Relax Your Shoulders: The Benefits of Journaling and Meditation
Stress causes muscle tension, headaches, and loss of sleep. “Relax your shoulders, Asia!” is a common phrase in my household. My friends and family know I am stressed when they see my shoulders tense up, almost as if I am holding a shoulder shrug. Luckily, many methods can be used to combat stress — these include exercise, journaling, meditation, and yoga. Recently, I have tried a combination of meditation and journaling as a form of stress relief.
My mom was the first person to introduce me to meditation. She has done Transcendental Meditation for the past 4 years and says it has not just reduced her stress, but has transformed her life. In the past few months, I have found my own form of mediation that fits into my lifestyle. I primarily use the app Headspace to guide my meditation. Within the app are categories to help with stress and anxiety, falling asleep and waking up, personal growth, and much more. Each session is guided (a person talks to you throughout the session) and helps you become more aware of your body, your breathing, and where your mind is centered. I focus on meditation for stress and anxiety. Although I have only been meditating for about 4 months, I have already seen valuable differences in the way I deal with stressful moments in my personal, work, and school lives.
Another powerful method of stress reduction for me is journaling. It started in my high school sophomore English class, where we started off each class with journaling for 5 non-stop minutes. For me, the silence and the ability to physically record my thoughts helped me slow down and calm down. I become stressed when my mind starts to run at a million miles per minute. When I take the time to physically write about what I am feeling, I can process what is stressing me at a manageable speed. Sometimes I draw pictures instead of writing words, which brings out my creative side.
In the past few months, I have combined these two forms of stress relief. Some days, I spend 5 or 10 minutes journaling and then jump right into a 10-minute meditation session, and other days I meditate and then I journal. This combination seems to be particularly powerful because I am doing something that calms me (meditation) and then doing something that helps me process my feelings (journaling). Whatever the reason, I have found that this combination helps reduce my muscle tension and even helps me sleep better. I recommend that you try combining multiple stress reduction techniques that interest you: often, it’s not a matter of finding the single best method, but of finding the best combination of methods that fit into your own life. Who knows, they may even help relax your shoulders too!
Asia Chapa has been a member of the Interactive Measurement Group since Spring 2017 and served as Lab Manager from Fall 2017 to Spring 2018. She has co-authored a conference poster and literature review, supervised data entry projects, and taught exploratory factor analysis workshops. She graduated from UNLV in Spring 2018 with her BA in psychology and a minor criminal justice. She will be graduating with her Masters degree in legal and forensic psychology from UC Irvine in Spring 2020.