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.

Start Today
Journaling is an investment in yourself; it helps you live a more intense life. Writing your journey unfetters and frees you. So catch the moment

How To Begin Your Journal
•Select a blank notebook.It can be ordinary or fancy —anything that appeals to you. If you want to maintain an online diary, the computer will be your best friend.
• Use a pen that feels most comfortable in your hands. You can also use pencils, paints... Write any time, anywhere about anything. For best results, write often.
• What should you write about? Start by jotting down your activities. Journaling is not just about scribbling down what you had for breakfast — though it can be, if that is what you want. Write down your thoughts, opinions, feelings and ideas. Mix and match by looking outward as well as inward. Quotes that you want to memorise and apply in your life, poems and essays that you have written. You can stick pictures or draw instead. You can even paste mementos of your daily wanderings: A caricature, an air ticket, the photocopied lyrics of your favourite song, a movie stub, an invitation card...

The Write Rules
• You will not share. Keeping it exclusive will help you be completely honest when journaling. If you write thinking you may share your reflections, you may be tempted to write for another person, or even worse, you may begin writing to that person!
•You will be honest in self-expression.
•You will not feel obliged to spell correctly, write complete sentences or even use the right verb. You will write at the bottom of the page and go up, begin from right and go left...
• You will date each entry in the journal. You may not see a reason to do this at that present time.