Journaling Good for Your Health


zil
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While reading on the Fountain Pen Network, I came across a link to an interesting article titled "Science Shows Something Surprising About People Who Still Journal".  I had heard before about the mental health benefits of journal writing (and writing down all your worries immediately before you needed to act without those worries getting in the way), but this is the first I've heard that it could have benefits to physical health (though it makes sense after reading it).  Anywho, I thought I would share - in case anyone needs a little motivation to keep / start writing in that journal they got as a youth... ;)

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This is interesting! I used to write in my journal all of the time, I loved it! I have't written regularly in over a decade though since I have become so busy with my kids. Just the other day I started keeping one again because I have been feeling so overwhelmed lately and I thought that it could help me to keep everything in perspective. Thank you for sharing!

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have kept a Journal since I was 18 yrs old.  We had pen and paper back then .....unlike Pam who learned to write with a hammer and chisel.   I am now 57 and have written in my journal more now than I did when our kids were still home.  I write in it every Sunday and sometimes other days if I feel the need to vent.  ?

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  • pam featured this topic
22 hours ago, Palerider said:

I have kept a Journal since I was 18 yrs old.  We had pen and paper back then .....unlike Pam who learned to write with a hammer and chisel.   I am now 57 and have written in my journal more now than I did when our kids were still home.  I write in it every Sunday and sometimes other days if I feel the need to vent.  ?

I think that's very kind of you to refer to Pam's activities with a hammer and chisel as "writing." But I should also point out that, as demonstrated by Moroni, journals that are engraved with a chisel are likely to last longer than those written with a pen, so Pam's words are likely to last longer than yours - as long as someone can actually  read her "writing"

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4 hours ago, askandanswer said:

I think that's very kind of you to refer to Pam's activities with a hammer and chisel as "writing." But I should also point out that, as demonstrated by Moroni, journals that are engraved with a chisel are likely to last longer than those written with a pen, so Pam's words are likely to last longer than yours - as long as someone can actually  read her "writing"

No one could read it ....Lol

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Many, many years ago when I was living in outer darkness [my inactive years] I read an article in a one of the women's magazines about keeping a journal. The object was to validate oneself, to keep from going crazy, etc.

So, as I sat in the near empty Tavern during the s l o w  hours, I owned with my first husband, I started keeping a daily journal. Writing about the customers and how, over the years, their stories seldom changed. Wrote about the abuse I was living with and the movies/programs I was watching on satellite TV that showed me it was NOT a normal existence. My first husband had successfully alienated me from my former friends, so I really didn't have anyone to confide in. He mailed my letters - which in actuality he didn't, he read them then destroyed them.

My Mom, who was not LDS, told me to tough it out, talk it out with husband. I was married for Better or Worse remember. This too shall pass. I really wasn't that honest with Mom, never told her of the abuse, which at the beginning was emotional and mental, and finally escalated to physical. 

So, here I am writing in a journal, and this controlling, manipulating spouse of mine, who reads my letters to my best friend and all of my family members then burns them, never once thinks to read them. The journal that is.

I keep the journal close to me at all times. Under the mattress when I sleep, under the sofa where I sit. In the cupboard under the back-bar where I work in the tavern. They are 5-Star Mead 5 subject college ruled spiral bound notebooks. It never dawns on me to rip pages out, I just cross out and keep writing.

When I separate & divorce hubby #1, I still keep the journals. My vague thoughts are to turn them into a book. When I meet and marry husband #2, I have the passing thought that I will hand them off to him, let him read them, then we can ceremoniously burn them. Life happens and for 6 years they are packed in a box that never gets unpacked. We move back to Oregon for retirement and for another 6 years they remain in the box.

Before a friend comes for a summer visit, I flip the furniture in the large living room.[ Flip = moving the recliner, tv, rocking chair from near the front door to the opposite end, and move my desk, *office* stuff, coloring/sewing/needlepoint to near the front door. ] In doing so, I go through the boxes of unpacked items and find the journals. After my friend leaves I go through the journals. After all of these years I am still really not ready to read them. All of these years being 20 years, 12 of which have been with a loving, active priesthood holding man. Guess the wounds hubby #1 caused have not been completely healed by husband #2.

