Journaling is a great way of putting stress in perspective. Putting your worries onto paper may help you see that you don't really have that much to worry about, or it may help you to be organized and manage your stress, rather than letting it manage you.

Why does journaling release stress?

Most stress you are aware of (and a lot of you unaware of) is emotional. Not the major upheavals in life, but the ordinary day to day stress.

Most of you may be saying, ‘but I don’t have stress’ and most of you would be wrong.

Stress is anything you expend energy on. Why? Because stress reduces your energy levels, internally and externally. Your internal energy is your ability to heal and recover as well as resist illness of all forms. Your external energy is your ability to run around all day long.

As most of you drive yourself to keep going, your external energy seems okay. What you are doing is driving your internal energy lower. This is why you see the following …

Dave has worked all his life, not a sick day off in 25 years, he retires and suddenly has a heart attack and dies. The most common words you will hear from his friends and family are …

‘But Dave was such a healthy person’.

You are not healthy if you die of a heart attack. That’s right, healthy people do not die of heart attacks. Dave may have thought he was healthy, but his internal energy was just getting lower and lower. With time this caused the worse type of health problem … an early death.

Most of you don’t know if you are healthy or not. You can have a full medical today which says you are 100% healthy and still die tomorrow. Health checks are checking for outward signs of disease, not inward signs.

So what can or should you do?

Reduce stress, eat well, exercise and do health promoting activities.

One of the easier and better stress relief techniques is journaling. You should use many others if you want to really reduce all your stress … physical, emotional, immune, and environmental and others.

Journaling does do one task very well.

It gets stress out of your head and onto paper. This is a simple mind trick you are playing, as the stress on paper is easier to look at and deal with. Stress also doesn’t seem that bad.

Just write down each day what is bugging you or any stress that has happened, events that are coming up they may cause stress, or just write whatever comes into your head.

You may have a whole page of swear words, after a day of stress. Journaling is good to do on a daily basis. You don’t need to spend hours each day journaling. Just jot down a few events at the end of the day, or as they happen.

Journaling the stress and at the end of the day write down a response. How you feel or felt, solutions to a problem or a bunch of swear words if it is just plain frustrating.

Journaling a response allows the attached stress to the event to be released and put on paper. You will be surprised with what you write at times. Small events can stress you out more than larger events at times.

It also is quite interesting to look back at in the future. You will be amazed, once you apply the solutions to problems how little the problem was. The stress you had last week doesn’t seem that large and you find you are able to use stress coping techniques better and faster.

You suddenly have ammunition for new stress as you have already planned how you can approach any new event. This gets better and easier each time you do it.

Stress once on paper never seems that bad. Start journaling, keep it with you and write in it often. Journaling is a simple and easy way to reduce stress when it happens and also giving you the ability to respond rather than react to stress.