Jake Desyllas of the Voluntary Life is a big proponent of journaling and a process he describes as Mental Decluttering. “It’s about clearing all the crap from your head so that you have the freedom to think clearly,” says Desyllas, who uses journaling as a way of freeing up his head space to enable creative thinking to take place.
Not just for creative thinking, writing down your thoughts is a way of privately realising and expressing a wide variety of emotions without sharing with others or revealing every aspect of yourself to the world.
Even writing down a few jumbled sentences can help “offload” problems or thoughts that could fester if not acknowledged.
By keeping a journal you will be in good company. Famous creatives like Ernest Hemmingway, Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag all kept extensive journals or notebooks.
Today more than ever, privacy is important and not everyone wishes to constantly vlog or tweet their innermost feelings out to the world for acceptance, confirmation or judgement.
That’s OK, because you can write it in your journal instead.