The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life

What do you remember about your life? When was the last time you felt joyful? What about devastated? Research shows you’re much more likely to be able to answer the second question than the first. Negative emotions carve deep ruts in our brains and are memorized by our bodies so they can be replayed over and over and over again. Positive emotions like joy and peace and love don’t always have the same impact. Do you want to get to the end of your life and remember only the negative? What parts do you want to remember? What we write down is what we remember. It’s like a time capsule in a way, a lifeline back to the best parts of ourselves. A little popcorn trail of words we can follow so that we never lose sight of the path we’re on. Words help us see ourselves more clearly. They help us remember who we are and what we’re here for. They help others remember us, too.

The research is clear: writing can help us manage negative emotional states, process our lives, and even heal from trauma. One of the reasons writing does this, I believe, is because it invites us, and even requires us, to look at our pain in a new way and for a long time. It requires contemplation.

What is the cost of holding back what is trying to be expressed through you?

What if there is no one else on the planet who can express the thing that’s trying to be expressed through you? What if this is your one shot, and you don’t have much time left? The thing in you that wants to be expressed can never be expressed through anyone else.

Emotional healing is not delivered through Amazon Prime.* In fact, the best things in life grow slowly: relationships, children, careers, the oak tree in your backyard, and your writing practice. Think of it like a garden. Get started now, so that in a few months, you will have something to eat. The reason I bring this up is so that when the feeling inevitably comes up that this is taking too long, you’ll remember these words and you won’t give up. You are about to get to the good stuff. The worst mistake you could make is to get days or weeks into this, worry you aren’t making any progress, and decide to move onto something more efficient and productive.

Writing helps us not only see the words we’re already using but then change the words we’re using so that we can in turn change our lives.

What Writing Can Help Us Do: Name our experience so we can more fully understand it. Give language to the future we want to create so it stops feeling vague and begins to seem achievable. Build a bridge (neural pathways) between the now we’re experiencing and the future we’d like to create. Heal and engineer our own resilience from past experience. Find perspective for life’s challenges, large and small. Invent brand-new solutions for age-old problems. Build our confidence. Increase our working memory and overall cognitive power. Cultivate more gratitude and contentment. Provide clarity for our decisions. Increase satisfaction in our romantic partnerships. Level up our immune system, help us sleep better, etc. Combat and curb anxiety, stress, and depression. Tune out the well-meaning and critical voices around us so we can finally understand what we think.

Writing is not some elite activity reserved for the uniquely gifted. Writing is communication, self-discovery, creativity, spirituality, and self-expression. Writing is the essential tool we use to find and practice our sense of voice. Writing is a distinctly human impulse.

Writing will show you the stories you’ve made up about your life. It will show you how those narratives are just that - made up. And it will help you change the narratives so you can change the outcome. Writing helps us step outside of our stories and see them differently. It helps us reclaim our stories for ourselves again.

What do I spend most of my time doing? Why am I doing these things? What is my “religion,” according to my calendar? When I come to the end of my life, will I feel I spent my time well? Where can I make space for writing?

Pennebaker’s research shows that writing for as little as twenty minutes a day for as little as four days in a row can cause a measurable improvement in your mood.

And as is true with all of our unique expressions, it feels both too small and too big at the same time. This is what I have to give. So I give it humbly and without trying to decide if it is “good enough” to give.

What are the facts of the story? What happened? What are my thoughts about those facts? What is the story I am telling myself? How did it make me feel? Where did I experience that in my body? What did I do because I felt that way? What happened next?

Meanwhile, research shows that writing for as little as twenty minutes a day for four days in a row can measurably improve your mood.

We all have infinite strategies to keep us from hearing our own voices.

I tell that writer about the private diary of Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl who lived and died during World War II. The words in that book—which have now been read almost ubiquitously by generations of students—were written by a thirteen-year-old girl who had no idea what she was writing while she was writing it. She even makes a comment in the journal to that effect. Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing.1 Catch the irony here. This is a book that has sold more than 30 million copies and has been translated into 70 languages. But did Anne Frank know her words would be read that widely? Or did she just feel like writing?

Most of us, when we get over our need to be important to the world, realize how important we already are. Then, and only then, do the words and ideas that have always been trying to be expressed through us finally come.

Chelsea wrote a book called Negotiating the Inner Peace Treaty that’s all about how to get these voices to communicate with each other so you can finally get some relief.

and Dr. Dispenza agrees with me

writing practice is life practice. Where we get unstuck in our writing, we get unstuck in our lives.

Expressive writing is the act of sharing your deepest thoughts and feelings about a subject on the page.