If you are looking for a low-cost way to improve your mental health, journaling is a great option. Keeping track of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences will have many positive effects, even if it is not done daily. One benefit from journaling is that it can reduce feelings of anxiousness. There is research that links journaling to a decrease of mental distress. If you find yourself overly thinking and worrying about a past or future event, journaling can actually help you break away from doing this. Awareness is also a key factor in improving your mental health. If you are writing down your thoughts and feelings, you are becoming more aware of them. Awareness helps you to better understand why you are having those certain thoughts and feelings. By writing them down, you may be able to see new perspectives about certain events that happen in your life.  Journaling also helps you to open up, even when you are privately writing about stressful events, feelings, or thoughts. You are allowing yourself to open up, which may in turn, give you encouragement to turn to your social support system if you need to. Journaling may be difficult to start if you have never done it before, but the benefits of it are worth giving it a try!