10 benefits of journaling for happiness

“Happiness is the journey not the destination.” Story Pieces

Your Flourish Journal is a way to fuse creative storytelling, positive psychology, and art journaling to create a record of your life as seen through a lens of positivity, openness, and expansion. It provides a roadmap of your happiness journey, showing you where you have been, where you are, and where you are going.

The Flourish Journal is based on the Happiness Triangle, which includes the three key areas in which happiness can be generated: positivity & pleasure, purpose & meaning, and connection & relationship.

In your Flourish Journal you can:

• Explore how each of the 10 positive emotions (joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, amusement, hope, pride, inspiration, awe, and love) show up in your life, building a record of positive moments.
• Create your unique path of purpose and meaning by delving into your principles and values, creating your life purposes, designing your life to achieve your goals, and discovering your personal set of meaning making activities.
• Open a world of possibility for wholehearted connection, kindness, service, and contribution by exploring all the kinds of relationships in your life, from brief encounters with strangers to your most intimate exchanges.

The benefits of keeping a Flourish Journal

Positive journaling in your Flourish Journal has a number of benefits.

1. Your Flourish Journal provides you a way to uncover, reflect on, and experience positive emotions. By doing this, you embrace the many shades of happiness and become more aware of how small moments of positivity can be incorporated into your daily life.
2. You gain insight into which activities generate positive emotions for you so that you are able to add more of these into your life. This helps you to maintain a positivity ratio of 3:1.
3. You gain a greater appreciation for small experiences of positivity and are able to better savour these both in the moment and again when you write about them. Savouring boosts the impact of positive emotions on your happiness levels.
4. Writing about positive experiences and connection with others shows you how much is going right in your life, the blessings you have, and how fortunate you are. It helps you to feel better about life (even when things may not be going so well).
5. Positive journaling provides a different perspective, offers solutions you may not have previously seen, and allows you to approach life in a new way.
6. Positive journaling allows you to harness the energy generated by positive emotions to fertilise personal growth.
7. Writing about the good things in your life and exploring purpose and meaning helps you to focus on your strengths and resources, which in turn fuels positive change.
8. Exploring purpose and meaning clarifies what’s important to you and shows you where you want to be in relation to where you are now.
9. Positive journaling inspires you to make progress and encourages you to change your circumstances, pursue goals, and try new things (even when they’re scary).
10. Positive journaling builds resilience so that you are better able to manage during difficult times. Reading over your Flourish Journal during times of hardship also reminds you of what happiness feels like.

Essentially, positive journaling helps you to flourish.

Join us for our online course Flourish: Experiments of Happiness, where you will learn more from the science of happiness and create your very own Flourish Journal. This course provides writing exercises that explore your own unique happiness journey.

You might also like our blog How to use positive emotions in your Flourish Journal.