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7 Ways You Can Use Your Journal to Instantly Soothe Anxiety
This article was originally published in JournalSmarter.com.
Your alarm clock rings, and you know it already: it’s going to be another one of those days.
A rush of stressful thoughts starts flooding your mind: so many to-do’s, problems to solve, expectations to meet — and the bare thought of getting out of bed makes you want to hide and scream.
Panic starts kicking in. You feel paralyzed, hopeless, overwhelmed.
How can you overcome this anxiety?
You’ve you have heard it all: meditation, healthy eating, exercising, effective organizing systems in place, therapy… You have tried it all, and yet — nothing works.
And how could it? How can you even think about starting to improve your life when you can barely even manage to breathe? How can you think when you’re paralyzed by the inner voice that screams “you’re never going to be okay”?
What you need right now is an instant relief. An easy, no-brainer, immediate solution. Something that will soothe that horrible feeling of despair, so that you can begin to think clearly.
The good news is, this is possible. And it’s easy.
And all you need is one object:
Your journal.
A lot of people use their journal for planning, learning, drawing or writing.
However, most of us are missing out on one kind of benefit that our journal can bring us: instantly soothing anxiety.
How?
Here are 7 simple, super effective 5-minute journaling practices that you can use as an immediate balm to bring you back to calmness, clarity and control.
1. Embrace Your Anxious Thoughts
One of the instincts many of us have when we face anxious thoughts is to try and deny them — push them away, think of something else. Unfortunately, this only suppresses our stress, and usually makes it surface later in worse ways.
So what can you do? There is a much better option: according to research, writing down your worries can make them go away — almost as if you are transferring them out of your head and…
