7 Ways Journaling can Benefit Your Brain

7 Ways Journaling can Benefit Your Brain

In the present day and age, journaling is considered a quaint hobby at best, a waste of time at worst. We live in an era dominated by audio-visual and writing is an increasingly specialized endeavor, reserved for and delegated to professionals.
And yet we find all through history, scores and scores of successful people, inventors, artists, entrepreneurs, and presidents have all kept their own journals religiously. What is it that connects the keen and creative mind to journal keeping?
A lot, actually. Turns out, our ancestors had figured out long before what science have gathered verifiable evidence for only recently – journaling has incredible benefits for your brain, and overall physical and emotional health as well.
Whether you are just jotting down useful information, keeping tab on your goals, or simply pouring out your thoughts as they come – the very exercise of writing down what’s in your head helps you unlock a lot of potential your brain would otherwise not tap into. Read on!

What does journaling do to our brain?

Strengthens memory

Writing does wonders for your memory. It helps you build better comprehension skills, thereby leading to better recall. Also, it has a direct impact on your working memory. When you record your thoughts in the writing form, you are going over them again and again and your brain as your thoughts are way faster than your writing speed could ever be. This builds better capacity of working memory and instant recall.

Better IQ

Several studies claim that writing regularly can have a direct correlation with improvement in your intelligence quotient. Among other things, writing forces you to think and express in established language forms, and that requires new vocabulary acquisition. Turns out, one of the biggest indicators of your IQ score is the breadth of your vocabulary.

Increases focus

Journaling is one of the best ways to sharpen and streamline your focus on anything; be it a long-term goal or the study material on hand. Here’s a tip: get into the practice of scribbling down any idea, information, or thought that you think may come in handy at a later time. Writing them down embeds them deeper into your brain; you remember why you need to do this thing or that a lot better, thereby keeping you focused.

Cognitive processing

Writing has incredible benefits for our cognitive processing and decision-making capabilities. Writing down your thoughts forces you to articulate them in a different medium. You have automatically started processing information when you write it down. It adds to your understanding, and helps clear up any vagueness those ideas may have while just running through your mind.

Relieves stress

We live in the Information Technology era, and our minds have to take in a mammoth amount of information every day. It is truly a challenge to take in such an amount of information and then to process it and put it to work. The discord between our information-retention capacity and processing speed can lead to huge stress and poorer decision making on your part. Writing can help you offload extra information from your memory, keep a lighter head, and have the luxury of going back to the information or thought that you have had some times ago. This significantly relieves the stress and anxiety associated with multi-tasking.

Boosts creativity

Writing is inherently a creative function, but it helps you unlock your creative potential as well. Journal keeping helps us with lateral thinking, and allows us to see and make connections between different ideas which we won’t be able to do in our heads alone.

Improves your mood

Journaling makes you happy. Especially, writing down your trauma and negative experiences goes a long way in identifying and facing the issues we are struggling with. It gives us an outlet, thereby lighting our minds and improving our moods. It also helps us look at our emotional issues from a perspective, thereby improving our emotional intelligence.

Conclusion

Journal keeping gets a less-than-favorable reputation as though it is just for overly emotional people. But the habits of many illustrious people all over the world, and now evidence based in science, tells us that this is one of the best ways to keep your brain from burnout, process your emotions and decisions, and make sense of the world around you. So take out your beautiful stationary today, and set to write down your thoughts. Your brain will than you.