by Dave Denio

Created on: April 22, 2008

Nothing relieves stress like laughter and nothing brings laughter like reading something you wrote when you were sixteen.

We should all be required to keep a journal or diary for at least a year. Let's make it a law. Journals provide such insight into our thought patterns. Reading something you've written years ago reveals to you that whatever you felt was important, serious, headache - inducing before is probably not what matters to you now. Stress comes from not getting what we want. Pressures arise when we are worried about the importance of some event. Diaries attach themselves to moments in our lives and allow us to flip back to them like post - its. We can return to old wounds or anxious minutes but with the view of someone in the bleachers.

As far as journal writing relieving stress by the act of writing, I would have to fudge on that proposition. Anyone ever written an angry love letter? Did you feel better after it or just stew some more? The actual maintaining of a journal or diary can be stressful. Diaries are no good unless they go one for a while. The value of a diary is its continuing, developing narrative. That means you have to stick to it. If you are the type who likes to be organized, making sure you set aside time to write each day can be stressful.

I've maintained a journal for the last twenty - one years with only a few breaks amounting to about two months. For the last five years I've been converting them to computer storage. I love reading about what I thought was important in 1987 and 1994 and 2001. This journal made me appreciate Ralph Ellison's idea that life doesn't travel like an arrow but like a boomerang. People or activites I mentioneed in passing twenty years ago have come back to mean so much to me now. It tells me that I shouldn't be too concerned about my worries today. Things get better. Times change. Priorities shift.

In 1988, my sister and I bickered constantly over the sharing of the television or the competency of our driving skills or what music played at family get togethers. In 1992 she was in a serious car accident. She had to teach herself how to walk and talk all over again. She is still wheelchair - bound for the most part. I look back on my grumblings in my journal before the accident and I moan, "Why did I care?"

"Journaling" has its stress relieving qualities down the line, after the books are filled, after months are accumulated.

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