HOW JOURNALING BENEFITS CHILDREN AND TEENAGERS

Writing a journal can help process feelings and thoughts, gain insight into their inner world, express fear and uncertainty as well as happiness and passion.

The childhood and teenage years are filled with lots of emotions and new experiences together with challenging situations in the world around us. A private journal can be a safe place to record those new and brewing feelings, emotions and thoughts; a safe non-judgmental place to improve general well-being and grow through journaling.

Journaling is a great way to relieve stress. Today’s children and teens are under more or equal stress than some adults; not only do they have school and high expectations regarding grades, but also extracurricular activities. Many also have part-time jobs, volunteer obligations, and personal difficulties, including family issues and friend drama together with world situations. Taking some time each day to write in a journal can help a teenager to keep his or her stress levels manageable.

Journaling requires the person to stop what they are doing and focus on what is happening at that moment. Putting down their smartphone and forgetting about school work or personal issues is a break that all people need from time to time.

At the same time journaling allows teens to write down their many thoughts, effectively getting them out of their head and making room for new ones. If you’ve ever felt less overwhelmed once you wrote down everything you needed to, you understand this phenomenon.

Journaling as little as 5-10 minutes a day can make a difference and journaling can be beneficial to:

• Develop emotional intelligence

• Express fearand uncertainty as well as happiness and passion

• Improve generalwell-being

• Gain insight intoown and other people'sfeelings, thoughts, patterns,and motives

• Change or improve our mood

• Strengthen empathy

• See the positives as well as thenegatives

• Get to know ourselves better; strength,worries, values etc.

• Feel and process anger, sadness, regret,and other challenging emotions

• Explore andidentify emotions

• Track feelings and thoughts

Investigations in journaling has been many, we would like to emphasize the research made by the Professor James Pennebaker, as described in Psychologist Susan David’s inspiring and very useful book, “Emotional Agility”.

Pennebaker, after his self-discovering that writing about emotions had surprising and mental healing power, conducted research for forty years about the connection between writing and emotional processing and well-being.

Following is how Susan David describes his research:

Over and over again Pennebaker did studies in which he would divide people into two groups and ask one group to write about emotionally significant experiences and the other to write about everyday things: their shoes, or maybe the cars passing on the street. Both groups wrote for the same time span—about twenty minutes a day, three days in a row….

In each study, Pennebaker found that the people who wrote about emotionally charged episodes experienced a marked increase in their physical and mental well-being. They were happier, less depressed, and less anxious. In the months after the writing sessions, they had lower blood pressure, better immune function, and fewer doctor visits. They also reported higher quality relationships, better memory, and more success at work.

– Susan David, “Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life”.

In other words, studies states that writing about what’s going on with you emotionally has a remarkable ability to make your life better and increase your general well-being.

We have created Guided Journals both for children and teenagers in various languages, based on COLORS and EMOTIONS for children and teenagers to thrive in their inner world.

Our JOURALS are guided because they are meant for children and teenagers to be guided into the habit of journaling. Once the habit is there, it will be easier for them to continue journaling on blank page journals.

Our material and project COLORS OF LIFE JOURNAL have also successfully been made into an ERASMUS+ Small Scale Project funded by the EUROPEAN UNION. We carry this project out together with the Department of Creativity and Educational Innovation at the University of Valencia, Spain.

Read more about the EU project on the page EU ERASMUS+ PROJECT on this website.