Sitting down to collect your thoughts with pen and paper is a practice that comes with a lot of perks. You get to express yourself without being judged, journaling allows you to track your thoughts to see how you’ve changed and grown over time and getting things out of your mind and onto a piece of paper can help make the thoughts in your head a bit clearer. But devoting time to write isn’t always that easy. It takes time and effort. If you still want all the benefits of writing but with a little less work, consider audio journaling.
Audio journaling is the practice of recording your thoughts on a device. You can decide to listen to them later, or pretend your recorder is a friend’s listening ear. However you decide to use it, here are some benefits to audio journaling and some reasons you might want to give it a try.
It’s Can Feel More Liberating Than Writing
One of the major hurdles to traditional journaling, is the mental energy it takes to write coherently. Writing is an art form and takes a great deal of thought. Even if no one else ever reads your journal, there are some standards you might find yourself clinging to as you put pen to paper. Verbal conversation is much less stringent. You can speak freely, with even less fear of judgment because the likelihood of someone listening to your audio notes are slim to none. You don’t even have to listen to them ever again, if you don’t want.
Journal on the Go
It may seem that talking to yourself out in public might raise a few eyebrows. And that’s possible. But these days with people constantly recording themselves for social media, it’s hardly uncommon. Most people are so busy with their own lives, they really won’t care about what’s going on in yours. So feel free to record yourself while you’re taking a stroll, meandering through the grocery aisles, or sitting in traffic.
Your Spoken Words Can Be Written Text
If you do decide to listen to your recordings and you find that there’s something you’d like to save for the sake of posterity, you can always transcribe it, either by hand or though a service, into a written document. If you decide to share with others, you can do so easily without giving them the more potentially vulnerable parts of your audio file.
Audio Journaling Captures the Raw Emotion
There’s something about hearing the tone and timbre of someone’s voice that lets you know just how deeply they may feel something. It’s true for the music we listen to and it’s certainly the case for the sound of our own voice. When you’re writing, you’d have to tell your journal that you’re crying. When you record yourself, you’ll hear your voice break as the tears fall. Listening back to these files, you’ll be transported back to exact emotion. Not only will you be able to tell how you were impacted by something, your present day self can determine how much you’ve been able to heal or how much work you still have left to do.
Can Help in Overall Verbal Communication
In the same way writing is a skill, so is communicating well, verbally. Many of us have had the experience of trying to express something but our words fell short. Whether you’re someone who speaks publicly or would just like to be more clear with your friends and family, recording yourself can help. Use your audio journal to organize your thoughts so that when you do speak to others, you can bypass all of the muddle and get to the meat of what you’re trying to convey.