Types of Journals You Can Keep

Journaling is a great hobby and it can help you gain a deeper awareness and understanding about yourself. It is also a great way to record your impressions of your surroundings or situations. Journaling can also encourage your creativity, and it can help relieve stress.

Here are some of the types of journals that you can keep. Keeping a focused journal can be very helpful because you are intent on one specific goal. It can also be fun to keep several focused journals at once, separating your impressions about things into different journals so they are in the appropriate category.

Travel Journal. This is a fun journal to keep. Many people who don't even consider themselves journal keepers keep this type of journal. To keep a travel journal you record your impressions of your vacation or trip. It can be helpful to include visual items - such as postcards or other items such as small pieces of maps or photographs. If you have drawing or painting skills then you can sketch in your journal and then paint in your journal later, or paint in your journal right away. This is a wonderful way to remember your trip, and even if several people take the same vacation and they all keep travel journals, they would all come home with different travel journals.

Health Journal. Journaling does have health benefits. Journaling about a health condition can give you insight into a health condition, and it can also help you to relieve stress surrounding the health condition. People who write down their food intake for example, become conscious of what they eat and they do wind up eating less and eating more healthy food than most people who do not write down their food intake. Putting pen to paper about a health condition could be very helpful.

Daily Life. Many people like to journal about what has happened to them in their daily life. So many blogs are about ups and downs of daily life. Journaling about your daily life can help you to see patterns in your life and help you to make changes or decisions about your life. It can also help to release stress.

Creative Journal. If you are the creative type, a journal can be a wonderful tool. You can sketch or write poems or do so many types of creative things. Or you can just vent, and that can be helpful to the creative process as well. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, encourages creative people to write three pages of longhand writing each day and she calls these pages morning pages. These morning pages and her program have been credited with helping many creative people unblock their creative energy. Consider reading The Artist's Way if this topic interests you.

Dreams Journal. Everyone has dreams. Not all of us seem to remember them. But most research has shown that if you start to write them down, you will indeed remember your dreams. Dreams have insight and symbols that will help you in your daily life. Not every dream may make complete sense to you the morning after you have had it, you may need to think about a dream for awhile before it becomes clear to you what its meaning is. But recording your dreams is this first important step.