Recently – as per my therapist’s recommendation – I have begun journaling. At first, I’ll be honest, I thought it would be quite boring and useless. I didn’t really understand how it would help my anxiety at all. I didn’t do anything for about 5 days after my therapist recommended I do that and then one day, I started to become very anxious and decided to just try it and see if it helped. And to my surprise, it helped me a great deal. Just writing out how I was feeling (mentally and physically) and quickly writing down my thoughts helped me work through it so quickly and easily. Once I had calmed down a bit, I wrote down how I was feeling then so I would remember how much this helped the next time I was feeling anxious.
This incident happened at the beginning of January and ever since then, I’ve been journaling quite a lot whenever I feel anxious or stressed. The pages are not very pretty and it’s not something I plan on sharing with anyone, but the physical action of writing out my thoughts and getting them onto a piece of paper feels like I’m taking them out of my head and helping to reduce my feelings of anxiety. I don’t fully understand the science behind how or why it works, but it really does help a lot (at least for me).
I would recommend to anyone who struggles with anxiety to start just writing down how you’re feeling or draw it out on a notebook or journal or scrap piece of paper. It doesn’t need to be a neat, aesthetic-looking journal like you see on Tumblr or Instagram, it can just be scribbles and doodles or a messy stream-of-consciousness. But for me, journaling has helped me feel a lot less anxious every day. I think it’s wonderful and can’t recommend it enough.
Written by Shelby Rogers