In keeping with Mental Health Awareness Week, and with the fact that Urban Outfitters and Paperchase are littered with ‘One Line a Day’s and similar aesthetically pleasing notebooks, it is safe to say that the discussion surrounding journaling and its associated health benefits has made a roaring comeback.
It is largely undisputed that writing about your day, noting your feelings and worries, is a positive and, some argue, potentially life-changing exercise with regards to health. Many studies have been conducted around this topic with positive results, the theory being that writing provides an outlet that allows you to find clarity in your thoughts that are confused by the mayhem of modern life, a way to tune into the thrum of your heart, helping to reduce stress, aiding relaxation and encouraging better sleep. It has also been found that keeping a diary improves your retention of past experiences later in life, keeping your memory sharp as you age. All of this is absolutely valid. The therapeutic power of writing is not to be underestimated – stats don’t lie hun. But I couldn’t help but find this ethos slightly controversial. Call me a cynic.
Inspired by Helen Fielding’s worldwide publishing phenomenon Bridget Jones, a couple of years ago I decided to jump on the bandwagon and invest in a diary. It is a fact universally acknowledged that everyone with a sense of humour loves Bridget Jones, and over the years she has become the quintessential role model for female millennials. Excited by the prospect of immortalising myself in writing just like our dear Bridge, in the evenings I began to note the events of my day in bed with a cup of tea – this ritual continued for a while without much second thought from yours truly. As time went on, however, I began to see this process as an obstacle.
On reflection I found that when I was writing, I was either presenting a manufactured, ideological image of myself and my life, or I was including all the monotony, the embarrassments and regrets that constituted a more representative ‘day in the life’; personal shortcomings that are easier to accept and learn from, when they haven’t been archived so that you can be reminded of them for years to come. I also realised that I was not reaching the goals I had expected to each month and became very demotivated as a result. It is just a reality that many days are filled with the tedium of routine or unproductivity, but I didn’t feel like I was living my best life because this break-down of days failed to capture (and I failed to realise) the bigger picture. Besides, this diary was living proof that I was not even in the slightest maintaining my New Year’s resolutions, as I sheepishly confessed to the pages that I had only set foot in the gym once in the past 20 days… Eventually, with the consciousness that there was a gap between what I was doing and what I wanted to be doing with my days, I became incongruent and unhappy, feeling there was no place for me to grow in this narrow framework of routine.
So I abandoned ship with the whole journaling craze, and found that I felt a lot better for not documenting my every move. I have always been a prolific planner (as a child I had a list of all my lists – that is dedication to the cause), but I have often found that this has made it hard for me to live in the moment, to truly experience momentary bliss. And so in the same way, journaling disallowed spontaneity to be a part of my life that I needed so badly to improve my headspace. I understood I had to be the author of my own fate, not the other way around – by not writing I was actually more inspired, and did more with my time. During the evenings, time I would have used to fill in my journal I instead used to catch up with family and friends, read for pleasure, exercise, or binge-watch that series on Netflix I had been eyeing up for months, and doing more things to ‘feed the soul’ for a few minutes each day had unmatched benefits on my mental wellbeing. Plus, my hand ached less.
So, whether you’re an avid journal keeper, or not, HCX hopes we’ve opened up the debate about what writing can, or can’t, do for our health.