Writing things down helps clear your mind. Well it does for me!
I’m no mental health expert, some might say mental, but over the years I have been to see several mental health professionals and all of them have told me that that writing therapy, also known as journal therapy, is a great way to self help as writing things down will help you not only clear your mind but it also helps you deal with emotions, (good or bad), it can help you organise your thoughts and can help you with your goals and ambitions in life.
Our brains get cluttered over time, with all the information we process on a daily basis, whether they be through day to day life or from trauma and stress.
Sometimes its good to get some of that information out of your brain and writing down your issues, troubles or problems can help clear those thoughts out and will then help you prioritise and focus on your life. The same way that writing things down at work helps you both remember and prioritise your workload.
This can be especially helpful when faced with stress, anger and/or issues we can’t or don’t want to deal with such as the end of a relationship or emotional/physical abuse.
This can help our brains to try to understand or gain a thought process to remove these issues from our conscious memory. Generally when we try to make sense of things in our heads they go round and round, imagine a juggler, with ever increasing number of balls and the frequency and ferocity of movement required to maintain those balls being juggled. The more balls the harder it is to juggle them!
This over time can cause further issues as not dealing with the subject of our emotions, such as anger and stress, means that as time goes by the number of issues we are asking our brain to process can increase if we don’t deal with the previous and existing issues or imagine previous issues we had suppressed suddenly rear up and drag us back to that mental state again. This could be such things as a death or the end of a relationship.
If we write down our thoughts, write about our problems, our anger and stress, it can help us prioritise our goals and intentions on what we intend to do about the issues we have written down!
To really be able to deal with our issues, then prioritising is important as things may need to be done in specific orders to reach a satisfactory goal.
Prioritise and then act.
Even if we just need to vent then the very act of writing this down can help us calm our minds. This in my experience is especially helpful when anger and negative emotions are involved as the very act of writing these thoughts down is by far the best was to make sense of them.
Sometimes we may not intend to do anything with these issues but by writing them down we are effectively helping to remove that thought or issue from our brains even if this is a temporary action.
Although it may remain or return once written down, we can file, share are on dispose of those thoughts or even react, reread or rewrite these thoughts to make further sense of them.
One of the many things you could do with your negative thoughts is to burn them and I’ve heard this called Burn Therapy several times. Writing down your negative thoughts and then ceremonially burning them help release your negative thoughts.
I don’t know if this works, but spiritually, it seems like a good idea.
Refinement is also a great way of dealing with issues in the long term and this is what I do.
I narrate my thoughts verbally and use my technology to convert these words into text, such as Siri, Microsoft Word or my favorite Google Keyboard. You speak, and it turns those words into text on your device.
Especially useful if you get verbal diarrhea and need to get things out of your head quickly.
So, what do you do once you’ve written this stuff down?
Some people, myself included, may share their writings in the form of internet blogs or post on self help forums. If just one of my rantings helps just one person, then it was worth writing down.
Some people also find it helpful to destroy the thoughts by burning them as mentioned above.
One of the most important reasons for writing down your problems or thoughts is they will either help you to stay motivated in dealing with these problems or for you to realise that these problems are trivial and should be discarded because of its triviality.
I know this can be hard if you’re dealing with an emotional problem but when you see something in black and white it may make you realise that this is a trivial issue and it’s really not that important and you shouldn’t stop giving this thing your valuable time and energy.
I know it can be difficult to write down emotional items especially when they make you feel sad or angry, such as the death of a loved one or breakup of a realtionship, but part of the process of dealing with these emotions is that once they are written down it can help rationalise these issues and focus on what to do with these issues.
Yes, it may be that once you have writing them down it causes you to relive that moment of your life but it can also help to release that anger or sadness and better make sense of it. Refining the detail of that moment of trauma, pain, sadness or anger can help to release the constant mulling over that we all do in our brains.
To be devoid of this constant reliving makes us cold and inhumane and although some of us do this, it is normal for most people to relive these thoughts in their heads over and over again. Writing these down can help with this process and help heal our minds from stress, anger and trauma.
Writing things down helps out brains processes things and carrying all this information around in your brain and constantly processing it it is not good for your well-being or mental wellness.
By writing things down you can process your problems or thoughts and choose to deal with, delegate or just ignore them!
Although writing can be hard especially if the subject you are writing about deals with trauma, anger or abuse but the physical active writing can help in the removal of the storm from your mind.
Some may also question the time it takes to write this information down, as time is a precious commodity and do we need to spend time in getting thoughts out of her head?
But…. What price can you put on your own mental wellbeing?
Personally, I would say it is an immense benefit and over the long term will help heal your well-being.
As you may have thoughts daily and writing these down may change them from a daily occurrence to a weekly monthly or occasional occurrence.
However, if you are not thinking about them in the long term then surely the mental well-being benefits outweigh any time taken to write these down.
I hope this is helpful to somebody as I know writing my thoughts down over the years have been immensely helpful to me.
Write me your thoughts on the matter.
