If you are looking for a new activity to engage in this summer, consider starting a journal. Keeping a personal journal is a great way to create a reminder of all your summertime fun. By creating a journal, you can look back on all the memories you made with friends and family during the summer.

Whether your summer will be jam-packed with travel and adventure or laid-back with hobbies and family, a journal is a great place to write about what you’re doing, thinking, and feeling. You can even include mementos of your experiences, such as photos and drawings, or keepsakes like the ticket stub from an event or a pressed leaf from a camping trip. You can look back through your summer journal whenever you want to remind yourself of the fun you had, or take it and share with trusted friends.

But don’t just do a journal for the summer – keep it going! Having a private place to express your personal thoughts and feelings, whether they are happy ones or sad ones, is great for your mental health by letting you “get it all out”. This will help you work through your thoughts and feelings about the events going on in your life, so that you can understand yourself and the situation better.

You can also use your journal to get a great self-esteem boost. By recording the great things that happen to you, and the successful things you do or participate in, you will remind yourself how unique and talented you are. Then you can look back through your journal for motivation, to remind yourself how good you felt at achieving your goals, or just to cheer yourself up when you’re having a bad day.

Lastly, keeping a regular journal will help increase your creativity just by giving you somewhere to practice your thinking, writing, and communication skills. Whether you engage in other creative hobbies or not, the ability to think creatively and communicate clearly will serve you through your entire life.

You can keep a journal in many different ways, so try various methods until you find one that works best for you. The most common is a paper notebook or hardbound journal and pen, great for those who like the feeling of a pen and paper, and feel connected to their words when they write things by hand. If you prefer technology, it is easy to keep a journal in a text document on your computer, or there are many mobile apps to help you keep a journal on your phone or tablet device. Just remember to keep it simple – the benefit is from the writing, not the medium or technology used to hold your thoughts.