Journals are nothing new, they have been around for centuries. Everyone knows about Anne Frank of course, and the two years she spent hiding from the Nazis, and historians can never forget about Samuel Pepys, whose diary provided us a glimpse of what life was like back in 17th Century London. But why did these people keep an account of their daily lives? Why does anyone? It’s certainly not for preserving history.
Truth is, there are many reasons and benefits people write about the day-to-day happenings of their lives. Some of them are:
1). It can improve the quality of your writing. Keeping a daily journal ensures that you will get some much-needed practice frequently, which is good if you ever intend on making a successful career out of your writing.
2). It provides hindsight to your problems. If you write about all the various issues you face, and keep up to date with how you handle them, then you might be able to pick up patterns in the behavior of yourself or others. From them, you can learn, grow, and ensure you can handle problems much better in the future, if not keep them from happening ever again.
3). Writing can reduce stress. We all have bad days. Sometimes we just want to scream at somebody, throw something around, or beat the living snot out of whatever we come across. all work, sure, but they’re destructive and hurtful of both yourself and others. Ranting in your journal about all of the things that tick you off while you are in a nasty mood is in many ways a better way to relieve that anger. There are fewer hurt feelings, fewer bruises, fewer regrets, and fewer chances to get arrested.
4). It can improve you memory. A lot can happen to us over the course of a year, or even a month, whether we realize it or not. It’s not hard to imagine how the days just seem to blur together after a while. And worse, sometimes, we can forget some very important things, like scheduled meetings and deadlines. For many people, writing is a good way to better commit things to memory. At the very least, a journal can also act as a makeshift planner of sorts.
5). You can better understand yourself. One would expect that we should know all about ourselves, but alas, even we can come across as alien at times. But more than that, sometimes, we just don’t know what makes us tick. We don’t know why we have the opinions we do, or how we ever developed them. With a journal, you can always examine your past thoughts, and mull over them again.