Like most people, I’ve been looking for ways to keep myself sane during quarantine. It’s getting harder and harder though if I’m being honest, but buried underneath all the suggestions of learning to braid your hair properly (done that) and learning a new language (I will probably never manage that), one suggestion to get through isolation comes up over and over again – journaling.
Maybe it sounds lame, or like something we mostly left behind as teenagers, but it turns out the benefits we got from spilling all our teenage angst out on to the pages still applies in adulthood.
According to Headspace, journaling can help you manage stress and anxiety by helping us understand what’s going on in our minds. Writing something down can be a healthy way to process and deal with our emotions, and boy howdy are there a lot of emotions to process when you’re locked down in the middle of a global pandemic.
Tracking your day to day life in a time when it really feels like we’re living in Groundhog Day – wake up, work from home, read the latest coronavirus news, repeat – might not seem like it’s worth doing. It can help you notice patterns though. Maybe you feel a bit better about the world when you go for a socially distant walk around the block? Or when you cook yourself your favourite dinner? Or call a friend? Working out what cheers you up is going to be useful, because there’s a good chance we’ll be in quarantine for several weeks yet.
If you’re looking to kick one off, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as “Dear Diary” followed by everything you did throughout the day if you don’t want it to be. Bullet journaling is where you basically stick everything into dot points. Jot down a line about how you felt that day and what the best part of the day was. Boom. Done.
And if none of those reasons have you hooked? Imagine how cool it will be reading your coronavirus isolation journal to your grand kids one day.
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