Did you know that journaling can be a powerful tool to enhance your fitness journey?
You can track your workouts, progress, and reflections, gaining valuable insights into your journey, identifying patterns, and trends to make informed decisions about your health and wellness.
Sue from Sue Stubbs Coaching gives us her insight into making the most of journaling and how it can be used.
"Whether you're navigating a significant life challenge, handling daily stress, or need to decant the thoughts going round in your mind, self-care practices can be beneficial.
Journaling is one such tool to consider.
For some, it serves as a means to document particular details of daily life. For others, it's an impromptu activity that facilitates the processing of experiences via creative writing.
Journaling is an effective, research-supported approach that can also aid in managing mental health issues and stress.
Journaling represents an expressive coping technique, which assists individuals in processing and releasing negative thoughts, emotions, or experiences. Transferring these onto paper can diminish their influence over you.
Just as this practice can help with negative thoughts and emotions, journaling about the positive experiences, events and thoughts during the good times too, is equally important."
Sue's Tips on Journaling
- Journal every day – the word journal comes from the old French word ‘jour’ meaning daily. As with anything new, it will feel different at first, a bit overwhelming or just not knowing where to start.
- Journal at odd hours – sometimes it’s good to write when you’re feeling sad, angry, tired, unwell. This can bring a new dynamic to your journal content.
- Keep your journal with you – whether it’s a traditional written journal, notes on your device or a journaling app.
- Use journal prompts – if you’re having a mental block, try asking yourself some questions:
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- What happened today?
- What did I learn today?
- The best thing/worst thing that happened today?
- What conversations did I have?
- How am I today?
- Write about something you enjoyed, the food you ate, something that you’re grateful for, just literally anything.
- Did someone annoy you? What emotion did that generate in you? Why do you think that may be?
"Your journal is personal and confidential – you can be as opinionated as you like!!
It’s also a means for reflection and acceptance. I do sometimes share them when I feel it can help someone or just to be accepting of something I have overcome.
This can feel really uncomfortable as there’s a level of vulnerability in sharing something so personal to you. The result, however, can be incredibly powerful in the next level of acceptance and will at least demonstrate that it’s ok to share.
I also scroll back to journals from a year ago on any given day; I love to see how far I’ve come and what I've learned along the way, along with the little memories and things I’ve done each day.
The reality is, we’re all getting carried away with life and often forget the little things we do.
Write it down!"
Get Your Free Journaling Masterclass from Sue, visit www.suestubbs.com