This post has been germinating in my head for a few weeks now and I have finally managed to put my thoughts down.

I’ve kept journals before, mostly physical diaries as a young girl, but then I’ve always had the fear that someone will open it up and read my innermost thoughts, and so after a few years of writing in them, I stopped.

After that, it was done in bits and pieces and I would write when and where I felt like. This blog is also an extension of that compulsion to jot down my thoughts and feelings. Then came social media and everyone started sharing their lives online, be it happiness, sadness or even rants and vents. But because I am a super private person, I find it hard to share on social media like many of my peers do. So most of the stuff I didn’t want to share here, on this blog were bottled up. I have done some writing and tearing it up techniques just to get rid of the feelings, but I have always felt it was not enough.

A couple of years back, I came across the idea of the bullet journal and was absolutely intrigued by this concept! Here was something that could document my entire life and I could plan months in advance and would never forget anything that needed to get done! I went and purchased a nice lined notebook and started planning my year (this was sometime in December 2016). Come January 2017, I started using the notebook as my bullet journal.

I lasted less than one month….

The bullet journal was not for me. I am the least creative person I know and can’t even draw a straight line without needing to use a ruler. This was because all the articles and videos I saw about how to effectively use a bullet journal was full of supremely talented and creative ideas which I had zero ideas to implement. I also could not write detailed notes without moving across pages in the book which hampered my journaling efforts a lot. But the deal breaker, at least to me, was the fact that I could not undo any mistakes in my journal. For a person who hates having things crossed out or cancelled, it made me squirmy and brought out all my latent tendencies! So that pretty much ended my bullet journaling journey.

So what next?

While I was using the bullet journal, I had also started using another space to document my daily life. This was nothing more than Google Docs. I started using it from January 2017 and am using it till now (and hopefully for a long time to come) as space where I document what goes on in my life on a day-to-day basis. What I do is very simple, every month is a fresh document and when I finish a year, I pull all the documents for that year into a folder named after the year. The individual files are named Year and month. That’s it. I use it almost every day and there’s no pressure to write long grandmother stories. Some days, it’s just a couple of lines and some days, yes, it’s a detailed description of what I did, ate, met and thought. I have also used it to document the steps I take each day, keep track of my eating and also any habits I am tracking at that particular time. I also love that since it’s on a cloud, I can use the space anywhere I am – where on my mobile device or on a physical computer. I also find it very cathartic when I am able to pen down my innermost thoughts and rants and when I put it down, I find my heart feel lighter and also am able to sleep well at night without having a multitude of thoughts chasing around my head.

I’ve gone a step ahead in 2018. In addition to my monthly Google Docs, I have also started using Google Sheets to track the progress of my habits and other data that I want to track this year. I have created graphs and this lets me see at a glance where I am with respect to those goals.

There are many benefits to keeping a daily diary or journal. It helps you stretch your language as you write every day and this, in turn, lets you challenge yourself with newer words and sentence structure. You are also able to keep track of your goals and lets you know where you are in terms of achieving them and you learn to improve communication skills, both written as well as oral. Also, as I wrote above, writing down your thoughts is cathartic and if you are disturbed either mentally or emotionally, the whole process allows you to make the experience more realistic, which in turns allows you heal faster. Studies have also shown that the emotional release from journaling lowers anxiety, stress, and induces better sleep.

Do you keep a journal or a diary? What has your experience been? Or perhaps you have been inspired to start a journal now? Do comment below and let me know, I’d love to hear from you….