In the last decade, my life has completely changed, from someone who doesn’t know what he wants from life, stressed about everything, preoccupied with what people will think of me, going from one odd job to another, not knowing how to make money, a messy emotional world and most of all a lack of understanding of what I want to do with my life and how to get there.
One day I read an article about how to change your life in 90 minutes. It was about a morning routine and one of the things he talked about there was writing.
I never thought about it, but if you join the 5am club, what else will you do if not meditation or writing. So I started writing.
The first thing I started writing about was how much money I wanted to make by the end of the year, and how I would make it. I wrote down the amount and wrote that in as few days of work a month as possible and from something I love.
Within a few months, I got this job, and by the end of the year I was pretty close to that amount.
Writing changes lives. It’s not for nothing that so many important people in human history kept a writing journal.
They say that the reason Marcus Aurelius, the ruler of the Roman Empire, never fell to the slaughter was because he wrote morning and evening.
In the morning, who he wants to be today.
In the evening, did he meet the goals he set for himself.
Writing creates awareness, narrative, clear goals, self-discovery, precision, understanding and emotional release.
Try it for one month and see how your life changes.
I really love to write, every week I write the newsletter that comes out every weekend, I have a notebook that I write in on a daily basis, I use it all day to specify goals, pour out emotions and make plans,
I use it in ways that help me improve my self-worth and confidence.
Here are some different ways that writing positively affects our functioning:
- Writing makes you happier and healthier
Studies show that writing down your life goals makes you happier and healthier. Most previous studies have focused on writing down a person’s past traumas in order to heal from them faster. What’s interesting about this study is that they compared the effects of writing about traumatic events to the effects of writing about the participants’ “best possible future selves.” The researchers found that both had similar positive effects.
Writing Makes You More Resilient
When we go through a difficult experience, or a challenging time, writing can help you cope better. A study that followed recently laid-off engineers showed that those who consistently engaged in expressive writing about their layoffs, fears, and difficulties were able to find new jobs faster.
“The engineers who wrote down their thoughts and feelings about losing their jobs reported feeling less anger and hostility toward their former employer. They also reported drinking less. Eight months later, less than 19% of the engineers in the control groups were reemployed full-time, compared with more than 52% of the engineers in the expressive writing group,” explains Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Wu.
For people who are more positive and motivated about their current situation and future. I’ve written before about how writing gratitude notes should be part of your mental fitness routine.
This could be a topic for an entire article – which I’ll probably write about another day – but practicing gratitude can improve your psychological health, improve your empathy, boost your self-esteem, help you sleep better, and more.
We naturally tend to dwell on things that go wrong or don’t turn out the way we expected or wanted, so it’s a great exercise for us to think about the things we’re grateful for by writing them down. And by the way, if you also take the time to thank the people who have supported you so that they know you’re grateful for their help, you’ll also create improvements in the relationships in your life, which have just as much of an impact on our physical and mental health.
Writing Helps You Communicate More Clearly
It may sound obvious, but regular writing has been shown to help people convey complex ideas more clearly. This has benefits both in terms of emotional intelligence – expressing how you feel – and in what are considered hard sciences like math.
You know that time when you want to explain something but feel like it would sound better in your head? Writing is a great way to flex that communication muscle and thereby get better at translating what can feel like confusing thoughts into words that other people can understand. Whenever I’m struggling to express something and have a chance to sit down and write it down, I pull out my notebook and try to put it down in a few sentences. It usually helps clarify my thoughts, first for myself, and then for others.
Reflection and Development
Writing is a great tool for personal growth that I use a lot as part of my journey to achieving conscious productivity. At the end of each day I can write how my day was, what I did, what I didn’t have time to do and why, did I focus on what was important to me or did the day slip away from my grasp? What did I achieve this day? What do I want to achieve or do differently tomorrow? How did I behave today? Did I talk to others? What did I do well? I will sit down and write down every success and thereby also raise my self-esteem.
If all of this hasn’t convinced you to start writing, I don’t know what will
If you would like to start, in my online course – How to Make a Change? I teach for an hour and a half different writing techniques for all the goals written here and more, how to get started, and also teaches different meditation techniques and how to build a beneficial daily routine that will improve your health and life. The course costs 289 NIS because it is important to me to try and keep prices symbolic that will allow everyone to incorporate the tools from these two lives into their daily lives. If you have signed up, tell me, I would love to hear why and what you changed, what improved and how you channel writing to improve every part of your life.
