Tuesday 29 December 2015

Designer Diaries

A diary is one of the most personal items you can find today. A journal, memoir, chronicle, logbook or even a personal column – it has a multitude of names. These diaries are highly personal  and recap our most intimate moments of our lives. Studies say writing about stressful events has long been known to cause improvements in health and psychological well-being.
Each of us has a stream of automatic thoughts running through our minds. These thoughts are often undetectable, yet powerful nonetheless. Some of us have background music playing throughout the day, some, have an internal monologue. Psychology suggests that the best way to control, monitor and track these thoughts  to combat long-term stress and anxiety is by maintaining designer diaries.
In the past few years, research has hinted that a cognitive mechanism may help explain the link between expressive writing and health, notes University of Texas psychologist James W. Pennebaker, PhD, who has taken the lead, in the past decade, in research on expressive writing and health. He and his colleagues have found that the people who benefit most from expressive writing tend to use more causal analysis and express more emotion in their writing, leading some psychologists to speculate that expressive writing helps people simplify and organize fragmented memories. In a practical sense, results suggest that the simple act of writing about stressful events can have a positive impact on academic performance - although for how long remains unknown.
Designer diaries are the modified versions of regular ones that are more personalized. While some brands offer basic solutions, some offer more customized ones.
Although some experiments provided tantalizing support for the idea that expressive writing may improve working memory, it did not firmly establish whether expressive writing freed memory resources by purging people's intrusive and avoidant thoughts about stressful experiences.
There are many reasons that diary writing has fallen out of favor in addition to the rise of social media. The internet has made us lazy, and easily pleased. For one thing, it takes physical effort to motivate yourself to write by hand. Studies have shown that we're losing the ability to write in long-hand. As our penmanship skills fade, we may feel less motivated to inscribe our thoughts for perpetuity. The job is made more difficult by the news you may hear through social networking sites or emails from friends and acquaintances who seem to have nothing but great things to say about their lives. Promotions, placements, bonuses and life events surround us as soon as we log in to Facebook. However, the good news is, some still feel that the beauty and skill of writing in one’s own handwriting can never surpass digital technology.

The only way to combat this is to hold on to that sense of self and privacy by maintaining designer diaries. Grab your pen or pencil and start moving, eventually you’ll see what comes out. Don't edit or censor yourself, just get it out there on the blank page. In fact, you may find that after doing so, you actually feel better.

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