Coloring is not a new concept and has been around to as far back as the 1880s when the McLoughlin Brothers first published The Little Folks' Painting Book, in collaboration with Kate Greenaway (Wikipedia).
It sure was a fun activity as a child back when life was simpler. As you matured, coloring became more than just fun but also a pleasurable escape and respite to an otherwise stressful life.
It provides various spiritual, psychological, mental, and even social benefits.
Combined with journaling, which lets you go deep into your thoughts and emotions, coloring is even more powerful.
Consider these benefits from adult coloring:
Have you heard of amygdala? It is that almond-shaped section of the nervous tissue located in the temporal (side) lobe of the brain. In simplistic terms, it is that part of your brain that has to do with your “fight or flight response.”
The amygdala gets activated when you’re overwhelmed, overworked, and anxious. It gets worked up and leaves you feeling panicked.
Coloring helps calm the amygdala, letting you get on with a more positive life experience.
Stress isn’t always negative. It can be positive. It can compel you to focus on the more important things, take steps to correct a problematic situation, or motivate you to work harder and more efficiently. This is positive stress at its best.
When stress is overwhelming, it becomes negative. Negative stress occurs when you focus on things you can’t change in life no matter how hard you try. It stems mostly from worry, which is a wasted emotion.
Adult coloring takes your mind off the things you fear or worry about, and it helps you focus on the here and now. It allows you to feel calmer and less stressed. You might even walk away from your coloring pages with a renewed sense of energy and a newfound sense of peace.
Coloring a page takes a great deal of time and effort. It takes precision and careful thought. The amount of invested time you put into coloring brings about mindfulness.
Mindfulness is a process that brings your attention to what’s happening at the moment, not the past nor the future. It’s a proven subtle way to help you focus and be genuinely present in the now.
Mindfulness, when you are coloring, happens while engaged with the following activities:
Coloring is an excellent way to improve mental health. Through coloring, you are able to:
Even if you aren’t anxious or too stressed, you can benefit from adult coloring. It’s designed to remind you of the simple pleasures of life.
Now, now…
You don’t need a ton of information to convince you of the power of coloring. You only need to do a page of adult coloring to realize that it’s not only addictive. It also does what this article promises!
What happens when you engage in journaling?
You heal yourself inside and out.
How can this happen?
When you practice journaling, you bring yourself into a positive state of mind that boosts your hormones.
Call these happy hormones, which are like pick-me-up pills that heighten happiness and alleviate depression.
There are ten of them:
#1 – Endorphin
This hormone is the body’s natural painkiller or morphine. It alleviates mood or euphoria and reduces pain and anxiety. The more you have of it, the happier you feel.
#2 – Serotonin
This hormone boosts your mood and makes you more sociable and likeable. It regulates a range of behaviors including appetite, sleep, arousal and aggression. It is responsible for diminishing craving, achieving restful sleep, boosting self-esteem, relieving depression, preventing agitation and aggression, and reducing anxiety.
#3 – Dopamine
This is the pleasure hormone that is responsible for your feelings of bliss, contentment, euphoria, pleasure, fulness of appetite, controlled motor movements, and sharpness of focus. It is strongly associated with reward mechanisms while striving to achieve a goal or pursuing a rewarding experience.
#4 – Oxytocin
This is your love hormone that’s stimulated by dopamine. It is secreted in response to social recognition, emotional bonding, cuddling as well as sexual stimulation, arousal, and orgasm.
#5 – Acetylcholine
This hormone makes you alert, sharpens memory, optimizes sexual performance, controls appetite and releases growth hormone.
#6 – Enkephalin
This is your hormone that restricts pain, reduces your craving, and inhibits depression.
#7 – Gamma Amino Butyric Acid (GABA)
This hormone is found in the central nervous system. It fights stress, anxiety, panic, and pain. It promotes calm, focus, control as well as growth in muscle mass.
# 8 – Melatonin
This hormone is responsible for rest, sleep and healing or recuperation. It regulates the body clock and fights the aging process.
# 9 – Norepinephrine
This hormone is secreted in response to stress, making you feel excited, happy, alert and motivated. It fights depression, controls appetite, uplifts energy, and achieves sexual satisfaction.
#10 – Phenylethylamine (PEA)
This hormone is a powerful natural stimulant in your body that stimulates good mood, promotes bliss, stirs infatuation, diminishes anxiety, boosts energy, and sharpens focus.
Now you know how journaling can make you happy, it's time to do your part.
Get into journaling if not into it already or...
do it as regularly as possible.
How important is it to have one?
What satisfaction is there?
What good does it do you?
What happens when you engage in the journal writing?
How does it work?
These are relevant questions you need to ask yourself most especially now when journaling has become a really big thing.
Before being drawn into this craze, it’s best to have a look at nine benefits you may possibly get from journaling:
Feel free to identify your own as journal writing is really a personal thing and one is good to one may not be to you
When you sit down to journal, the first thing you reap is solitude.
A desire for solitude may be misconstrued as loneliness, emptiness, isolation, seclusion, privacy, detachment, separation and solitariness.
Indeed, you may engage in journaling when feeling lonely or empty.
However, it could be more than that.
