Using Journaling to Cope & Thrive During Social Distancing

READ MORE ABOUT JOURNALING HERE:

• 9 Tips to Make Journaling Part of Your Daily Routine
• 10 Journaling Styles
• Why Journaling Is Good For Your Mental Health

While staying safe at home during quarantine, it’s perfectly normal for you to go through a gamut of feelings. You may experience fear, loneliness, isolation, uncertainty, hope, ambivalence, and a whole host of other emotions.

These feelings and emotion can be difficult to deal with. This is when a daily journaling practice can become massively helpful. Getting your thoughts and feelings out on paper is a great way to release all of those things you’ve been holding on to. It’s also a great way to put your feelings and concerns into words, making them more tangible and easier to deal with.

Journaling Benefits

There are countless benefits of journaling under normal circumstances, but the benefits during the Coronavirus Pandemic are even more telling.

According to VeryWellMind:

Journaling about traumatic events helps one process them by fully exploring and releasing the emotions involved, and by engaging both hemispheres of the brain in the process, allowing the experience to become fully integrated within one’s mind. Journaling can also help you to focus on areas of your life that you like to focus on more often…

As for the health benefits of journaling, they’ve been scientifically proven. Research shows the following:

• Journaling decreases the symptoms of asthma, arthritis, and other health conditions.
• It improves cognitive functioning.
• It can strengthen immune system response.
• It can counteract many of the negative effects of stress.

COVID-19 Journaling

Herbert “Tico” Braun, a College Fellow and professor at the University of Virginia, is encouraging everyone to journal their way through this pandemic. He says:

Think of your children, your grandchildren, your friends down the road, who will ask you what was it like during that pandemic – “What was it called? Corona-something? You know, the one that was named after a Mexican beer … back then in 2020 or ’21. When was it?”

When you think about the individual in this pandemic, think of yourself and you can write about yourself, think and write about other individuals, and about your relationships to others, to your society, societies, to your loved ones, your friends, your institutions.

When you think about society, think about parts of it; death, disease, Wuhan province, the Chinese government, medical systems, Italy, the stock market, shaking hands, online classes, isolation, your town, your family, rich people and poor, social distancing, public events, the market, vulnerabilities, hoarding, hospitals, politicians, health insurance, selfishness, fear, sick leave, economic policies, exponential expansion, individualism, cooperation, competition, solidarity … and more.

You can read more of the interview with Professor Braun here.

Journaling with Success Wizard’s Apps

Whether you use the Success Wizard App, Goals Wizard App or Productivity Wizard App, you can easily keep track of your feelings and emotions through the Journal function.

There are two main ways within the apps that you can leverage the Journal function:

1) Answer the “check-in” questions and determine your mood through the mood meter scale prompts, or

2) Type or speak a free-form Journal entry.

Your Journal entries will be saved within the app so that you can go back to review and reflect upon them at any time.

Your mental health is just as important as your physical health during this time. Be well, stay well, and take care of yourself!