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Pag journal dakan! These are often heard when someone continues to lament and complain on things happening to the culprit’s life. Also, when someone verbally airs out ideas and often digressing to the main point, chances are some friends would irritably say: write them down than allow us to feel dizzy.

Personally, journal writing has become an extension of my thinking. Jotting down ideas, notes and observations seem to empower the person inside that it even allow this writer to know how to confront emotions either good or bad.

Journaling is an aid to self-discovery and personal growth through writing. Keeping a journal of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences helps one’s well-being. In general, it helps you “know yourself” in isolation and leads to greater understanding and behavior change in your interactions with others.

Atherton (2018) mentions that keeping a journal is important because it creates a space amid the general chaos and clutter from which to pause, collect, organize and untangle. Journaling enables a person to set things down, sort through them, unpick them, understand them and heal them. Also, journaling presents the opportunity to reflect, dissect, analyze, learn, understand and future-proof against detrimental repetition.

Lots of persons automatically react to situations allowing themselves to regret their actions related to the stimulus. But there are those who stop and try to write their feelings and even the resolutions to the things they experienced and make them as learning grounds.

The personal learning process stimulated through dialogue with oneself or with one's instructor over time arises from the cognitive and affective synthesis of shared thoughts and the meanings ascribed to these thoughts. Journal strategies have successfully been applied in traditional learning environments and should be carefully considered in different arenas (Davie, 1997).

Why do we have to reflect and write them down? Simple: We are the managers of our thoughts and our thoughts matter. These are the springboards of our decisions and eventually our actions. That is the reason why social scientists believe that the success and failure of a person depend on his/her calculations. There is an impact of writing your thoughts down. They will become tangible ideas printed on paper. And you can weigh things out through them.

In learning, students are encouraged to have journals. Most of the research involving journal writing has been qualitative in nature, with the journal entries analyzed for trends. Davies found that in the process of journal writing, students moved from being passive to active learners during their clinical debriefing sessions.

This type of paradigm shift was also reported by Sedlack, who found that journal writing aided in placing responsibility with the student for active engagement and self-directed learning. In addition, the students' self-confidence increased because the journals enabled them to identify their own lack of motivation (Walker, 2006).

Teachers, on the other hand, are encouraged to write their reflections in the daily lesson logs. This will allow them to dig deeper into the whys and wherefores of the lessons they have conducted during the week.

Research by Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano, and Bradley Staats in call centers demonstrated that employees who spent 15 minutes at the end of the day reflecting about lessons learned performed 23% better after 10 days than those who did not reflect. A study of UK commuters found a similar result when those who were prompted to use their commute to think about and plan for their day were happier, more productive, and less burned out than people who didn’t.

So, why is it that it is difficult to write down our reflections? Some of us see that writing is a task. Something that is done in the classroom or in the office. There are those who do not want to confront their inner demons. And most do not find meaning in it.

Still, we need to keep a journal. It is heartwarming that notebooks are proliferating inside bookstores and there is a market for the young who jot down their thoughts and feelings. It is in doing this that we can be assured that people are still monitoring themselves.