Solitude is the state of being alone without being lonely. It is a positive and constructive state of engagement with oneself. Solitude is desirable, a state of being alone where you provide yourself wonderful and sufficient company. ~ Hara Estrof Marano, Psychology Today
More often than not, journaling is where you find:
It is in solitude where you let down your hair and become the person you truly are.
It’s enjoying the freedom to be oneself.
No masks.
No pretenses.
No inhibitions.
You lose yourself and claim it back, way better when you let it go.
The magic takes place in solitude
To many, there is no place better than being alone journaling.
Journaling relieves stress and anxiety.
It’s calming, soothing and relaxing.
It is a powerful tool for self-expression.
When you write in your journal, you let go of thoughts and emotions that frustrating, troubling, stimulating, and even uplifting but stressful.
As a result, you gain clarity, self-understanding, focus, confidence, and strength.
Now you are able to face and solve problems with calm, grace and confidence.
You notice that your health condition improves. Ailments such as migraine, depression, anxiety, insomnia, heart disease, and other forms of illness diminish or disappear.
Journaling sparks creativity.
It is a tool for creative expression.
It challenges you to think, feel and respond in familiar, strange, novel or untested ways.
What you can do is limitless.
Write. Compose.
Draw. Doodle. Paint. Pastel. Ink.
Swear. Pray. Romanticize.
Tear. Cut out. Crumple. Fold. Paste. Mask.
Experiment. Challenge.
Ask.
Analyze. Theorize.
Exclaim. Explain. Solve. Resolve. Answer. Clarify.
Build. Destroy.
Organize.
Plan.
Whatever.
Up to you.
No right or wrong.
No black or white.
Only creative expression.
Journaling is excellent to clarify your thoughts, emotions, responses, and behaviors.
As you journal, you gain valuable insights that lead to clarity:
Who am I?
Why am I here?
What is my mission in life?
What do I live for?
What am I willing to die for?
What do I love the most?
What pains me?
How do I feel today?
Why do I feel this way?
What am I scared of?
Who are the most significant people in my life?
What do I want to be 5, 10 or 20 years from now?
What have I achieved?
What have I become?
These are some popular journaling prompts that would help you understand yourself at a much deeper level.
To the question of your life, you are the only answer. To the problems of your life, you are the only solution. ~Jo Coudert, Advice From A Failure
Journaling is a wonderful way to understand the world that surrounds you.
It can help clarify events, problems, circumstance, and options as well as people influencing your life.
When you’re beset with a mind full of fuzzy, disconnected thoughts flitting here and there, journaling would:
As you understand things better, you also gain a clearer view of actions, solutions and directions to take to deal with whatever confronts you.
You’re able to carve out a more defined and definitive roadmap for your future.
Self-esteem is feeling proud, satisfied, confident, accepting and respectful of your abilities and worth.
Keeping a journal boosts your self-esteem.
When you regularly write in your journal, you keep tab of your progress:
You track how close you are to achieving your dreams.
You reaffirm the benefits you are achieving as you get closer to your goals.
You see yourself in a new light as you see how much you have transformed.
Even when you don’t always succeed, you realize that you are worth more than gold.
It doesn’t matter what others say.
You accept yourself warts and all, believe in yourself and take pride in who you are.
When you write your journal, you release negative thoughts and emotions that block your view of things and approach in life.
Without these impairing blocks, you gain a new pair of eyes.
You see things in a positive light.
You open up yourself to new possibilities.
You respond differently.
Life has more meaning and you approach it with more life.
You’ll be amazed at how much you forget.
When your memory fails you, your journal is there.
Among other things, it would remind you of:
Over time, your journal becomes a valuable catalog of memories that you can look at for years to come.
Journaling is an excellent tool to clear the mind of clutter and manage thought patterns that adversely affect your well-being.
A significant number of people overlook an important health discovery that even seemingly random thoughts hold powerful energy. This energy seeks and finds an outlet to express itself.
What you think, believe and feel eventually manifests itself in many different ways; mostly, negatively, by way of lethargy, boredom, depression, sickness and, worst, death.
Journaling is a positive first step to deal with negativity. By writing on your journal especially on a regular basis, you:
These process helps stimulate and boost hormones (also called happy hormones) that make you live life in a different light.
Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease. ~Hippocrates
When you journal, you record information in real time:
When you journal, you record information in real time:
Over time, you accumulate a significant amount of data for multiple uses.
One day to collect the scattered fragments of myself, and give them symmetry, wholeness and use. ~Muriel Strode (1875-1964), My Little Book of Life, 1912
How important is your baseline data?
What good does it do for you?
What do you make of it?
There are a number of things you can do with it, such as:
Once you realize the value of your insights, things begin to shift in the way you think, feel and behave.
Journaling offers this opportunity for personal growth and development.
Browse your journals and see endless possibilities of products to create and sell:
You name what else.
The list is endless.
When you have solid data to work with, you may define what you want and come up with a plan for it.
Your plan would include:
I’ve been keeping a journal for decades and have experienced first-hand what it can do to me; so, if you ask me why I should keep a journal, I have all these 9 reasons to tell.
How about you?
What benefits have you gotten from journaling?
I would love to learn how journaling has changed or enriched you. Go ahead, share with us below.