in everyday life, but with the characteristic of analyzing how we feel in relation to a certain issue and our opinion on a certain subject, and then record it. Keeping in touch with our emotions seems like a good idea. The Iowa Department of Psychology conducted a study in which four groups of people were required to keep a journal for a certain period of time. In the end, those who wrote about their negative thoughts and emotions were able to see the benefits of going through situations that were initially frustrating or limiting, and to process their emotions more easily to overcome those situations.

Recording your thoughts, ideas, and the trends of your emotions is also helpful in making decisions. If you feel you need to decide something important, a notebook and your favorite pen can help you. Roger Hiemstra, professor at the Syracuse University School of Education, established that this activity can contribute to more efficient decision-making. Writing about ourselves under certain circumstances can make us more aware of our true desires and we may even have some epiphany in the process, as expressing these ideas in writing opens the door to aspects we hadn’t considered in the first instance.

Narrating from the perspective that we experience the events of our days in a diary requires the expression of our feelings, and not only helps us to vent, but can also free us from illness. Activity has also been shown to have effects on our physical health. At the University of Texas at Austin, social psychologist James W. Pennebaker conducted a study in which he demonstrated the benefits of narrative writing on immune system development. For him, writing about topics that aren’t so pleasant helps reduce the stress on our bodies so that they focus their resources on healing.

When was the last time you wrote a diary? If you keep one, have you noticed the benefits of writing every day? Tell us in the comments.