By Raksha Bharadia

At A Glance
• Journaling will help you keep track of your life
• Journaling can help your make sense of everyday happenings
• Journaling can help you change the course of your life

You can rewrite the events of your daily life
Keeping a journal is a wonderful way of charting and mapping life’s journey, of keeping a record of personal thoughts, feelings, experiences and activities.

And it’s easy.
All you need is a pen, paper, a little of your time and some effort and you have your very own friend, philosopher and guide.

Know Yourself
Journaling lets you see the pattern of your activities, emotions, moods and thoughts. It makes you introspect and understand.

When things go wrong, you can ask yourself what triggered a particular reaction — why you lost your cool, why you yelled at a loved one, what is the transgression limit of your comfort zone? Keeping a journal lets you address all these issues with complete honesty.

Words Linger On
We meet different people and face different situations all the time. Each day brings forth new lessons and new understandings and we need to remember them. A journal allows us to revisit those experiences at will and choose to learn from them or lose the moment to become distant memory.

Release Pent-Up Emotions
Enjoy giving full expression to all those devilish thoughts within you in privacy! You can vent your anger with full force and only your journal will know. It will not flinch in horror or disapproval! Keeping a journal brings about a feeling of catharsis and it is possible that a solution may also emerge.

Count The Other Joy Of Journaling
Journaling can be used to organise thoughts and to set goals. Once you write down your goals, the act of journaling can serve as an internal motivator to move you towards them.

The act of writing has been proven by scientists to somehow stimulate the body to produce more T-cells, an invaluable component of the immune system.

Writing about important life matters may even make it easier for one to access one’s memories. Kitty Klein, PhD, a researcher at North Carolina State University, led a study demonstrating that writing frees up the working memory. She reports in the ‘Journal of Experimental Psychology’ that writing helps put pain in the background. It moves discomfort out of the foreground of an experience so that the pain doesn’t run the life, control the experience or define the person involved.