How to Keep a Diary

A diary is a way of writing down your memories, but it has other benefits as well. Keeping diaries is beneficial to your mental health and it helps you become a better writer! 【小题1】

【小题2】 Many people find it helpful to plan a right time to write each day. It’s good to write before bed or in the morning. Of course, you can write your diary at any time! It’s up to you!

Give your diary a special purpose. During some time of your life, you may not feel like there’s much interesting going on, which can make you harder to write something in your diary. You may devote your diary to a specific purpose.【小题3】

Write about thoughts and feelings, not just events. For example, your favorite band will come to your city.【小题4】 You can also write how the sound of the musical instruments makes your whole body feel like shaking and how excited and happy you are when they play your favorite song.

Use your diary for creative writing. When you write your diary, don’t worry too much about the rules of spelling and grammar. You don’t worry how other people think about your writing either! 【小题5】 Indeed, a lot of diary writing is just like that. Don’t be afraid, however, to use your diary to write more creatively. Some people even write their own songs in their diaries.

It is a big struggle when we encounter problems in school. Whether it is a personal or academic problem, it can really affect your performance when it comes to your schoolwork and wear down your will. 【小题1】 Here are four ways to overcome the barriers to your academic success and help you achieve your goals in life.

Manage your time well. Balancing your time well can be a big help in doing your schoolwork. Do not let your social relationships take over all of your time. Don’t lose sight of doing well in school especially when you have goals in life. When torn between hanging out with friends and your schoolwork, make sure that you have set a schedule when meeting up with them. 【小题2】

Make full preparations. Nothing can beat a person who is prepared. 【小题3】 You can also avoid rushing when you have a list of what project you should do first. This will also help you to be less stressed whenever there are a lot of things to do.

【小题4】 Life can make you feel discouraged and lonely but always keep in my mind that it will all get better in the end. Being optimistic can help you feel less worried and start looking forward to the future. A negative mind or thinking will not give you a positive life. Life can be really hard but there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. Focus on the things that are important and will make you achieve your dreams in life.

Reward yourself when you have achieved something, whether big or not. You should reward yourself once in a while for doing well. In that way, you would not feel burned out in studying and doing schoolwork. 【小题5】 You deserved it.

For nearly ten years, I have spent my Monday evenings attending rehearsals for my amateur choir(合唱队). Mondays are not my favourite day, and I often arrive in a bad mood, but by the end of the rehearsal, I usually feel energized. The singing does me good. So do the people. With a few exceptions, I would not describe my fellow choir members as close friends. We exchange brief chats, smiles and jokes-—but that is enough for me to come away feeling a little better about the world.

There is no choir practice now, and won’t be for a long time. I miss it. In lockdown, I do not feel short on emotional support, but I do feel short of friendly faces and casual conversations. Another way of putting this is that I miss my “weak ties”.

In 1973, Mark Granovetter, a sociology professor at Stanford University, published a paper entitled “The Strength of Weak Ties”. Until then, scholars had assumed that an individual’s well-being depended mainly on the quality of relationships with close friends and family. Granovetter showed that quantity mattered, too. He categorized a person’s social world as “strong ties” and “weak ties”. His central insight was that for new ideas, weak ties are more important to us than strong ones. As Granovetter pointed out, the people whom we often talk to swim in the same pool of information as we do. We depend on acquaintances whom we see infrequently to bring us news of opportunities.

This was the idea behind the Pixar building, the design of which was overseen by Steve Jobs. The building has a large central hall through which employees from different departments have to pass several times a day. Jobs wanted colleagues to bump into each other and shoot the breeze(闲聊). He believed in the power of these seemingly random conversations to fire up creativity.

Encounters with weak ties can be good for our mental well-being, too. Gillian Sandstrom, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Essex, investigated the extent to which people get happiness from weak-tie relationships. She found that on days when a person had a greater number of casual interactions with weak ties-say, a local barista(咖啡师), a neighbour, a member of yoga class-they experienced more happiness and a greater sense of belonging.

For these reasons, we should continue to find ways to cultivate weak-tie relationships, during lockdown and beyond. Sandstrom adds that we can also engage in more weak-tie-style interactions with our strong ties. The goal is to let others know that you are thinking of them without asking for a great deal of time, energy or attention.