Expert shares 7 tips on journaling for mental health

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Mental health is tricky to navigate for most of us. Be it burnout from work, mood swings because of hormonal challenges, triggers at home or anxiety because of relationships - there is a need of healthy coping mechanisms to avoid being overwhelmed. "No matter what you are going through in your everyday life, journaling has proven to be very effective to cope with everyday challenges and stressors and also has a positive effect on mental health," says Meghna Karia, senior psychologist and outreach associate at Mpower.

She elaborates, "Journaling is an act of recording your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and insights. You can choose the medium of recording your thoughts which could be either handwritten, or you could also choose to type and make a digital journal." Even though handwriting has proven to be more helpful in processing your thoughts, journaling whenever you can and when you feel the need to - regardless of the medium - has far-reaching benefits.

How to cultivate the habit of journaling

Karia shares 7 expert tips on how to develop a habit to journal for having good mental health.

1. Gratitude
The first step is to start with a gratitude journal. Cultivating gratitude in our lives helps us see the silver lining.

2. Practice savouring
One can talk about how beautiful the day was or the week which had some positive scenes to remember, the people involved in those positive scenes, and the way it made you feel good about the overall event.

3. Be intentional
Set intentions every day and journal them down. Intent how you would like to feel in the day. Intent how you would like to look forward to the day. Intent how you would like to behave in the day and also write the intent of how you would like to think by choosing the state of mind for the day.

4. Set your goals
Journaling can also help with writing down your goals and vision creation. A vision board also gives you a detailed understanding of a road map that would serve you better in terms of an action plan and the steps you would like to take to work toward your vision.

5. Navigate decision making
Journaling also has been encouraging when it comes to making decisions. Penning down the choices you would like to choose, the pros and cons of the choices, and the healthy and harmful consequences of those choices would also help to be better with your decision-making and problem-solving.

6. Track your triggers
Journaling also has proven to manage mental health conditions like eating disorders. Writing down the triggers of emotional binging and also expressing how one feels before the trigger has helped a lot of them to have control over unhealthy eating patterns.

7. Travel Journal
It's scientifically proven that traveling to nature also helps in healing. Writing about your emotion's pre-travel, while you travel, and post-travel also helps you to understand how there is a shift in your mood and the way travel helps you reach insights about what next steps you would like to take in your professional life and in your personal life which would serve your mental health better.

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