3. Why you should use A Journal

There are many great reasons to use a journal. I could write a whole chapter just listing the various benefits of documenting our daily lives for mental health and clarity, and although all of them would be very worthy contenders for wonderful reasons to use a journal they are not my reasons to journal.

My journaling experience is different. I use my journal to declutter my mind and plan for the future. With that said my journal is not my planner, that is a whole new blog series and very different to the journaling process.

Journaling for me is almost like a date with my best friend. It is a place of reflection without judgements. The place I go to, to solve problems. The one place where I can dissect my thoughts and come up with answers to pressing issues that have raised their heads during my day. It's somewhere that no question seems stupid. I get to write it all down, read it back, look at how I dealt with the situation and decide if I would change anything and make a note of how I would do that in the future.

My journal almost becomes an analysis of how I react to situations, or people, even conversations. It's my growth tool. A way of checking in with me and deciding if who I am today is still on the right pathway of who I want to become.

None of us are perfect and sometimes it's good to check in with ourselves to reflect on how we are behaving and giving ourselves the validation that we are happy with the trajectory our life experience is heading or not as the case may be. If things aren't as good as we had planned then our journal gives us the ability to make changes and corrrect our pathway, to make the blue print better, a new revision of our life plan.

xx Lei

JOURNAL WRITING IS A VOYAGE TO THE INTERIOR - Christina Baldwin