I did find pictures that hubby #1 had missed in one of his drunken rages when he burned album after album along with boxes of my pictures. Not very many of the pictures are in the journals, but still enough to trigger enjoyable journey's down memory lane(s). Also found a letter from my little sister. WHAT a punch in the face that one is. I had had a phone conversation with her asking her to write to me with her memories of the trip when our parents moved them all from Seattle to South Dakota.

I cannot remember reading this letter, yet there isn't an envelope - so I must have. Her letter is so full of lies. Why did I not see these lies when I first read it? She wrote it in 1997, during a time I was going through the worst of the abuse by hubby #1 that is why.  I need to go visit my younger brother (who was there on the 'Exodus Back to Heaven' is how my Mom described it) and ask him of his memories. Also need to talk with the cousin who drove the rental moving truck, and whose father is Dad's brother.

If our nieces, nephews, grand N's ever read this letter, they will think that it speaks of truths of a time in the life of my parents.

The lies are so great, that I can't read the letter from start to finish in one sitting. I started to yellow highlight the lies, and the parts I need verifications for, then realized I needed to do more than just highlight - needed to make notes. So, in a bit [small season] I will scan it into my computer, and do the notes-n-highlights via the computer.

Back to my journals ~ ~ In 1983 I went to Seattle to help my sisters care for my very ill mother. In 1981 we had brought Mom back to Seattle because her health was failing, and she no longer had children living close enough to care for her. During my down time from my *shift* with her, I was rummaging around in the basement rooms going through her boxes and found what I thought were my journals. Turned out Mom journal-ed in Mead spiral bound college ruled notebooks too. After spending several hours gathering all of her journals (packed into about 6 moving boxes and equaling about 1 bankers box worth of them) I put them in order and preceded to read them.

Journal #1 started the same exact way my 1st journal did. She had read the same article, in the same woman's magazine but it was decades earlier than when I had read it. She read the magazine in the Dr's office as she was waiting for her appointment, then asked if she could take the magazine home. She was kind enough to actually include the entire magazine in with her 1st journal.

When I finally got home, I scrounged around and found the magazine I had read. Same article, published decades later in the same magazine.

I really don't think I will be keeping these early journals of mine - there is just too much in them that I am not very proud of. My desperate thoughts of killing my spouse to be rid of him. My plans on leaving him, and then NOT doing it. I do need to read them again, then ceremoniously burn them. Hubby #1 has passed away, his only son believes his Dad was a good person and there is no one but me left alive to tell him the truth. My journals are a witness to the truth. Let him believe his Dad was good, there is no good to come from educating him.

The Dad he knew was the man he spent the last 2.5 years of his life with. Perhaps he was a good man by then.

The journals I keep now are on a computer program that I purchased from the same company that makes RootsMagic - it is called Personal Historian. As much as I loved writing on paper with a pen, my poor neuropathic hands can no longer do that and have what has been written be legible.

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  • pam unfeatured this topic

It would be great to write an imaginary journal! I have read some passed off as real journals from the 19th century. On Gutenberg books, there are a number of pop supposedly true accounts of us frontier women. The best sellers of the day, I imagine! The frontier women kill bears, are captured by Indians, meet downtrodded Mormon women, who dare not confess the unspeakable details of their wretched home lives. I imagine they were written by housebound easterners sitting in front of a blazing fire.

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42 minutes ago, Sunday21 said:

It would be great to write an imaginary journal! I have read some passed off as real journals from the 19th century. On Gutenberg books, there are a number of pop supposedly true accounts of us frontier women. The best sellers of the day, I imagine! The frontier women kill bears, are captured by Indians, meet downtrodded Mormon women, who dare not confess the unspeakable details of their wretched home lives. I imagine they were written by housebound easterners sitting in front of a blazing fire.

Alternately, it would be great to write a real journal well.  Once, in college (one needs a college library to find these things), while researching a Russian Lit paper, I came across the diary of Tolstoy's wife.  It was fascinating - not in that what she was describing was unusual, but in that it was the real-life ramblings of a person we might otherwise have imagined was unusual.  She was writing about how she feared her husband didn't actually love her.  And something about her daughter(s), I think.  It's been a long time.

I think the only problem with modern journals is that modern people aren't taught to write well...

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