I’ve been journaling everyday for over a year. I originally started journaling as a remedy for my memory loss--if I kept a record of what I did everyday, I would be able to look it up via find and search in the Google Doc and tell other people. This allowed me to be able to actually have a conversation with my therapist about how I had felt that whole week, and not just the moment we were speaking. It’s allowed me to remember the last time I had a doctor’s appointment and schedule a new one, and it’s made me thoughtful about trying to do something everyday that’s worth going in my journal.
My journal isn’t creative; it usually starts with “I woke up.” I keep in every misspelling and typo and you can tell when I wrote it on my phone because the sentences are actually capitalized. I use emoticons, there are long strings of just aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa and if there’s a pause in my thinking I write “uhm.” Some people’s journals are deep commentaries on their life up to that point, or creative outlets more like a write-everyday-challenge than a list of activities like mine, but all journalling is good, and does a bunch of good things for your brain and life!
Other than increasing your ability to remember what you had for breakfast, there’s a link between writing/journalling every day and increasing your IQ and intelligence. Anyone remember Big Brain Academy for the Nintendo DS family? There was a reason a lot of those games had to do with visual and fact recall, as well as activities like editing texts, completing sentences and reading comprehension. Because doing all those things actively and everyday actually promotes IQ growth! (Although my favorite part of Big Brain Academy was the Dr. Mario-inspired cool-down.)
Your brain can be exercised just like a muscle, which is supported by the existence of habits--muscle-memories for your brain. After a year, journalling every day is no longer an act of self-discipline, but a habit where I sit down, have nothing to do, and think, “I can journal now.” You too can have a big buff brain if only you journal every day.
If you’re more the artistic type, not only does journalling increase your creativity by inspiring “stream of consciousness”-type thinking, a necessity for any rough draft, but all this applies to art journalling as well! Because I get my thoughts out on a Google Doc, I usually don’t actually write on my art journal pages, but art journalling, much like 365 day art challenges and the like, are proven methods to inspire practice and growth in art. Art journalling can create beautiful full page artworks, or be more like how I write--typos, aaa’s and all.
The final argument to be made for journaling is the nostalgia factor. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone down to my high school graduation entry and read it just for the memories. It’s also nice to go back and read entries from when I was at my Most Depressed, to remind myself that things in fact do get better, if slowly. I imagine I’ll enjoy the same things four years from now.
One personal recommendation for the structure of a document based journal: put your new entries at the top. This makes it easier bc you don’t have to load and scroll through the whole document to make a new entry (which becomes especially important when your journal is 119 pages long). Also, length doesn’t matter! Some of my entries are two sentences, some are a page and a half.
Go and enjoy journalling!
