This is the question that's E-mailed to me every night around 8 PM from a site called OhLife. All you do is reply to the E-mail with your journal entry and it's saved on their site. The E-mails also contain a random entry from the past. When I signed up for it, I thought it would be another annoying E-mail (like many of the others I get). Come to find out, it's been a great tool for helping me reflect on my feelings and the events of the day. I'm tempted not to reply some days. But I always have something on my mind that seems to flow once I get that E-mail.
Here is a list of 100 reasons why you should journal:
Stress reduction:
- Reduces the scatter in your life
- Increases focus
- Brings stability
- Offers a deeper level of learning, order, action and release
- Holds thoughts still so they can be changed and integrated
- Processes your stuff in a natural and appropriate way
- Releases pent-up thoughts and emotions
- Empowers
- Disentangles thoughts and ideas
- Bridges inner thinking with outer events
- Detaches and lets go of the past
- Allows you to re-experience the past with today's adult mind
- Heals relationships
- Heals the past
- Dignifies all events
- Is honest, trusting, non-judgmental
- Strengthens your sense of yourself
- Balances and harmonizes
- Recalls and reconstructs past events
- Acts as your own counselor
- Integrates peaks and valleys in life
- Soothes troubled memories
- Sees yourself as a larger, important, whole and connected being
- Leverages therapy sessions for better and faster results
- Reveals and tracks patterns and cycles
- Builds self confidence and self knowledge
- Records the past
- Brings out natural beauty and wisdom
- Helps you feel better about yourself
- Helps you identify your values
- Reads your own mind
- Aids in connecting causes to effects
- Reveals the depths of who you are
- Reveals outward expression of yet unformed inner impulses
- Creates mystery
- Clarifies thoughts, feelings and behavior
- Reveals your greater potential
- Shifts you to the observer, recorder, counselor level
- Reveals your processes - how you think, learn, create and use intuition
- Creates awareness of beliefs and options so you can change them
- Self-discovery
- Reveals different aspects of self
- Helps you see yourself as an individual
- Connects you to the bigger picture
- Is a close, intimate, accepting, trusting, caring, honest, non-judgmental, perfect friend
- Accesses the unconscious, subconscious and super consciousness
- Finds the missing pieces and the unsaid
- Helps rid you of the masks you wear
- Helps solve the mysteries of life
- Finds more meaning in life
- Enables you to live life to the fullest
- Is fun, playful and sometimes humorous
- Expresses and creates
- Plants seeds
- Starts the sorting and grouping process
- Integrates life experiences and learnings
- Moves you towards wholeness and growth, to who you really are
- Creates more results in life
- Explores your spirituality
- Focuses and clarifies your desires and needs
- Enhances self expression
- Enhances career and community
- Allows freedom of expression
- Offers progressive inner momentum to static unrelated events
- Exercises your mental muscles
- Improves congruency and integrity
- Enhances breakthroughs
- Unfolds the writer in you
- Maximizes time and business efficiency
- Explores night dreams, day dreams and fantasies
- Measures and tracks what is important
- Eases decision making
- Offers new perspectives
- Brings things together
- Shows relationships and wholeness instead of separation
- Can be applied to clarify any issue in your life
- Takes so little time to stop, pay attention and listen to yourself
- Meets your needs, style, processing methods
- Caters to left and right brained people
- Has no rules - messiness, typos, poor writing are all OK
- Is often self-starting and motivating and supplies its own energy
- Improves self trust
- Awakens the inner voice
- Directs intention and discernment
- Provides insights
- Improves sensitivity
- Interprets your symbols and dreams
- Increases memory of events
- Teaches you how to write stories
- Soothes troubled memories
- Captures family and personal story
- Stimulates personal growth
- Improves family unity
So, try OhLife! See what you think!