Homeopathy

Journaling is a practice that helps you meet your goals or improves your quality of life. This can look different for each and every person, and the outcomes can vary widely, but they are almost always very positive.
Journaling can be effective for many different reasons and help you reach a wide range of goals. It can help you clear your head, make important connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and even buffer or reduce the effects of mental illness!

How Can We Use Writing to Increase Mental Health?
Whether you’re keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it’s the same thing. What’s important is you’re having a relationship with your mind.
Natalie Goldberg
You might be wondering how writing in a journal can have a significant impact on your mental health. After all, it’s just putting some words on a page—how much can that really do for you?
It turns out that this simple practice can do a lot, especially for those struggling with mental illness or striving towards more positive mental health.
Journaling requires the application of the analytical, rational left side of the brain; while your left hemisphere is occupied, your right hemisphere (the creative, touchy-feely side) is given the freedom to wander and play (Grothaus, 2015)! Allowing your creativity to flourish and expand can be cathartic and make a big difference in your daily well-being.
Overall, journaling/expressive writing has been found to:
Boost your mood/affect;
Enhance your sense of well-being;
Reduce symptoms of depression before an important event (like an exam);
Reduce intrusion and avoidance symptoms post-trauma;
Improve your working memory (Baikie & Wilhelm, 2005).
In particular, journaling can be especially helpful for those with Post traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)  or a history of trauma.
It’s hypothesized that writing works to enhance our mental health through guiding us towards confronting previously inhibited emotions (reducing the stress from inhibition), helping us process difficult events and compose a coherent narrative about our experiences, and possibly even through repeated exposure to the negative emotions associated with traumatic memories (i.e., “extinction” of these negative emotions; Baikie & Wilhelm, 2005).
Even for those without a traumatic experience to work through, we have a good idea of how writing can enhance our mental health. It can make us more aware (and self-aware!) and help us detect sneaky, unhealthy patterns in our thoughts and behaviors. It allows us to take more control over our lives and puts things in perspective. Further, it can help us shift from a negative mindset to a more positive one, especially about ourselves (Robinson, 2017).
However, to have a positive impact on mental health, we need to be sure that we have an appropriate method. Simply doing a “brain dump” of words on the page may feel good, but there’s little evidence that it will increase your well-being or decrease your symptoms of depression.
Baikie and Wilhelm (2005) offer the following tips to ensure your journaling is constructive, gleaned from their comprehensive overview of the literature:
1. Write in a private and personalized space that is free from distractions;
2. Write at least three or four times, and aim for writing consecutively (i.e., at least once each day);
3. Give yourself some time to reflect and balance yourself after writing;
4. If you’re writing to overcome trauma, don’t feel obligated to write about a specific traumatic event—journal about what feels right in the moment;
5. Structure the writing however it feels right to you;
6. Keep your journal private; it’s for your eyes only—not your spouse, not your family, not your friends, not even your therapist (although you can discuss your experience with your therapist, of course!)