Journaling every night is very helpful. It does 2 things. Gives a written record to help you reflect on where you are at in your life. It’s impossible to remember a lot of things and then once you read about it years later it comes back to you. It also helps you write down feelings and emotions that are going on and enables you to get them out. Especially for someone struggling with addiction, having a record where you can learn about yourself and go back to is a huge help when you start to have moments where you feel down.
If you are not a morning person then trying to do this before you start your day might not work, maybe if you have a consistent lunch schedule that would be the time. Ending the day with reflection and an overall assessment of what happened and how you felt about the day is so helpful while doing it. It becomes even more helpful later on when you can read about that day later.
It works both ways, you can see the growth and the progress. Or you can see where you were at a better point and use yourself as an example to get back to that point. Also, as a side note, journaling doesn’t only help you. It helps others down the road, people that may not even exist yet.
What I have found other than a safe place to write true thoughts and feelings, is journaling is a place where you can learn about yourself, check your progress, and relive moments of pain and joy in our lives. Why would I want to relive pain? To help you remember why you are here and the work that you put in to get into a better place in your life. This is a game changer.
It crazy how I’ve been able to learn so much about me, based off what I write down. Unfortunately everything that I hear or say doesn’t get programmed in my brain. Rereading things that I learned about help to reteach the things that I forgot. Ever wonder why we reread the bible or other books, it’s because we don’t learn everything the first time, and sometimes other things jump out at us.
Journaling has been a big part of my recovery every night taking the time to write out the feelings and thoughts from the day. It’s really amazing to see the progress that you have made when it’s all written down in a journal. Maybe it should be called growth tracking instead of journaling.
We also can look back and process the pain through journaling. Seeing our life from an objective angle and then looking at it with the feelings that we have we can start to work on the process of healing.
God Bless!