A Stress Management Journal

Why a stress management journal? Life can sometimes seem like an uphill struggle, and all of us get stressed at different times and need ways to achieve targeted stress relief.

The fact is that experiencing stress is normal, and to some degree necessary if we are to meet challenging goals and conquer them.

But there is no need for stress to take over your life or move from a state of motivating you to achieve your ambitions, to actively causing you pain or mental anguish.

Get An Overview On Life

In order to make sure that you are achieving the right balance in your life it is a good idea to keep a stress management journal that records the events in your life, how you are feeling about them, and any other emotions that may be pertinent to your wellbeing.

This may all sound very ‘new age’, but the fact is that keeping in touch with how you feel, and making sure that your emotional health is taken care of is something that all of us would do well to explore.

How To

Keeping a stress management journal can be as simple as buying a notepad or diary and simply writing down your feelings about the day every night. 

Or it can be more high-tech and using journaling apps that you can now get for the iPhone or your computer.  The choice is yours. But the main thing to remember is that the technology that you choose is largely irrelevant, because it is the contents of your head that are of interest here to achieve stress relief, and not the methods that you choose to record them.

In Shakespeare’s day there was no internet, Twitter, iPhones or Facebook and even books were relatively much more expensive than they were today, and yet the contents of the Bards head have stood the test of time, because they were fundamentally a journaling of human experience (albeit a fictional one) filtered through the mind of one man.

In truth your journals may not reach the heady heights of a Shakespeare! But that is not the point. For most people journaling will be a private experience where they write down their thoughts in order to both understand themselves better, and also to have a record of their emotional lives over time.

It can be a good idea to have a certain loose structure when you journal, and it can be particularly helpful to ask yourself the same questions every day, so that you are not faced with the writer’s blank page demons.

Some good questions to ask every day are:

1/ What happened today?

2/ How did these events make me feel?

3/ What can I learn from them?

4/ If I had to find three good things about today what would they be?

You are of course free to formulate your own questions, but the primary purpose of a stress management journal is to learn more about yourself so that you don’t let the everyday stresses of life overwhelm you, but instead learn from them and enjoy quiet stress relief in a sustained and manageable way.

Often we can become absorbed by the pain in a day and forget the joy. We remember that we hurt our arm, or had coffee spilled on our lap, and we forget the beautiful sunrise, the great smile that someone gave us at work, or the brief elation that we felt when we completed a run or a hard gym workout session. 

From there on you can use various methods to amplify and sustain that brief moment of insight.

Time Needed To Focus

In less than 15 minutes a day a stress management journal can help you to recapture the moments of majesty in your own life, and put the moments of insignificance back into perspective.

It is true that the things that we choose to focus on are the things that will define our lives.

If we choose to focus on stress, pain and misery then our lives will become but a mere shadow of what they could be. We can mire ourselves so much in the degradation of the human spirit in fact that we no longer see the moments in our own lives when we soar.

It is for this reason that I believe it is so important to finish every stress management journal entry with (at least) three good things that happened in each day, so that we can start to redress this balance of the natural human tendency to focus on pain more than pleasure.

Start a stress management journal today, and see how your life can be transformed!

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