I’m pretty sure everybody can remember the first time they wrote a diary entry and the first time they rediscovered their diary, only to realize that they were quite weird and almost illiterate.

Although I have had many experiences like this, the past three or four years, I had rekindled my love of journaling. In high school, I noticed myself writing an exorbitant amount in order to, somehow, understand what was actually going on.

Now that I am a sophomore in college, I haven’t actually journalled in a significant amount of time, unless you count writing academic essays or proposals as journals.

But I find that I miss it way more than I originally expected. I find myself wishing that I would spend more time on understanding myself in a literal manner, instead of just passing over certain situations or emotions.

To be very honest, I actually feel like I only feel stressed out nowadays. I feel like I only really understand the overwhelming feeling of being a broke college student, not really the emotions that one inevitably feels on a daily basis (i.e. happiness, sadness, jealousy,anger, etc).

I know that it was proven that those who journal and take the time to truly sit with themselves are calmer than everyone, and typically more successful.

For example, Chris Martin, lead singer of the band Coldplay takes time every morning just to write. Basically, he just writes to clear his mind and to open himself to all forms of inspiration, which I find to be inspirational in itself.

Now to go back in time, I remember whenever I was a little girl and I wrote everything to communicate. I didn’t really want to talk about certain things. Most of the time I liked to communicate through letters when it came to more serious topics or feelings.

That really hasn’t changed too much now that I’m almost 20 years old, but I noticed that I don’t rely on it as much as when I did when I was a little girl. I was an emotional little girl, who was really scared to feel and talk about certain things, and right now it feels like I’m focusing so much on school and other activities that I don’t take the time to recognize other feelings the way I did when I was younger.

Honestly, that’s the difference I think between everyone’s child-self and their now much-older self.

Our inner child would be able to tell someone how we were feeling at the moment we were feeling it. If we were sad, we would cry; if we were mad, we would yell; if we loved, we loved. Now everything is either filtered through social media or completely silenced by the fear that someone would NOT understand where we are coming from.

Journaling gives us the time to recognize the thoughts that happen in the back of our minds and what really worries us when we try to distract ourselves with work. It allows us to expand our minds in a way that allows us to understand ourselves and to be so self-aware that it does nothing but good things to our mental health.

We are all human. No matter the age and no matter the amount of stress or responsibility put on us, it’s never okay to hold everything in or even ignore it.

We learned in the movie Inside Out that ignoring a problem and ignoring emotions only leads to irrational and self-destructive decisions. Humans are so instinctive sometimes that we don’t think it through. We only act. Journaling helps us think things through first.

***Check out some journal videos below***