Journaling can be a form of therapy, but it is often overlooked. Journaling can help with a person’s mental health, and it should be utilized more often. In my opinion, journaling is a very healthy and easy way to reduce stress, clarify your thoughts and process different emotions.

It has been scientifically proven that if a person spends just 15 minutes a day journaling, then their overall happiness will heighten. Whenever I journal, I can start out feeling very anxious or stressed, but once I get my thoughts into words, I can feel the weight of the stress being lifted off of me.

As a little kid, I would have these fun diaries that I would write “secret notes” in and I wouldn’t let anyone else see them. My parents gave me a journal at the end of second grade, and my first journal entry was about how one of my friends was acting annoying about their new third grade teacher. For years I would write random updates about my life every couple of months, and sometimes I wouldn’t write in it for years, but during quarantine I started to seriously use my journal as a safe place for me to vent out my emotions. During and after quarantine, I began to use my journal as a place where I could reflect on the adversity I had faced in the past or am facing in the present moment.

Sometimes when I flip through the pages of my first journal, I can clearly see my personal growth and how much better my mental health has gotten. I can see so much improvement in my thought process and perspective on different events. It is extremely rewarding to be able to see and track the growth I have made over the years.

My journal has become a safe space for me to process my thoughts and emotions. Even if I don’t really know what I’m going to write about, I always end up writing a lot more than I planned to. It is really therapeutic to just get my thoughts out on paper where I can physically see them. Journaling has helped me express myself, and I feel like I have now been able to find my inner peace.

As high school students, we deal with stressful situations all the time. Especially with the stress of junior year and college starting to take over my thoughts, journaling has been a great way for me to express myself. It’s important for high schoolers to be able to de-stress, whether that be through taking a walk, talking to someone or journaling.

I highly encourage everyone to start journaling. It’s going to feel strange at first since you’re literally just writing down how you feel on a piece of paper, but I promise you that it will ultimately help your mental health. Honestly, I don’t even journal that much. I usually write an entry once every month or couple of weeks. If something happens in my life and I need to straighten out my thoughts, I will always reach for my journal. The first journal I had lasted me from third grade all the way until this past year, so although I didn’t do the whole “journal every day” thing, it still really helped me. In the future, I want to utilize journaling even more, because if it has already helped me so much from scattered entries, it will definitely help me even more if I stay consistent and build a habit around journaling.