I know we’ve all heard that journaling can be great for your mental health (which is awesome), but did you know it can also be great for your physical health? After all, mental and physical health are extraordinarily intertwined – as many that exercise have discovered, working out helps clear the mind or relieve stress. Conversely, processing your emotions or releasing mental stresses can have a direct impact on your physical well-being, too. 

For example, this study tested antibody levels (specifically against Epstein-Barr virus) of groups of undergraduate volunteers: one group wrote about trivial events, and one wrote about stressful events (there were other comparison and control groups, as well). The study conducted blood testing before and after these groups wrote in 3 weekly 20 minute sessions about their assigned content. The resulting blood analysis concluded that the group writing about stressful events had measurably higher antibodies against the virus than the group that wrote about trivial events. 

Essentially, writing out their stress increased their immune system response. There was a direct physical improvement in response to writing. This type of writing practice is called expressive writing, which many studies have shown can increase physical health (as long as the writer is actually processing their emotions during the exercise, not just reporting them). 

For many, beginning to write about your most traumatic or stressful life events can seem daunting, and it can actually cause more stress in the short term as old emotions are stirred up. However, if you stick with the process and continue to write about these events, expressive writing can help structure and organize your emotions around your stress, which allows you to process them and begin to move on. With the release of these stressful thoughts, your body shows a physical improvement in the long term and a decrease in chronic health issues. 

While journaling is a great practice in general (it’s encouraged to make it part of your usual fitness routine), it can be especially useful when you travel. Traveling introduces so many additional stresses to your day, while also completely throwing off your usual daily routine. This combination of factors can lead to some very uncomfortable physical effects, like trouble sleeping, headaches, body aches, and unusual fatigue. Making a few small efforts towards combating these side effects, like planning what to pack or carving out daily journal time, can go such a long way to improving your fitness during your travels.

If you’ve never really journaled before, it can feel like a silly or useless activity until you try it. It can also feel intimidating, like you have to come up with what to write before you start. In reality, though, journaling tends to trigger memories, releasing them from our subconscious mind – memories that often do not resurface when you are just trying to think through your emotions or thoughts. To pull out these buried emotions, speed journaling is a great way to start. Speed journaling can also help kick-start your journaling practice if you are someone that doesn’t feel very interested in journaling to begin with. 

While you travel, it can also feel like you don’t have time to write. Speed journaling can help minimize the feeling of wasting time with writing, as it can literally be as short as 1 minute per day. Sometimes once you start, the planned 1 minute will turn into a few minutes as your subconscious spits new emotions and ideas at you while you write. Either way, within 10 minutes you’ve taken the time to process unwanted stresses during your travels, which will make you feel that much better each day you participate in the practice. 

If you’ve got a little bit of extra time one day during your trip, or if you want to try speed journaling as a new part of your fitness routine at home but don’t know where to start, try this quick journaling exercise. This kind of writing exercise can help you find a way out of stresses that are playing on repeat in your mind, so you’re not getting yourself stuck in the same feelings about a stressful event day after day.

This same idea can be applied to your fitness journal. Instead of using a fitness journal to track metrics of your improvement, use it to write about how the exercises you completed make you feel (or use it to track both). Putting feelings toward your fitness intentions, goals, accomplishments, and activities can help improve your outlook on your fitness routines; it can help working out feel less like a chore, and more like an active participant in the improvement of your well-being.

All of this is to say that journaling can help you link your mental and physical fitness. Instead of treating mental health and physical health as separate aspects of your wellness, looking at them as a cohesive and symbiotic part of your health is sure to propel you forward on your fitness journey. Taking care of both mind and body is paramount to your wellness, and journaling is the best way to start merging those aspects of your health. 

Here are some great journaling prompt resources to help you get started if writing without a plan feels too overwhelming:

– Scroll to the health food, fitness, and mind/body prompts in this article.

– Check out this pinterest board full of a variety of journaling prompt ideas.

– This post might help you narrow down what sort of things to write in your fitness journal.

– This mom’s self care blog post takes a holistic approach to wellness with a long list of wellness prompt ideas in a variety of categories. 

– This slideshow post helps walk you through 24 mental wellness prompts and suggests details you could provide to write through them. 

What sort of journaling helps you? Comment below to share your thoughts. Happy writing!